Audition CC - Bring back middle-mouse click and drag to scroll waveform

Report · May 04, 2018

This is in my muscle memory from using Cool Edit / Audition 2 and 3 for many many years.

Constantly having to move the mouse up to the mini-waveform scroll pane slows down workflow when editing considerably.

Not all of us are using a trackpad.

Thanks for reading, if any developers actually read this stuff, that is.

Report · Apr 08, 2020

Looks like this has been implemented, yay!

However, like pretty much every Adobe application, it performs at such an unbelievably poor framerate it actually hurts your brain to use.

Come on guys you're generating a bitmap from some waveform data.

In 2020.

With multi-core processing, a GPU, gigabytes of RAM.

Can you not do better than 2 frames per second?

Cool Edit managed this just fine 20 years ago on a single core 100MHz PC, what the hell are you playing at?

Please don't bother replying with 'update your drivers, what are your specs' etc.

This computer is capable of throwing around millions of polygons per second, it's a modern computer, the fact that Audition can't plot waveform data and scroll through it at a decent framerate is YOUR problem.

Report · Apr 08, 2020

Well, on this Windows 10 laptop, click and drag-scroll on the waveform itself moves it as fast as you can move the mouse. But you haven't even told us whether you're using a Mac or a PC...

Report · Apr 28, 2020

Hi there,

Apologies for my snotty attitude. I've just lost patience when it comes to Adobe performance problems. The entire suite has got consistently worse over the years*. Have been an Adobe user for 20 years, and a Cool Edit / Audition user since 1998. It's upsetting to see your once beloved, trusty tools become poor quality nuicanses. Audition is probably the least affected of the bunch, why I'm still using it.

Here's middle-click scrolling performing poorly on a quad-core i7-8550 Windows 10 machine with 16GB of ram, notice the mini-waveform scrolling works fine, so it's probably just a mouse polling / event issue:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTGAmuyKKsY (60 fps video)

* = Audition is the only thing keeping my CC license alive now. I've stopped taking motion graphics work because After Effects is too painful to use, I've bought Affinity Designer and Photo, Sketch and use Davinci Resolve for video editing. Yes, I've verified performance is poor and I'm not imagining it by trying the apps on many different machines and on both platforms. Using a competitor's app for a few minutes makes you realise the performance bottleneck is with Adobe's UI rendering methods - they're terrible. Here's another demonstration video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GEi-cW3DTo (60 fps video)

PS. my avatar was chosen at random when, presumably, my account was badly migrated from some previous version of this bug report forum. There is no way for me to change it, any attempt to upload a new image fails. It's just sort of poetic that my very presence on the bug report forum contains a bug in itself. I'm cool with being a featureless mannequin woman wearing a sari though, why not eh?

Report · Apr 28, 2020

I can't say anything about the rest of the software, but there is one thing in Audition at least that you might like to try:

If it's on, turn it off - and vice versa (remember the restart). This has been the culprit for a number of strange refresh issues, and it may be behind yours too.

Report · May 05, 2020

Thanks for replying. Makes no difference in either state for me unfortunately.

I'm assuming the UI library is shared across the entire Adobe CC suite, as it exhibits the same poor performance in all apps (on every OS, on multiple machines). I'll be sad to say goodbye to Audition, been using Cool Edit since 1998 as I said, but I've found good alternatives for Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere, and I'm hunting for an Audition alternative now 😞

Report · May 05, 2020

Good luck with that - seriously. I've yet to find one that I can afford that gets anywhere close.

Report · Jul 24, 2024

The problem for me is that it seems like the app loses focus to the upper menu. Other Adobe apps have begun behaving like this also. Left clicking in the waveform window brings back focus to allow me to drag with the mouse button. This isn't a new problem but it definately is an annoying one for me causing twice the time to achieve the same action ie. a single click now becomes a two click action.