I want to record 6 hours of CD quality sound but Audition Crashes.

[camille minichino]

When I start the recording session, Adobe Audition is (according to the Mac Activity Monitor) taking 23% CPU. As the recording time advances, the % increases.  At about 5 hours, the CPU time is at 100%.  There are no other apps running and taking CPU time.  Sometine before 6 hours, the Audition display becomes erratic and the time stops and jumps ahead randomly.  Eventually the Activity Monitor reports that Adobe Audition is not responding.

My system is Mojave 10.14.6 on a Mac mini (2018) with a 3.2 Ghz Intel Core i7. 

Acrobat is using Windows: Editor, Files, Freq Analysis, Level Meters, Time and Tools.

I don't understand why the CPU goes up while the recording time increases?  Isn't the app just putting bits on the drive?  I'm not asking to do any editing processing until the 6 hours has been captured.

I'm asking for 16 bits stereo 44100 Hz .

[SuiteSpot]

The only Macs I deal with generally come with a coke and fries so bear with me as far as advice...

Here is what I would look at....

1.Make sure you have plenty of hard disk space

2. Make sure you are not recording to a USB or network drive but rather an internal SSD drive (I think the 'D' actually stands for drive)

3. Make sure your audio interface is actually set to 44.1khz otherwise Audition has to resample on the fly

4. Make sure you are running the latest version of Audition

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

Okay, lines I simply don't understand:

"Acrobat is using Windows: Editor, Files, Freq Analysis, Level Meters, Time and Tools."

And one very significant detail is missing - are you trying to record in Waveform or Multitrack view? They have completely different recording mechanisms.

[camille minichino]

The Audition program is being used on a Macintosh computer.  The Windows list is which of the Window items are checked to be displayed (and I assume that means that the ones that aren't checked are not being used by the program and therefore are not using computer memory and storage assets)

I am recording in the Waveform view. 

I have plenty of space and have SSD drives to record the files.

As an option that I thought was involved in this problem is the Editor window.  I was able to start the recording with the Editor option checked, and then unchecked it after the recording started.  The CPU % went to 15 and stayed there for the entire 6 hours.  At 6 hours, the program stopped, and I was able to use the file "Save As" choice to successfully save the entire recording as a .mp3 file.  But editing that file was time consuming, requiring almost 10 minutes to load and edit.

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

Okay, the real clue there is that you are recording in Waveform view. This doesn't record direct to file at all, and is entirely limited by the available space on your temporary drive. If you want to make a really long recording, then do it in Multitrack view, where the file will be written direct to disk, and not have the rather severe limitation of being a temp file first. And if your system crashes, recovery of everything up to that point is possible quite easily.

Okay, I'm not a Mac user but I still don't understand what Acrobat has to do with this at all. But with most computing systems, an item not being displayed means only that. It will still be using resources and running in the background. The only thing it won't be doing is using up screen real-estate.

The other thing is that if you save to an MP3, that's not what you will be editing, because Audition doesn't use them. What it does is decode your MP3 back to being a wav file, that it can edit. So for a six-hour file, I'm not in the slightest bit surprised that it takes ages to open! And when it's finished and you resave it, it has to be re-encoded. So you've inevitably lost quality, because it's a compressed format. It may be larger, but save it as a wav file, edit it as a wav file and then save the final result as an MP3. That's what the format was designed to be - a distribution format, not an editing one.

[camille minichino]

When the 6 hours of recording was done and I chose to open the Editor by clicking on it in the Window menu bar, the file became visible and I was able to save it successfully from there after editing it. During the 6 hour time, the CPU stayed at the 15% it started at.  Apparently, Audition uses a lot of computer resources and power to display the Editor window during the recording period.  I don't expect to make any editing decisions before the recording period is complete. So having the Editor window closed solves the problem.

Incidentally, I've been doing this type of recording for quite some time, and previous versions of Audition didn't have this problem. I'm concerned that if I upgrade my OS to Catalina, other problems will happen.