Premiere Pro lags when moving the timeline slider and crashes while editing

[Trial4life]

Hello everyone,
I'm new to the forum but I've been editing videos for years. I'd always used Sony Vegas, but started using Adobe Premiere Pro CC v12.0 only a couple of years ago, and it has almost always worked flawlessly.

Since a couple of months though, I've started experiencing strange issues while editing:

• Whenever I move the slider in the timeline, the preview is not responsive at all, and I have to wait at least 3 seconds for the proper frame to appear in the preview; the same delay happens whenever I click the "play" button (I have to wait 3 seconds before the preview starts playing);
• At the beginning of these 3 seconds, I noticed 100% CPU activity spikes in the task manager;
• If I try to edit too fast (cuts, trims, move clips, every other action), the chances of the software to crash are almost 90%... I've been editing a 45 min video project and probably I've run into hundreds of crashes. It just freezes and I have to kill the process in the task manager.

I'm thinking that the crash is caused by the first issue: in fact, I've noticed that if I wait for the preview to load (3 seconds after I stop moving the slider), PP will never crash. The crashes only occurs if actions are made in those 3 seconds of pre-loading.

I'm sure that months ago the software was not so sluggish. I've tryed with the following fixes:

• Clear media cache files
• Reset workspaces
• Disable GPU acceleration
• Reduce the preview size
• Converting all of the footages I'm working with into GoPro Cineform codec using shutter encoder

None of this solved the problem... The conversion into Cineform helped a lot in the first stages of the project (faster video playback and editing, less crashes), but as soon as it started becoming bigger, I got the same bug again.

Are there any other things I could try? Is it possible that the "Essential audio" tool in the "Audio" workspace is causing the issue? I used it a lot to correct the audio levels.

EDIT: the strange thing is that if I hold the slider with the left click, after those 3 seconds, the preview starts to be 100% responsive (I can see the video frames updating in real time when moving the slider).

System Specs:

• CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-6500 CPU @ 3.20GHz 3.19 GHz
• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB
• RAM: 16 GB

Footage Specs:

• Container: MPEG-4 (JVT)
• Codec: avc1 (avc1/isom)
• Acquired with DJI Osmo Pocket and DJI Mavic Mini

Thanks in advance for the help!

[Trial4life]

It turned out that Essential sounds was the cause of the lag! In fact, if I delete all of the audio tracks, everything goes instantly super fast.

Do you know how can I use essential sounds without encountering this issue? Have newer versions of Premiere solved it?