Hardware for Podcast Editing

As you may know, I do quite a lot of audio editing these days for the various podcasts I am involved in. The time I spend editing the audio is worth optimizing....

So I was looking into buying affordable external controllers (aka control surfaces) for Adobe Audition. There are two ways how Audition can be controlled from an external device: the MIDI interface as well as "something that simulates a keyboard".

I have been looking into the following devices: Frontier Design Tranzport, the Numark Total Control, the Miditech MTB Command as well as the Contour Shuttle Pro V2.

The first three are MIDI devices and cost ca. 200 EUR. The last one is a "keyboard simulator" and costs EUR 99. I decided to try the cheapest one.

It arrived today. It has 13 buttons and two wheels, I use one for transport and one for zooming. I've assigned the most commonly used editing operations to the 13 buttons.

After editing a bit today I have to say it works really well! I now use the mouse with the right hand and the Shuttle with the left hand, hardly touching the keyboard. The editing experience is a quite a bit more efficient, and much more pleasant.

It's a little bit like HOTAS from military aviation: it takes a little bit of time to learn to "play it", but once you have practice, you're much faster and you can operate the device blindly.

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