Playhead position suddenly moving jerkily

[ZenGeekDad]

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.

[fredk8028166]

Hmmm. 48GB should be enough for a smooth moving playhead, no? Not a single
other program open… just audition, and again, this is on a freshly wiped
and reformatted windows system.--

Fred Kennedy

Senior Animator

He / Him

newfangledstudios.com
[phone number redacted - Adobe policy - Mod]

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

Well, you have to consider your video driver then. NVIDIA seem to have been updating theirs about once a week recently - really hard to keep up. But I certainly don't get jerking problems, and the only times I ever have, they've always been fixed by updating the video driver...

[blackrosekiller]

I have tried this and all of the above. My issue is the same but with Adobe Premiere. The playhead moves smoothly as long as I am clicking on the timeline and not on a clip. If a clip is highlighted and I play, the audio and video plays fine but the playhead does not move in real-time with the audio and video of the clip. It lags and then suddenly jumps ahead to catch up. I stumbled upon a fix when this happened about a month ago and it was working but now it's not again and I can't recall what I did to fix it.

[Will Akana]

My speciific solution was discovering spectral analyzer was open in a side window of Auditoin so it was hogging the CPU. I'd suggest reseting the workstation in Premiere or checking if any side process enabled is hogging the CPU in the program.

[Joshnewtothis]

Thanks for your comment, Will. I was experiencing a jittery playhead, and by simply going to Window > Reset to Saved Layout, the problem seems to have been resolved. It must have been something similar - a spectral frequency analyser that I introduced in a session last week and forgot about. Cheers!

[scottf70820907]

Same issues here - MAC OS - nothing I've done helps - including a clean re-install