Playhead position suddenly moving jerkily

Report · Sep 20, 2017

After a year of flawless movement, Audition's playhead today started moving jerkily.

For any audio editor to function AT ALL, it has to have some graphical element (Audition's "playhead"), that moves instantaneously along the waveforms, matching the sound being played over the PC to the waveforms associated with that sound. The work I do in Audition is IMPOSSIBLE without this most basic function.

For the first year of steady use, Audition did this perfectly. But today, mid-session, it shifted to jerky movement. Now it jumps position every 200 to 400 ms, then freezes in the new position, motionless until the next jump (200-400 ms later).

This started occurring midway through Audition editing work on a single .wav file today. One moment the playhead position was moving normally. The next, it only moves by jumps and freezes.

I had nothing else running on my PC. I have not recently installed any new hardware, software, driver updates, or accepted recent updates to Creative Suite. My PC is an overbuilt home build with heavy resources, which has run Audition flawlessly for the last year. There is ~900 GB free on the main SSD pair (2x1TB SSDs in RAID0). Audition's user temp files are tiny. Malware seems unlikely; I use Norton 360 religiously, and was not downloading anything when the stuttering started occurring.

I tried opening different .wav files in Audition. With one smaller file (a ~2.5 min long mp3), I got a ~1-2 second period of somewhat smoother (but not the usual perfectly smooth) movements at the very start of playback. But immediately after that, the playhead's movement reverted to all stutters, even when I "rewound" the playhead to start of the file (where it briefly had moved smoother).

So for right now, Audition is dead to me. This is major concern, since I have many projects in the works. Any suggestions would be awesome.

Report · Sep 20, 2017

More details. I just noticed Audition's level meters are updating in exactly the same way, and with the same timing -- so when the playhead moves, the level meter do too, and when one is frozen, so is the other. Checking Premiere Pro CC, it is playing back perfectly smoothly. Similarly, YouTube videos (1080p) are playing back smoothly. And in-PC video files are playing back smoothly in other app as well.

So this is not a video card general melt-down. It seems more Audition suddenly not working well with my video resources.

Any thoughts?

Report · Sep 20, 2017

More details: Rebooting maybe gives me ~3 seconds of nearly normal refresh rate for the monitor elements of Audition during playback, but after that everything reverts to stuttery updates. And to clarify my above reply, once Audition goes stuttery, I can open any other application and get perfectly instantaneous video update rates. Also: those stutters are limited to the visual display of Audition on my monitor; the audio playback remains smooth and flawless. And: the PC's cursor moves across the Audition screen perfectly smoothly too, even while Audition's playhead position and level meters stutter badly.

So, this problem seems to be Audition sending updates to the monitor slowly, not the graphics card struggling (it's pretty beefy, and handles way tougher tasks fine, and handled Audition fine for the last year before today).

(Off topic: Why does Adobe's forums' edit button act so buggy? If an edit window ever opens, which is rare, it never lets me actually do any editing to the opened post.)

Report · Sep 20, 2017

Update: I get the same effect from closing and reopening Audition, as from rebooting: a few seconds of near-normally smooth video (/monitor) update rates, before starting the bog down toward longer freezes. Freeze length does not vary with time since opening Audition. It varies with how long I've playing back the audio. This suggests to me that the freezing is not driven by some utilities' background activities (as Audition gets set up to use). It's instead got to do with the playing back within Audition.

BTW, I think the freezes grow to ~1 sec, not 0.2-0.4 sec as mentioned in my initial post.

Also, I checked with MSI Afterburner, and my GPU is barely loaded during this time: it runs in the mid-low single digits for loading levels (2-6%, it looks like).

Report · Sep 21, 2017

You haven't said which Audition version you're running, or mentioned the OS at all... are you allowing automatic OS updates?

Report · Sep 21, 2017

I have the subscription version Creative Cloud, all apps. Audition is 2017, build 10.1.1.11.

Windows 10.1, (64 bit).

Adobe CC is not set to auto-update. (The desktop app tells me when an update is available, so I can decide when to install them. It shows no updates currently pending, and I have not made an update in the last few weeks.)

I'm thinking I will try a clean reinstall of Audition tomorrow (no time to do that tonight).

Report · Sep 22, 2017

Are you allowing Windows to update itself? That alone has been known to screw up all sorts of things. It's not exactly unknown for a new version to require you to update video drivers, and this has all the hallmarks of being a video issue...

Report · Sep 22, 2017

Yes, I do allow W10 to update itself automatically. My system shows it installed security updates from Microsoft on the 12th. But I used Audition on several of the days since then, and Audition waited until the 20th to break.

Report · Sep 22, 2017

The clean install worked:

I uninstalled Audition from Adobe's desktop app -- selecting the option to remove all personal preferences.
I verified the Audition folder under "user" was emptied by the uninstall (it was)
Rebooted. (For good measure.)
Then reinstalled Audition from Abode's desktop app.

So far, I've used the new install of Audition only several minutes, but no signs of GUI (video) stuttering/freezing so far, and before this, it only took seconds to go bad. If the problem comes back, I'll add more to this post. But for now, I'm calling this fixed.

Report · Sep 26, 2017

and ... it's back. So whatever is inadvertently causing it is reproducible. It took a couple days of editing to start to show up again. This might have to do with my running PrP and Audition at the same time? I'm doing timeline multicam editing, and periodically hopping over into Audition to clean up the audio. This is a relatively new workflow I'm trying out. Instead of editing audio completely in advance of any video timelining, I'm instead using the video queues (while building the timeline) to help understand and therefore optimize sound. I'm not using dynamic link to launch the Audition from within Premiere Pro. I'm just opening the audio source file (a *.wav file), directly with Audition, and not saving Audition's edits until I'm ready to update that audio file in PrP. It seems to work, except I can't rule out it driving this video stuttering problem in some buggy way ... though I don't know it's causing it either. (I'd tried the dynamic link feature a couple times months ago, and had problems with it, so this had seemed initially like a simpler less buggy workflow.)

BTW, I was not totally happy with the clean install on its own, either, since it loses any personalizations, and I forgotten how many I'd made (hotkeys, customer ETQs, etc).

Report · Sep 27, 2017

ZenGeekDad wrote
This might have to do with my running PrP and Audition at the same time?

That's not out of the question at all, but I think you'd need the devs to look into it. With a bit of luck, one will be along shortly...

BTW, I was not totally happy with the clean install on its own, either, since it loses any personalizations, and I forgotten how many I'd made (hotkeys, customer ETQs, etc).

If you need to do this again, save your preferences folder first, and then replace the 'vanilla' version with the original one. That should restore your personal settings.

To be honest, I'm slightly surprised that a reinstall made any difference to this at all; I can see no obvious reason for it, as this seems much more like a potential driver issue.

Report · Sep 27, 2017

If Premiere is rendering video in the background then it is very likely that Audition could become jerky. like most video NLE software Premiere can make use of the GPU of your graphics card to speed up rendering of video effects using CUDA or OpenCL. You could try turning off GPU rendering in Premiere to see if that stops the jerkiness of Audition's graphics.

Report · Nov 28, 2018

I know this is a little old, but did you ever resolve this? The same thing has been happening to me for the last several versions and I can‘t find many other mentions of it online.

Report · Nov 29, 2018

That can be a sign of incompatible graphics card drivers.

Report · Dec 16, 2018

This just started happening to me recently as well. I haven't used Audition in a month or so it was fine last time I did.

Currently running a GTX 980Ti with 417.35 updated from 417.01 which behaved exactly the same.

Audition has become completely unusable like this.

Report · Dec 17, 2018

The answer to most of these questions is to make sure that there's a check in this box!

Report · Dec 17, 2018

Yeah, that's not it, at least in my case. Although for fun I should turn it off and see if it behaves any different (I'll have to try later when I'm home, my machine at work isn't doing this.)

Report · Dec 18, 2018

LOL -- turning hardware acceleration OFF actually works.

Report · Dec 18, 2018

The reason that the option is there is precisely because it doesn't always work. If your video hardware and driver don't support this functionality, then enabling it will certainly make things worse!

Report · Jun 24, 2021

This is seemingly still an issue that has not been resolved. What happens with me is I can also leave the individual file and return to the multi-track, then go back into the individual file, and it is smooth. But then 2 minutes later it begins jittering again. I sincerely don't understand what is causing this.

Report · Jun 25, 2021

Have you checked to see if there's an updated video driver for your machine?

Report · Apr 16, 2022

I'm having the same issue. The playhead is jittery but the audio sounds fine. Did you ever resolve this??

Report · Jul 02, 2022

Did you figure this out Will? I'm experiencing this exACT issue. Smooth audio, but playhead/audio meters jittery. Never had this issue before... I just reformated my system because I thought that was the issue. Just reinstalled audition on a fresh windows installation, and it's still doing this.

Report · Jul 02, 2022

My particular issue was that something IS making it jittery. Data usage.

And what was using the data?

Spectral Analyzer tucked in a side bar without me seeing the window--

And cranking out CPU hogging processes.

So yeah, check all the windows or reset the workstation to defaults and see if that helps.

Report · Jul 03, 2022

That could potentially be a RAM issue. In Audition, if you go to Edit>Preferences>Memory, you can alter the amount of RAM reserved for other apps. On this laptop it all works fine with Audition having all the RAM, and reserving none for anything else Adobe. Premiere still works fine though, because in real life RAM is dynamically allocated, and Audition very rarely uses all of it. The real issue with it is when Audition is only getting to use a small part of what's available because a hard limit has been set.