If you’re puzzled or frustrated that the audio in your project stops playing back or recording when you leave the Adobe Audition window, let me assure you there is a reason.  You’re not crazy.

This is a natural reaction to the settings for your sound card.  Follow along by opening Audition, clicking on the “Edit” menu, and then selecting “Audio Hardware Setup”.

Keep in mind that the settings for the Edit View and Multitrack View are independent.  That being said, if you’re using an ASIO driver (versus “Audition Windows Sound”), the sound card will “release” (stop recording or playing back) when the window goes into the background if the “Release ASIO Driver In Background” checkbox is selected.

If you’re likely to change windows while using Audition to record and play back, you can uncheck this box.  However, it may cause unexpected behavior in other applications that are also trying to use the ASIO driver.  For example, if you’re trying to dub audio from Skype or another program by recording in Audition and you’re getting weird (or no) results, try changing back to “Audition Windows Sound”.  You can think of this as a compatability mode of sorts for your sound card.

Summary

If you click away from (or minimize) the Audition window while playing or recording audio when the “Release ASIO Driver In Background” option is selected, audio operations will cease, and you’ll manually have to restart them while Audition has focus.

Alternately, you can try unchecking the box, or using the “Audition Windows Sound” driver temporarily to accomplish your task.