Extremely slow spectral adjustments

[SkooledZone]

I fine-tune audio podcasts in Adobe Audition. Sometimes the podcasts are an hour or longer. When I'm zoomed in and need to cut something, do a simple volume adjustment, or add a fade to a selection, it always takes way too long to complete. We're talking sometimes 20-30 seconds or more per edit. Auto-healing isn't too bad, thank god! However, any function that requires a screen-wide redrawing of the spectral display takes a ridiculous amount of time. To the point where sometimes I just go watch a quick YouTube video after every single edit. LOL. I have a very fast computer with very fast internet speeds, so that shouldn't be the source of the issue. I just think Audition isn't programmed to handle large files. I suppose the only way to solve this is to chop up the hour podcast into four separate 15 minute files. I can do that if absolutely necessary, but I thought I ask why Audition is so sluggish and if anything can done to improve performance in upcoming versions. Perhaps Audition shouldn't try and load things each and every time that are 20 minutes or more down the line. The programmers should treat it like a video game where new locations aren't drawn until you actually reach them to explore. "But what about playback?" Well, then have a mode change from fine editing to quick listening.

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

How much difference does it make if you reduce the resolution of the spectral display? (right-click on the RHS scale for all the options)

[ryclark]

Just as an experiment I have opened a 3 hour plus audio file. And on my reasonably fast Win 7 64bit PC with an AMD R9 270 graphics card zooming in to 10 secs of audio in the spectral display takes around 5 secs. and back out to full is virtually instant. This is with a spectral resolution of 2048. Even when zoomed in and making a small edit to the audio it only takes around 5 secs to redraw the modified display. The initial display when opening a similar length audio file may take a few seconds longer.

Although you say you have a fast computer you don't say what Operating System or graphics card you are using or how much RAM you have available, all of which are relevant to Audition's display redraw speed.

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

If this is a Windows machine, then it's worth checking to see if there's an updated video driver for it - whatever sort of machine it is.

[SkooledZone]

Yes, zooming out is always instant. It's the zooming in that take time and even worse when I make cuts or power fades to long files. I just wish there was a setting in Audition so that it didn't have to redraw out so far after each and every edit. Photoshop doesn't have that lag when you zoom in on pixels and it doesn't have to redraw the whole graphic over and over again. I know they're kind of apples and oranges, but still...

[SkooledZone]

Oh and as far as my computer goes, it uses Win10, an AMD Radeon R9 200 graphics card, and it has 18 out of 24 GB RAM available for Audition. Let me know if that helps.

[SkooledZone]

Not sure how to check resolution, but the properties of the file indicate 96000 Hz and 32-bit float. I need that level of detail to be able to eliminate certain mouth clicks and throat pops.

[ryclark]

SkooledZone wrote:

Not sure how to check resolution, but the properties of the file indicate 96000 Hz and 32-bit float. I need that level of detail to be able to eliminate certain mouth clicks and throat pops.

Right click on the Frequency scale on the right of the display and change Spectral Resolution from the bottom of the drop down menu. The actual resolution will be indicated in the bottom left of Audition's task bar. Normally for most types of audio a resolution of 1024 or 2048 is about optimum for spotting clicks and pops.

You don't really need to be using 96k sample rate for voice recordings. Going back to 48k will halve the storage needed and the amount of data that has to be processed when editing. That should speed up the redrawing of the Spectral Display a bit I would have thought.

[zupertech]

I noticed this problem some time ago. I am not sure if you are using a spinning hard drive for Adobe Audition or an SSD drive. If Adobe Audition is loaded on an SSD drive and your immediate files you are editing, the search and redraw time is signifcantly reduced. Another thing that slows down redraw and processing time is the amount of edits you have done. Even when the "History" is deleted, there seems to be a memory cache that remains and slows down edits. Try saving everything and placing a marker in your work. Close Adobe Audition and reopen the file. Now try editing. If everything is faster for a while, then you have discovered the problem.

[emmrecs]

I think it deserves to be pointed out that this thread was started in 2016 and that there have been no further comments (here at least) since that year.  So the problem does not appear to be one that is at all common.

[Guest]

I have this problem with spectral screen redraws on my iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2020, Monerey 12.6) in the spectral view. This slowdown doesn't happen on my work PC (latest specs, etc.)