Inspiring

Question

Audition Beach Balling (CPU Bound) Constantly

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
October 5, 2019
4 replies
2295 views

I'm running Audition 12.1.4.5 on MacOS Mojave 10.4.6 (although this problem predates either of these updates). The computer is a beefy one, a top of the line Mac Pro (2013) with 32gb of memory.

I'm editing a fairly simple podcast, with one voice track a small SFX track and a music track. No fancy effects on any of it, a parametric equalizer on a couple of tracks, and Dynamics on the voice track. Nothing complex, although I do have ducking on the music track.

I get a 20-30 second beach ball on nearly every action. Simply clicking on a track, changing tools (razor to move or vice-versa), heck even click over to it just now to check the version. I get a 30sec beach ball. And the CPU is hitting 450+%, even showing as "not responsive" in the Apple Activity Monitor. It's almost impossible to be productive.

The files are located on a NAS connected with gigabit network, and the caches are all on the local SSD. The Audition memory preferences screen shows 26gb available for Audition. The local SSD has 700+gb free.

The strange thing is this doesn't always happen. Sometimes when I use Audition, it's lightning fast. Other days, this happens. I've tried rebooting, that doesn't change it. I've tried closing down everything else (Chrome for example), no change. I've tried pre-rendering effects, no help.

Anyone have any clues? This is killing my productivity.

Thanks!

This topic has been closed for replies.

Charles VW

Inspiring

Are you still able to make this happen despite your workaround? I'd like to see if I can diagnose it to see if it is a problem on our end or not. Please email audbugs a@t adobe.com mention this thread.

CLWillAuthor

Inspiring

Well, I'm back to report that I found a way to make it work.

What I did today was take the main narrative file (~20mins in length) and just simply chop it into pieces no longer than about 5 minutes. That means that each file has no more than, perhaps 20 clips from it. Then just add those to the track in their usual time line spot. I didn't edit the files in any way, just broke the original 20min file into several pieces.

Though a PITA, this works. I haven't seen a beach ball all day. Similar length and complexity of audio and a similar number of cuts, but now it works great.

This is a truly sad bug on Audition's part. This shouldn't behave this way. But at least I found a workaround.

Thank you both for your help,

Chris

SuiteSpot

Inspiring

I am still looking at this sesx - it only has 123 clips in it and 5 media files yet is 171 mb. I have one here with 1003 clips and 129 files and is 3mb. Trying to find the bloat.

SuiteSpot

Inspiring

Try moving the media (and the sesx) to the local hard drive of your Mac - just to eliminate the network as an issue

CLWillAuthor

Inspiring

Just tried this. I copied the entire tree (17gb) over to the local SSD, renamed the remote copy so Audition wouldn't find it. Confirmed that it was finding and using the local copy. Essentially no difference. Merely opening the SESX takes a while, but the very first mouse click, and I get a 30sec beach ball. Some actions seem to be better, but not infrequently I get this long ponderous beach ball, lasting 20-30secs.

For reference, here's the other stuff I've tried:

-- restarted both the machine and the NAS

-- did everything I could find in the Apple communities about SMB performance (remove signing, etc)

-- tried using AFP to connect to the NAS

-- rebooted the machine and run absolutely nothing else when running Audition

I still get these huge pauses. Audition runs fine otherwise, the functions all work, playback and mixdown are fine, etc. Just these interminable beach balls. Arrrggghhhh....

SuiteSpot

Inspiring

From your post we just discovered an important piece of information - "I copied the entire tree (17gb) over to the local SSD"..
Audition has been dragging 17gb over the network - that is a lot in anyone's game.
As expected there is some improvement by moving it to the local SSD but even so it is still 17gb.
To prove / disprove save a copy of the session (the local SSD version) and remove two thirds of the tracks and any reference to 'unused media' and run the session again. Any improvement?

SteveG_AudioMasters_

Community Expert

Usually it's something completely different - like virus protection or network polling - taking over the machine that causes this. But whether that applies to a Mac I have no idea, being a PC user. You might need a developer comment on this, or at least another Mac user, although we don't get many of them.

CLWillAuthor

Inspiring

Thanks, but I know it's Audition doing it. As I noted, I watch the Activity Monitor (the Mac equivalent of the Task Manager). When this is happening, Audition shoots right to the top, using 450+% of the CPU (multi-core machine) and stays there while it beach balls.

I'm going to try moving the project locally and see if it's some disk issue. Not sure what I'll do then... but worth a try.

Still open to other ideas 🙂

Thanks

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