It would take you about 10 minutes to set up the project described in Premiere Pro, you would have real time previews and it would probably render near real time. Take the time to learn more tools.
Even the really boring and unoriginal in not at all creative Daniel Lesden video you referred to (pardon my artistic snobbery), if I were to recreate it, I would take the audio into AE, create a comp that was about 1/4 as tall as a standard HD comp, find the point where the audio loops, trim the comp to that length, and render just the audio spectrum effect in AE, then apply a radial blur and color treatment to the footage in Premiere Pro, add the rendered audio spectrum, loop it if needed, and send it to the render using the AME in Premiere Pro by adding it to the cue and moving on to my next shot. The most important thing in the long run to learn about video production is how to work efficiently. There is no bigger creativity killer than fussing with tools you are not using properly. Imagine trying to sculpt a statue of an elephant using only a nail and a tack hammer.
As for MP... I always look there first if there's a render problem because it just doesn't work like it should yet and 1GB per core is way wrong. CPU cores like to have 4 and if your project slows down with MP off, turning it on isn't going to help the memory cache problem that is hanging things up.
Is your audio file an mp3? if so, that could also be causing you problem. Convert it to a linear PCM uncompressed 48 Khz 16 bit wav file or AIFF. They are much more efficient and the standard for video production.
