Audiion Freezing and Lagging 5-15 Seconds After Nearly Every Action

[ABBloch]

I've been an Audition enthusiast since 1998 (since the old Cool Edit Pro days, long before Adobe bought Syntrillium).  I'm one of the few professional film sound editors who uses it daily (if at all) as my primary DAW.  I have loved and defended Audtion and its capabilities for decades now, despite the fact that colleagues routinely make fun of me for my refusal to have jumped on the ProTools bandwagon, all this time.  Audition has suted my needs, very, very well.

But now, unfurtunately, it's having serious problems, and costing me a LOT in terms of time, money, and client relations.  After nearly every action I take, whether it's something as simple as a click to move playhead, or something more complex like a spectral edit, the program hangs for 5 to 15 seconds.  This has been going on for weeks now.  It's absolutely maddening.  It has forced me to work at only a tiny fraction of my usual editing speed.  

 I'm currently 3 weeks behind, delivering a feature, because of this issue.  The director is having tantrums.  The distributor does not want to keep issuing extensions.  I'm pretty sure this comapny will never hire me again (which is beyond tragic, since they're one of my oldest clients).

I've exhausted my knowledge, trying to fix whatever the problem is.  It's beyond me to solve.

At first, I thought it might be a spinning drive/virtual memory issue, so I replaced all my drives with brand new SSD's.  No change.  My mobo is maxed out on RAM, so adding any more would be a not-small project, but I'll replace the mobo if I need to (even though it's not  very old).  I'd like to consider that a last resort, though.

I've also considered it might be a driver issue, so I've reinstalled all device drivers.  Again, no change.

Premiere, Photoshop, and other resource-intensive programs all work fine, so whatever the problem is, it's limited to Audition itself.  Nothing else is affected, so far as I can tell.

Anyone have any ideas?

Core i7-7700 4.2 GHz
64 GB DDR4 3000 (PC 24000) RAM
GeForce RTX 2070
ASUS ROG Maximus VIII Hero/Whetstone mobo

Thanks in advance for any help. 

(By the way, please, for the love of all that is decent in the universe, no one say, "Buy a Mac," or "Switch to ProTools" or anything else designed to be so deliberately unhelpful.  This is not the time for that.  I need your help, not your ridicule.)

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

We've had a number of similar complaints - some appear to go away of their own accord (which is a bit weird) and with others, it appears that something else installed has started a polling process that interrupts everything. On this machine I get occasions where something Microsoft refer to as the 'system' appears to take up 100% of the processing power available, but usually this doesn't last long. There are a few things to check, though: firstly go to Edit>Settings>Memory and allocate all of it to Audition. Secondly make sure that your temp files are in a different location to where Windows has its one - by default that's the same location and really, it shouldn't be. The OS can mess with that folder - not good. Thirdly, do a google search for 'optimising audio on Windows 10' and work your way though as many of the recommended alterations as possible.

For ideological reasons I couldn't recommend anybody to get a Mac. Aside from that though, you'd still run into difficulties - it's just that they'd be different ones. And for many PT users (although generally they won't admit it) Audition is the mastering app of choice...

[ABBloch]

Thanks, Steve.  I'm not sure if it makes me feel better or worse to hear that the same thing has been happening to others.  I certainly wouldn't wish this on anyone, but there's always some small comfort in "It's not only me."

Your suggestions unfortunately couldn't help with the current problem, as they're all things I've always done anyway.  But I do appreciate the attempt.

All that said, it's looking like there may be some light at the end of the tunnel, after digging for it with pure brute force.  Since I now have an abundance of hard drives kicking around, I decided to try an experiment.  I wiped one of them, swapped it with my system drive, and did a clean install of Windows on it.  I then clean-installed all the CC apps, and my audio plugins.  (The latter was easier said than done, as I had to make some international phone calls, to get the various iLock licenses reset, quickly.)

Audition seems to be back to its old self now.  I loaded up the project that's been my living Hell for the past several weeks, and the Audition is having no problems with it.  Hallelujah!

From some other issues the computer had been having, which are also now no longer happening, my working theory is that Windows and Audition had both gotten corrupted somehow, and that each was bringing out the worst in the other.  Maybe I got hit with a malware attack that somehow made it past my security, or maybe they just crapped out on their own, but either way, they were both borked.  Now that they've both clean, they're both happy.  

Well, mostly happy, anway.  My interface is now exhibiting some odd behavior.  Audtion plays program sound through it, no problem, but system sounds aren't getting through.  Weird. I'll take it, over how it was for the last few weeks, but it does suggest I'm not out of the woods yet.  Where there's one malfunction, there will inevitably be others.  Fingers crossed, that remains the only one, at least until this project is finished.

[emmrecs]

.  My interface is now exhibiting some odd behavior.  Audtion plays program sound through it, no problem, but system sounds aren't getting through.  

By @ABBloch

I wonder whether System Sounds might have been at least part of the cause of your problems previously??

As a "default" I was always told that System Sounds should be turned permanently off!  By their very nature they can be intrusive and also have a habit of potentially wreaking havoc with your "wanted" audio playback and settings.

[ABBloch]

Thanks for the suggestion, but I had been running it this way for years, without issue.  I do get that system sounds can be a point of interference or distraction, but they can also be useful.  It kind of depends on what your'e doing at the moment.

I do, of course, turn them off when I'm recording.  Quite obviously, they're noise in that situation, not signal.

But when I'm editing, I do find them to be helpful.  If I inadvertently click on something I shouldn't have, or if a USB device loses connection, or what have you, I want to hear that alarm bell.

In any case, for reasons I cannot explain, system sounds are now working again, through the interface.  I didn't change anything.  They weren't working when I went to bed at 8:30 this morning (after a long all-nighter, reinstalling software).  Now, at 4 in the afternoon, I just sat down to get  back to it, and they're working perfectly.

The gremlins have a strange sense of humor.