essentially they are the same. adobe bought syntrillium, the company that makes cool edit and renamed it audition. the first version of audition is pretty much like the last version of cool edit pro (2.1 i think). now there's version 1.5 that has some additional features (i'm not sure what they are off the top of my head, but adobe's website lists new features in this version). in my mind, they are practically the same, at least for the basic features i use.