Audio Skipping

[paulam25909058]

I kindly request your help. I just upgraded to a new Mac Powerbook for editing. The primary reason I did this was because I was experiencing something that I thought was latency on my old laptop. My audio almost sounded like it was skipping a little, like scratches on a vinyl record. Unfortunately, the problem seems to be even worse using Audition on my new computer. Why is this happening? The computer is brand new with loads of speed and space.

As a quick fix, whenever the audio starts skipping in multitrack, I’ll just pop into the waveform for a second (or the reverse) and then go right back to multitrack and the problem is solved (at least temporarily). But how can I fix this for real?

I also encountered another issue that I’ve never experience before. I was editing a podcast that has a standard into and outro as part of the template. For some reason the track with the vocals for the intro/outro just stopped playing. Nothing was soloed or muted and the music track below it still worked. As a work around, I copied/pasted the intro/outro from another session but I would love to know what caused that issue. I'm using Audition 2020. Maybe that is the problem? Thank you. 

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

Try going to the Hardware section in Preferences and increasing the sound device latency value (it may be called buffer size - it varies according to what it's connected to). This may also make a difference to your playing stop on one track too, although that sounds more like a HDD buffering issue. But it's a Mac - I have no idea what you have to do to optimise the performance of one of those for audio. But there are almost certainly things you can try - googling 'improve mac performance for audio' will produce several suggestions.

[paulam25909058]

Thanks for your thoughts. But I don't see why there should be any latency / buffering. This computer is brand new and optimized for working with programs like Audition. 

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

This has nothing to do with how wonderful your computer is. If you haven't specifically optimised it for audio, then it isn't - it's that simple. All computers experience latency and buffering issues - it's inherent in the way they work. It takes a finite amount of time to process anything - especially feeds from a hard disk to a sound device, and that's why there is a buffer built in - it simply wouldn't work at all without it. And yes, you often need to alter the size of it, depending upon what you are trying to stream from the drive.

With all due respect, I suggest that you actually try what I've suggested before telling me it's unnecessary.