Audition Playback degrades in multitrack mode: cache issues?

[Rag and Bone]

I've just start using Audition and I'm hitting an odd issue.

I'm using the latest version on my late 2105 iMac (4 Ghz i7, with 32GB ram) mac OS 10.15.6

After a few hours of editing, my multi-track session exhibits extremely poor playback...like a radio tuned off the station. This seems to happen after applying effects. I am typically using the essential sound panel with a dialogue preset, followed by a soft vocal boost with the mastering effect.

Listening in waveform mode seems unaffected.

I'm not sure if this is related, but the headphone jack on my iMac is loose, so I'm listening to the playback through a Focusrite iTrack Solo USB interface, but once the problem develops, it remains when playing back through the speakers. I've tried adjusting the sample rates, but I'm not sure that makes a difference. Other apps are unaffected.

The problem persists even if I close the file without saving, and then reopen. Restarting the computer doesn't help, but removing the effects seems to. It seems that, in some cases, I can then re-apply the effects. Copying the wav files into a new project seems to get around the issue.

The problem doesn't occur consistently, so it's hard to say what helps. The current project worked without incident for about 8 hours, another one worked for about 16 hours.

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

A common cause of this when effects are applied is that the effects processing takes up so much power that it slows everything else down. For any given track with a lot of effects there's a solution though - you pre-render the track - hit the little lightning arrow above the effects rack:

If you find that you need to alter anything, you can - just de-render it, make the alterations and re-render.

[Rag and Bone]

Thank you for that...I'll give it a try. Fingers crossed!

[Rag and Bone]

Hmm..I'm encountering the problem again...I have pre-rendered, cleared all the cache files, and the distortion persists...playback is distorted in multi-track editing, unchanged in waveform editing. If I export the clip in a mixdown file, or combine the clips on the track into a new wav file, the distortion is there.