Summary: Audition is frequently and randomly crashing. I'm working on a podcast which uses a lot of movie clips and a few different interview tracks. A lot of the video files are mp4s, but they seem to be generating new wav files fine. My Conformed Files folder is huge tho. It was working fine for about a month and then it started to crash on me. Now it's happening all the time and I can't figure out why!

I've reached out to Adobe support twice: once through chat and one phone call. Nothing has worked. So far I have done all of the following trouble shooting steps: reset preferences, trashed preferences, restarted machine, updated OS, updated audition, uninstalled/re-installed audition, cleaned media cache, different external hardrives, and tried on a different computer and a different user and still crashing.

All other adobe software is working fine and stable.

Here's more technical info:

macOS Mojave (10.14.6)

Mac Pro (Late 2013), 3.5 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon E5

32 GB Memory, AMD FirePro D500 3 GB

Adobe Audition 2020 (13.0.2)

JKL is pretty familiar to anyone who uses Audition regularly. If you edit podcasts, you know how crucial this can be for the purposes of saving time. The problem is, much like the terrible means of searching for silence in Audition (for the purposes of dialogue editing, anyway), it’s far too rigid and playback sounds incredibly unnatural. Right now, I have my shuttle increases set to half speed, which gives me a roughly 1.3X playback. I’d like to use a higher speed, but anything greater than that is useless for spoken word. They’re chipmunks and you can’t understand anything. Pro Tools gives you the option to perfectly set playback speed to your preference since it allows you to enter an exact percentage. This is immensely helpful. And there should also be a toggle for how the pitch of the output changes. I mean, every single podcast and audiobook player can do this, but some of the best implementations are Overcast and Libby (and even Audible), both of which do a good job of allowing you to smoothly adjust speed for preference with minimal destruction to the “legibility” of the words spoken.

Along these lines, I use a Kensington SlimBlade for moving around my DAW. There are some options to scrolling speed and direction, and I have my upper-right button set to allow me to hold it to scroll horizontally; but what I really want is for Audition to allow me to fine-tune horizontal scrolling behavior even further. I want to be able to dial in the speed and inertia of scrolling at will and even assign hot keys to change behavior on the fly as needed.

It seems like every DAW maker, with perhaps the odd exception of Ferrite on iPadOS (which itself still has a long way to go), was blindsided by the rise of spoken word for the purposes of editing. With the onset of audiobooks and podcasts rising rapidly even today virtually every DAW is ill-suited for the task. It’s like everything out there is thinking in terms of a 3-4 minute song and not long form. There is the exception of movie scores, but even then it’s a very specialized task that’s ultimately broken up into much smaller bits that are later added to the final product in usually a video editing environment. You can sort of do this with audiobooks, but even then a typical session is hours long. Podcasts are often 30-120 minutes, easily. We need a way to move around these editing environments much, much more quickly. We need playback that is much, much more adaptable to listening quickly. We need tools like strip silence that eliminate the unnecessary stuff recorded when another person is speaking, which helps tremendously with not only overall editing speed, but also the application of effects. We need a method better than groups and locking to timeline to prevent accidentally getting audio out of sync. We need excellent multicore performance so we don’t have to rely on pre-rendering as aggressively before mixing down, which can take an hour or more for the typical hourlong podcast. Leveraging just one core is just INSANE to me in 2020.

One of these days someone will come along that will not only create a purpose-built podcasting DAW that not only thinks in the terms above, but they’ll also have it on multiple platforms (including mobile), they’ll have default layouts and preset workspaces better suited to the task of long-form dialogue, and they’ll support excellent plugins while still cutting out the cruft that comes with supporting music or soundtracks first. This wold be a huge, huge product. It’ll think about automatically routing and recording remote audio during guest call-ins while also recoding locally. It’ll think about syncing dialogue (it can use the remote track as reference, even as guests send in their local audio), it’ll think about (as perhaps an even better alternative to strip silence) automatically creating disparate clips of only the portions where people are talking using the other already synced tracks as a way to gather intelligence about who is speaking when, and so much more.

The first DAW to really understand the needs of podcast and audiobook editing — which are in some ways is much more lightweight, and in many ways more esoteric than that of music or soundtracks — is going to OWN this space. They’ll have a huge, huge hit on their hands if they make a purpose-built tool.

I saw the Sensei demo recently where they automatically isolated ums and ahs. This is indeed a start and gives me hope for Audition, but at the same time Adobe moves so painfully slow and so much of the low-hanging fruit has already been ignored. And what’s the point of a demo if I can’t use it for, what, another 2-3 years? It doesn’t help.

What helps is simpler stuff you folks can implement now.

I’ll just post a (slightly modified for context) message that I sent to Jason Levine as an open letter since there is literally no information or outreach about this out there.

TL;DR, I’m very close to switching DAWs (likely Pro Tools) even though I don’t want to. Between this and a lack of a real strip silence feature that’s also usable in the nondestructive environment, and which doesn’t force me to ripple my track and/or export to hundreds of useless markers, it’s becoming less and less viable to continue editing in Audition.

Hi Jason,

Please forgive me for contacting you directly. I’ve exhausted all other search options to the extent my capabilities allow, including emailing Adobe support to no avail.

I’ve got a 2019 16” MacBook Pro with 8GB 5500M and a 2018 Mac mini connected to a 16GB Vega 64 eGPU. The former is the 8-core i9 with 32GB RAM. The latter is a 6-Core i7 with 32GB RAM.

I’m running simple multitrack podcast recording and editing sessions in the latest version of Audition. The MBP is used primarily for editing, the mini is what we normally use for recording. We’re recording at 48/32 in mono. I typically apply plugins from iZotope and Waves. My effects chain is usually 7-8 items long per track. Usually 2-4 tracks. One track per individual on the podcast. They’re recording at same rates (at worst, 44.1/16, but assume it’s usually 48/32).

After doing my initial edit I usually do a mixdown to a single WAV at the same rates. This way I can deal with a single track for fine-tuning my pacing, using markers to denote chapters, and mastering to yet another WAV. This is my final, which I later encode (including artwork, links, chapters) to MP3 (160Kbps, mono) in a phenomenal little app by Marco Arment called Forecast (which uses all 8 or 6 cores just beautifully).

My biggest issue is the first mixdown on either device. I’ve noticed on iStat Menus that on either computer only a single CPU core will fire up. On the 16” MBP, it doesn’t even look at the discrete GPU. It stays on the Intel the whole time (even with energy settings that force the discreet GPU on adapter power). On the Mac mini, the eGPU (which I’ve set in macOS to specifically use with Audition, Premiere, Lightroom, etc.) fires up to full bore, but still doesn’t seem fully leveraged. On the MBP a typical 70-80 minute show with two tracks will take over an hour to mix down. On the mini, even with Audition clearly leveraging the eGPU (to what extent or why, I do not know as I thought a mixdown of audio only would be mostly processor intensive), it still takes about 50-60 minutes. In fact, I suspect the difference is more about slightly better thermal performance than the eGPU.

Why isn’t Audition leveraging more of the processor cores? It seems like Creative Cloud applications for 2020 made fairly good leaps in leveraging discrete GPUs in certain apps, even if non-workstation class, but multicore processors are seriously underused across the entire creative suite. Is it just me? Am I missing a setting? It just seems like this stuff should be so much faster. As I take on more client editing work this becomes a real issue. I can use my Mac mini as a passive little render farm so I can free up my MBP, but it’s still taking that hour.

Do you have any insight on this?

I genuinely appreciate your time and once again apologize for reaching out via this forum.

Best,

Gilbert Tang

After using Essential Sound - Ducking, I turned off "Monitor Clip Changes" so that I could hand adjust keyframes. (Audition does a poor job of auto-adjusting in any way that sounds good and makes sense, but that's another issue.)

I was finished, but I felt like the Amplify effect which appears in the Effects Rack when using the Ducking feature was causing the sound to clip out on the high-end. So, I turned off the Amplify effect in the Effects Rack, and when I played the track, the effect itself was removed as well as all of my keyframes that I hand adjusted.

No amount of "Undo" would fix the issue, even though my History still shows many Modify Keyframe actions taken. There's nothing I can do to get that time back, but I can report this as a bug. Even turning off Ducking in Essential Sound removes all the keyframes. This really shouldn't be happening; we should be allowed to review a track without these effects and NOT lose our work. Or is this a case-by-case bug?

Hi! I'm encountering a weird issue when I'm moving my mouse over the multitrack editor. The mouse cursor sort of gets "stuck" on the audio clips, it seems to be trying to change the cursor shape between the normal mouse pointer shape and the "move" cursor, many many times, so it sort of flickers.

I use an external Thunderbolt monitor connected to my macbook, and this only happens when the Audition screen is on the (much bigger) external monitor, and that monitor is the "main" monitor for OSX (see screenshot). If the Audition screen is on the (much smaller) macbook screen, in either configuration, this behavior doesn't happen. When the macbook screen is the main screen, this doesn't happen, although then it disrupts all my other workflows and screen management.

I've just updated to Audition 13 in hopes that it would be fixed, but it is not :(

Dear Developers,

Today, I have experienced that over 70 .wav files created using Audition under macOS 10.14.6 are not loaded in python. The code I have used is <paulstretchstereo.py> under <https://github.com/paulnasca/paulstretchpython>.

After converting those files by using RX7 or by using Audacity, python could load the files.

Why does it happen?

The following is the error message from python:

stretch amount = 8.04
window size = 0.25 seconds
/Users/prko/opt/anaconda3/lib/python3.7/site-packages/scipy/io/wavfile.py:273: WavFileWarning: Chunk (non-data) not understood, skipping it.
WavFileWarning)
Error loading wav: shortpercussivelikeJG3GA.wav
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/Users/prko/paulstretchpython/paulstretch_stereo.py", line 149, in <module>

(samplerate,smp)=load_wav(args[0])

TypeError: cannot unpack non-iterable NoneType object
Paul's Extreme Sound Stretch (Paulstretch) - Python version 20141220
by Nasca Octavian PAUL, Targu Mures, Romania

I am not sure if it is a bug or not, but it is very strange....

Thank you in advance for your work.

Currently, according to Adobe, there is no way to change the sample type to a sample rate other than those listed on the pull down list. This is very disappointing and means that if I choose to record audio at 528hz, 432hz, etc., I now will have to go and find another company and software to accomplish this. This is extremely disappointing since I pay for the full professional CC software, and is surprising that Adobe Audition has not been designed to support other and more popular audio sample rates. Will Adobe be changing Adobe Audition to support other sample rates other then the defaulted ones? Thank you.