Repeated spinning wheel of death

Report · Feb 15, 2021

I'm at a loss about this and so is my very competent IT department. I'm a radio reporter, often working on deadline, and cannot afford to have this keep happening.

I get the spinning wheel of death while working in Audition, and the only solutions are to quit the program and re-open it, or at times, when Audition refuses to shut down, I've had to re-boot the computer. The only saving grace is that when I then reopen Audition, I usually am able to return to session I had been working in. It's annoying, and a huge time suck.

Our IT department looked for a solution, but nothing worked...including a total wipe of the computer and reinstallation. When that failed to resolve this problem, they swapped me out for a new laptop. Yep, it's still happening.

On both computers, I'm running an up to date version of Windows 10.

The only idea I can think of that we haven't tried would be to replace Audition with an older version in the belief that there's an as-yet undiscovered conflict with Word or Chrome or Teams or Outlook.

I'd be grateful for an ideas before I resort to trying an older version of Audition. Thanks!

Report · Feb 15, 2021

I'm presuming that this is on a Windows machine. Two things; have a look at the last log file generated before a freeze - it should indicate at what point the freeze is happening, at least. The second thing to do (and your IT dept should be aware of this) is to run Sysinternals Process Monitor and see if you can pinpoint the problem that way.

Should also say that there are a few favourites for causing this sort of problem. Typically WiFi polling is one, Anditvirus software repeatedly scanning folders you're using is another, as is sharing a temp space with the OS whilst it's constantly resizing it (a hangover from very early Windows days that they should have eliminated over a decade ago) - which brings me to the other point; there are any number of things you can do to improve the audio performance of a Windows machine - a google search will reveal plenty of them, of which preventing the temp folder resizing is typically one.

When you've done all of the optimisations, most Windows machines will run audio processing without a hiccup.