Help! Audition not responding and hogging RAM :(

[mattloves]

Hello, I've been using Audition on my Mac desktop for over 3 years. Yesterday and today I've been having an issue which has never happened before. I'm using Audition v22.2. I have an iMac 5k 27 inch 2017 desktop with 24GB RAM. 

I started a new multitrack session and then imported some MP3s that I use for my podcast intro, outro, and other audio fills. Audition says it needs to convert them, so it does that and they appear in the session, then I add them to the timeline. I've been doing this for years no problem. 

However yesterday and today, everything goes haywire from this point.

Either:

1) The tracks are still processing and time out when I drag them on the timeline. The message that appears is "Reading MP3 Audio, waiting" Application doesn't respond and RAM use surges. This has happened a couple of times. 

2) They appear no problem, but when I try to play the session I get the Mac spinning wheel thing and the application doesn't respond. RAM use surges. This is the most frequent outcome. 

3) They play just fine, but when I close the session and reopen it again, we go back to scenario 2 above, where the application doesn't respond and the RAM use surges. 

Looking at the Mac Activity Monitor, for all three scenarios above, the amount of memory during this time surges, from around 200MB with an empty session, to 20 or 30GB and climbing. Last night at one stage it got to over 50GB. 

I've tried lots of different things, including:

A) converting the MP3s to WAV files in Apple Music before improting

B) creating the session on an SSD disk instead of my Mac hard drive

C) using an older version of Audition (14.4) I still have on my Mac. 

D) Downloading Audacity to see if thre is an issue with the sound files - they play fine in Audacity. 

E) Loaded the MP3s and played them in VLC and Apple Music - no problem with them. 

F) Looking for an Audition update, looks like my version is up to date. 

G) I've tried to open older sessions with completely fdiffrent tracks and they don't load either. 

H) I just started a new session and dragged a 2 minute MP3 in, it was trying to convert it and the time went up to 52 minutes within 20 seconds. I quit the app. 

I) I've rebooted my Mac four or five times inbetween trying different things. 

[mattloves]

After being frustrated for hours and hours, I ended up uninstalling both versions of Audition and then reinstalling it again. The version I reinstalled was the same as before (22.2). That seems to have worked!