Currently, Premiere Pro has no indicator for audio rendering, and appears to render all audio prior to starting playback, causing lag spikes upwards of 20s with a large multi-track file.

This would be okay, if somewhat annoying, if Premiere actually cached and retained this audio after this first time. However, that is not the case. Premiere does not cache the audio to disk, and will discard all of it immediately if you so much as click out of the program for half a second, causing another 20s lag spike before you can start playback again.

Additionally, people have reported related issues with Premiere rendering ALL the audio rather than only the needed audio when exporting - the same thing applies here. None of those issues seem to have been addressed.

As it is, this makes editing large video files with multiple audio tracks exceedingly annoying, especially when my work means that I will very often need to pull in extra images and footage as I edit.. which means a 20s wait for playback every single time.

I'm not sure how Premiere got to a state where audio is treated so completely differently to video, but this is a serious underlying issue with Premiere's handling of audio, and is the main reason why I have been seriously considering switching away from Premiere. 20s of lag every single time I simply click outside the program makes editing incredibly frustrating.

Premiere's audio handling needs to be fixed.

A simple list of changes would be as follows:

-Retain audio previews properly instead of discarding them
-Actually write audio previews to disk to re-use later
-Only render audio that's actually required for playback/exporting
-Option for audio playback pre/postroll, same as video previews

I hope this can actually get addressed rather than falling into the void of ignored issues like so many others have.