Known Participant

Premiere recreating audio waveforms for all clips every time a project is opened, even if project has already been in progress and PEK files already exist

Forum|Forum|27 days ago
June 18, 2026
2 replies
92 views

On many of my projects, as of Premiere 26.2 and now on 26.3, I’m finding that Premiere is needing to recreate audio PEK files on every time a project is reopened. Example, I was working on this project file yesterday, all day. Closed it out, reopened it this morning, project is stalled while Premiere recreated PEK files.

It is creating brand new PEK files in the standard MacOS media cache directory.

Happens across several different projects, happens on both my Mac Studio and my MacBook Pro.

Haven’t quite had a chance to do a heavily detailed test of what could be causing it, but from chatter I hear on the forums, Facebook, and Reddit, I believe this has something to do with the relinking/slow loading bug people have been reporting.

Amy the Stuv

Community Manager

Hi @BrianLevin ,

Welcome back to the Premiere Pro forums! To better understand this issue, we need a few more details. Please see, How do I write a bug report?

You’ve already provided a lot of that information, but more is always better to help identify what’s going on. I’m also wondering if these projects were upgraded from earlier versions, and if you’ve already followed the steps for troubleshooting in the link above to clear the Media cache and let it rebuild fresh?

If that didn’t work, I would be curious to see if you created a new project in the latest version, open your old project, copy - paste everything in the old project into the new project if this issue persists. This information can help us identify the bug.

Thank you for your help,

Amy

BrianLevinAuthor

Known Participant

Will return to this in a week or two, I just fully cleared the cache and PEK files on both machines and will rebuild all caches from scratch. If the problem persists after that I’ll report back with more testing and details.

BrianLevinAuthor

Known Participant

After completely clearing my media cache files, media cache database, and all of my PEK files from both my work and home computers, and starting completely fresh, I’m still discovering that reopening projects that I have used as recently as the previous day still requires a length “relinking” process and in many cases also runs through “preparing audio” as well, even though just a day prior that project was online, in active use, and fully cached with all audio waveforms generated.

I’m on 26.3.0 and it was upon updating to this version that I noticed this happening. Prior to this version I’ve never had this problem before, no changes to my workflows, data storage, or anything like that.

Peru Bob

Community Expert

What are the hard drives (how many, what kind, what is on each, what capacity, and how full)?

BrianLevinAuthor

Known Participant

Media is on external SSDs of varying types and sizes, SanDisk, T7’s, T9’s, etc. They range from 2TB to 4TB. None of the external hard drives are full. My internal SSDs on both machines have at least a 1TB of free space on them.

Since I had to do an update to MacOS Tahoe today, I figured I would just go ahead and completely wipe my media cache, media cache files, and peak files, and start with a totally fresh cache setup for testing.

Peru Bob

Community Expert

I suspect that the issue is related to the external drives.

If it were Windows, I would suggest that the external drives might not have a fixed drive letter, but I don’t think that applies to Mac OS. I’m not a Mac person.

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