Please help - Audition crashed and now when recording audio the timeline is slowly juddering

Report · Oct 02, 2025

Audition 2025.

Have been recording all day. Audition crashed out on me, since then when I go back in to record, I can set up my session but upon hitting record, the timeline is jumping maybe 0.1s for every real life second. Audio is no longer recording, just the odd bit of hiss.

Have done a full uninstall/reinstall via Creative Cloud, cleared out the AppData folder, held down Shift when opening, tried multiple different recording devices and all the same.

If I open an existing audio file, I can edit that no issues, I just cannot record into Audition.

Recording into Windows Sound Recorder, MS Teams etc. all fine.

Found one similar post on Reddit, 8 months old, but no fix on there.

This is with Audio hardware set to MME as it always has been. If I set to WASAPI, the timeline goes back to normal speed but everything sounds robotic.

youtu.be/sZKfhH3sCwc?si=MqMaED482cSqth8E

Report · Oct 02, 2025

I've lost my evening to battling on with this, but oddly, if I double click the lower right where it says Convert Sample Type, and set it to a Sample Rate of 22050 Hz or below, everything is working normally.

Is something screwed up on my system?

Report · Oct 03, 2025

Further troubleshooting this morning. If something else is using audio/video at the same time (e.g. if I attempt to record my screen using Camtasia), or if I briefly set Windows Media Player away, playing something (muted) the issue does not occur.

Seems Audition is seriously unhappy with something, almost feels like IRQs or similar from 30 years ago. Assuming from lack of response no one has seen this before?

Report · Oct 03, 2025

What device is Audition set to save to? Perhaps there's an issue with that drive.

Report · Oct 06, 2025

I've tried multiple devices, ranging from the 3.5mm input jack, to a Zoom R8 USB interface, to the laptop's inbuilt mic (though I assume the inbuilt mic is communicating via USB protocol).

Same thing persists throughout unfortunately.

Report · Oct 04, 2025

I don't think that this is Audition causing this problem - much more likely to be your Windows sound settings being corrupted. I suggest going through those carefully first. Also, you said that Audition crashed - is there any chance that you can locate the crash log file and copy and paste its contents into this thread? We might get a clearer idea of what has failed. (You should be able to locate this from the Help menu and it should be pretty clear which file it is.)

Report · Oct 06, 2025

Hi Steve,

Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately this machine is effectively government issued so is extremely locked down (as an example, I only have view access to Device Manager).

Here is the crash file, though this may be from after I deleted the %appdata% structure from Audition. It has definitely crashed one more time since so hopefully may be something of use.

Agree plausible something is corrupted but it is only affecting Audition - MS Teams, inbuilt system Sound Recorder etc. all fine. As a workaround, before I'd found that playing a video 'fixed' the issue, I made a recording via Sound Recorder and then edited in Audition afterwards.

Report · Oct 06, 2025

The log indicates that Audition doesn't have permission to access some drives:

... System call CreateFile() failed -- drive could not be monitored, driveLetter: "T", lastError: "Error 5: Access is denied.\r\n"
... System call CreateFile() failed -- drive could not be monitored, driveLetter: "W", lastError: "Error 5: Access is denied.\r\n"
...System call CreateFile() failed -- drive could not be monitored, driveLetter: "N", lastError: "Error 5: Access is denied.\r\n"

It seems that the "locked down" state might be preventing Audition from working.

Report · Oct 06, 2025

Hi, I did spot those but think they may be a red herring given Audition worked fine until the crash. There are some references further down the log with regards an exception encountered.

Happy to check if there's any where that they could be set up as a scratch drive or similar, or to discount it?

Report · Oct 07, 2025

One of the things that can cause particular problems like this with Audition is running it as a user without admin privileges. The moment I see drive access issues I get suspicious! It only takes a Windows update patch to screw things in this regard; these can do all sorts of damage to a system that was previously working fine...

The other thing I noticed is that on one of your logs, it took the audio system quite a long time to initialise (look for large jumps in the number of ticks per step), so it does still look as though you may have system issues.

Report · Oct 08, 2025

Thanks Steve. I BSOD'd trying to change audio devices in MS Teams earlier which isn't a good sign either. It doesn't look like this is a common problem across the board so suspect I'm going to have to beg/steal/borrow our helpdesk to rip out my current drivers.

There's definitely something off about exclusive access to audio devices - as above if I set a video playing before I start recording in Audition, the timeline is going at a normal pace.