now it is doing some phase 2 thing, taking another 12 minutes.....CEP is starting to piss me off!
CEP has some decent failure recovery stuff it handles in the background with temp files, so on the first opening of the file, it takes a while. All subsequent openings of the same file should be swift.
Also - are your temp files on a different physical disk? This should help significantly.
As for the two phase thing, here's kinda how it works:
Editing
[1] save "undo" info
[2] perform processing
Saving
[3] flush WAV file
[4] save WAV file
You can skip [1], but not [3]. And it doesn't always do [3]. I'm not sure when or why, necessarily. I always skip [1] - if I flub it, I just close the file, re-open the original, and start again.
Perhaps CEP takes longer to do the resampling because it's a higher quality resample? Dunno.