Any Audio Edit Causes Major Timeline Lag and Stuttering

a wav file with the same settings as an aiff should be virtually the same size so thinking there may be something in the settings of your wav files.  Generally the wav's I work with are uncompressed.  and don't even see any option to apply a compressor to it in apple compressor...     

Update: I'm now noticing after reviewing task manager again that every time I touch the audio in any of my projects it causes the power usage of Premiere to spike to very high. It didn't do this when I was initally trying to diagnose the issue yesterday. Might be a clue towards solving what's going on here but I'm not sure where it's pointing me to.

end up causing it to correct itself.

(Apologies, misclicked the post before finishing up after going up to edit a section of my response.)

Hi Michael,

Thank you for the response. I have already attempted using ProRes proxying, I figured if this was a workload issue that would at least minimize the freezing for a small amount of time before one of the projects got more complex, however it had no impact on the issue.

Additionally, it being related to the stress the files cause makes no sense to me, since two of my team members share the exact same specs on their PCs and updating to 25.1 seems to have significantly smoothed the process of one of their workflows and absolutely bricked the other one.

To answer your question: Yes we use .mov animation files often in our videos, often exported from After Effects in-house. I am not certain that they are relevant though, as I'm having this problem in fresh projects where I only import the raw footage and audio as well. Nonetheless, at your suggestion I'll dig a little deeper into their codecs and see what I can find to ensure I'm utilizing those files most efficiently.

Moving further, I'm going to re-export the host audio as an AIFF, though given that those are larger files than .WAVs I'm concerned this may make the issue worse. My other option if I follow that path of thought is to export as .MP3 or equivalent compressed file types, which would be unacceptable unfortunately. But again, it won't hurt for me to take a look and try with AIFF files. I have been wrong many times before, haha!

As a frame of reference to my level of familliarity in the field, I've been professionally editing video for 6 years, with 2 of those years being freelance, plus I've got another 2 years of Audio/Video Production education prior, all of those years using Adobe. That all said you're very right, trying to diagnose these kinds of issues is difficult as it is let alone with limited information filtered on a forum.

I appreciate you reaching out regardless, hoping something will 

upgrades often put greater demands on your system, so a few things are setting off alarms for me...  

First, you might try a proxy workflow using a "mezzanine" format for the proxies, like prores proxy.  Happy to go in to more detail about this if you need more details.  Premiere's proxy workflow is rock solid...  post back if you need any help setting it up.  

When you say .mov animation files are you talking about the animation codec?   The animation codec can cause problems particularly at higher resolution.  If you need a file with an alpha channel, you can use prores 4444  which will play much nicer with your hardware...  

And I've found .wav files generally put greater demand on your system than aiffs.  

You might try removing these things from a duplicate of your project and see if things improve.    Never simple to diagnose these sort of problems from a distance so forgive me if I'm stating the obvious to you.  Also difficult to judge the level of expertise/experience from peoples posts here...