Mini Audition 6.0: a mixer that moves

Mini Audition’s multitrack has had buses with effects for a while, but every lane went to exactly one place and stayed at one level for the whole song. 6.0 changes both.

Sends

A real mix has one reverb that the vocals, the snare and the keys all share, each at its own amount. Now a lane can play into its bus (or Master) and send a copy to other buses as well. Open the → menu in a lane’s header: under Sends, pick a bus and a level, from −24 dB to 0 dB.

Sends come after the lane’s fader and balance, so turning a lane down turns its reverb down with it. The lane’s capsule shows how many sends it has (“→ Vox +2”), and a bus lists the lanes sending to it. Effects that play late on a send-only bus are made up for like any other, so everything stays in time.

Automation

Fade a lane under a voice-over, push a chorus up 3 dB, pan a part across the stereo field. Click the curve button in a lane’s header and a line appears over its clips:

• click to add a point where you click;
• drag a point up, down or along;
• ⌥-click a point to remove it.

Click the button again for balance, and once more to hide the line. Volume automation rides on top of the fader: the fader still turns the whole lane up or down. Balance automation takes the knob’s place while it has points. You hear it as you draw, it goes into the mixdown, it’s saved with the session, and every change can be undone.

Tags and cover art

Exports now carry a title, artist, album, year and cover art in every format: ID3 in MP3, WAV and AIFF, Vorbis comments in FLAC, and iTunes tags in AAC. The artist, album, year and cover are remembered, so every episode of a series gets them; Batch Process titles each file after itself. A podcast host or Music shows the episode properly instead of “Unknown Artist” with a blank square.

Get it

Mini Audition 6.0 is free, for macOS 15 or later. Every change is in the changelog.