Audition CC 2018 wont play audio tracks

I am at a loss to figure this out.

The setup: I have made a screen recording on an iPad. The resulting MP4 file has four audio channels in it. The top two (L & R) are empty and the bottom two (again, L & R) have an audio waveform. Earlier this week, I was able to load the file into Premier Pro CC 2018, and hear the audio, which was requried for properly syncing the footage to video shot with two cameras. Today, for whatever reason, The audio on those video files will not play in Premier, even though the audio level meter shows activity. What does this have to do with Audition? Well, in an attempt to get SOMETHING that I could use, I loaded the MP4 into Audition with intention of extracting the audio to later pair with the video in the timeline.

What I've tried: Once in Audition, I noticed the multiple channels of audio (two empty over two filled). If I disable any one one of the two audio tracks with a waveform in Audition, the other plays through the headphones. If not, no sound comes out. Almost as if the third track is a perfect sound cancellation track for the fourth and vice versa.

So, I extracted all audio channels to new MONO files. The two new mono files with a wave form will not playback audio...

Next, I tried saving the MP4 (with three audio channels disabled so that ONE plays) as a new WAV audio file. Resulted in a 4 channel audio file that fails to play audio again.

Moved on to trying to convert from multi-channel to stereo - conversion failed, then to mono - conversion failed and Audition crashed.

What is going on here?