Audition Suddenly Sluggish During Long Multitrack Edit

Question

I have a few wave files I am editing, and two of them are about an hour long. I have been making a ton of edits, cuts, and ripple deletes for the first 40 minutes of so of the audio with no problems. Suddenly, every time I make any edits or cuts everything slows to a crawl in Audition for anywhere from 2 seconds to 10 seconds.

I haven't run out of disk space on either my boot drive or the project drive, and both drives are modern PCIe SSDs. I have a ton of RAM left, CPU/GPU load do not appear to at issue. I have cleared the media cache, and I am stumped at this point.

The only peculiarity that I can see (which I cannot verify wasn't occurring before), is that when I make any edits or changes to the clips in the multitrack, Audition starts writing a ton of disk I/O on the WAV files in question, and Audition doesn't pick back up until those writes slow down. What's crazy is that it's writing at 400-500MB/s, and the WAV files are only 700MB & 900MB.

I have no idea what's happening here but it's taken my workflow and slowed it to a crawl. I might have better luck just exporting this session to Premiere and seeing what happens.

waheuler · Accepted Answer

Yes, it is very possible that you have a corrupted session file. The best person to look at this is SuiteSpot, who will hopefully see this thread and respond. Or you could just start a new session and see if the same thing happens?

There really shouldn't be any major disk activity at all if you edit in Multitrack. All that's happening is that you are specifying replay spots in your file, and the file itself doesn't get touched whilst this is happening - the process is essentially non-destructive. The only time it can get a bit heavy is if you have a load of effects on a track - these have to be processed separately before the track will play properly. The solution in this case is to 'pre-render' the track (which is also undoable if you need to change anything) using the little lightning bolt above the effects rack. But if you are just editing a track with no effects, there should be no need to do this.

You know what, I had made a mistake earlier and applied a bunch of effects to Clip Effects instead of Track Effects...that would could mean that editing the clip even in multitrack view could trigger a edit (and associated I/O) of the clip itself?

If that's the case then I think I found the culprit, and as usual, it was me not paying attention lol.

waheuler · Answer

So I think I figured it out.

Audition really does not like longer high quality files (WAV in this case). Every time I make an edit, it appears to trigger a ton of disk I/O, and how much I/O seems to be based on how far into the file being edited the cut/trim is.

I solved my current problem by breaking up the larger files into approximately 20 minute chunks. Not the most elegant solution but it definitely solved the problem.

I would love to hear from Adobe on what the actual answer is here, because as it stands, Premiere handles the longer audio files better than Audition does, which isn't great for their audio focused application.

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