[Fridrik Skulasson]

I stumbled upon this exact problem; I pressed “Play”, either by clicking the button or by hitting Space, and the play button itself lit up and the meters went up to the appropriate level, but there was no movement of the transport bar, nor any sound. It all looked like the whole application had freezed. What’s more, it all worked just fine and then suddenly just stopped working mid-session, as in you could do maybe 10 playbacks or something like that before it all ceased working. Only by rebooting the computer I could play it back again, only for it to fail after a handful of playbacks.

A lot of entries on various forums seemed to pinpoint the audio hardware selection being wrong but it didn’t make any sense as it always started out working just fine, and the selected output hadn’t changed either. After reading this thread, I started thinking that Audition maybe was confusing the audio devices. See, for recording I use an external device and for mere playback I often use the internal onboard device. In addition I also have another sound card installed but which I currently don’t utilize for anything, which means it shows up in the audio preferences.

So I simply deleted all the inputs and outputs in the Control Panel sound preferences that had anything to do with this additional card, as well as disabling it in the Device Manager. This forced Audition to only concentrate on the onboard sound device and what do you know, that did the trick for me. It seems that Audition is easily confused with multiple devices so my two cents here would be to disable every sound device bar the one you will use with Audition.