Crashing, disk errors, trackpad issues - Audition and Mac

Hi everyone, long time lurker here. Thank you for all the great advice and support you give (especially SteveG!).

I am a very very long time Audition user and am far from a novice. I'd even say I'm a pretty advanced user. However, in recent times, it feels like it has almost become unusable on my MacBook Air M2. I was wondering if anyone has encountered the same? A few of the recurrent issues are:

Frequent crashing. To the extent where I have at times lost large chunks of work.

A repeated error around being unable to write to disk. At this point, I always have to close down and start again. I am 99% sure it is linked to my external hard drive (I use a good quality Samsung SSD). Often, if I come out of the programme and back into it, I get this message. Or if my laptop went to sleep. Or if I accidentally disconnect the SSD. I never used to get this crash, it used to be much more resilient to change. Is there anything I can do to alleviate this? I have played around with cache settings etc. I'd be willing to change SSD but I am not sure it's relevant to this.

And finally, in mid flow, Audition will often stop letting me pinch to zoom on the trackpad. This makes editing impossible and, again, I have to restart the programme.

Apologies if this wraps too many issues into one but I am reaching the point where I am actively researching alternatives, and that feels like a great shame, as I have been on Audition for 2 decades pretty much.

Thanks in advance for any help you could offer.

Best wishes,

Nick