Hi,
I recently restored an image from backup - and a couple of things had to be re-activated. One of them was Audition 3 - but guess what? They don't have an activation server any more!
It turns out you can download a new version that doesn't need activation - and a new serial number.You uninstall the old version and install this new one.
This seemed to work OK - but it pays to keep a safe copy of all your settings. They are located in
C:\Users\yourname\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Audition\3.0
I copied all this stuff from a backup to this folder - and I got all my settings back ;-)
Read about it here:
https://helpx.adobe.com/x-productkb/policy-pricing/creative-suite-2-activation-end-life.htmlhttps://helpx.adobe.com/creative-suite/kb/cs2-product-downloads.html# Audition 3 works fine on Win 8.1 for me - and I have no intention of moving to the Adobe subcription model, so I'm trying to squeeze all the life out of ver 3 that I can ;-)