Inspiring

Question

Problems with stuttering audio playback in multitrack session

Forum|Forum|9 years ago
February 15, 2017
4 replies
8416 views

hi

I'm having trouble with audio jitter in my multitrack session, which is also playing dynamically linked video from Premiere Pro. It's a 17min film, and there are quite a number of tracks (maybe 50) although almost no real-time effects at all in the session. (And of those 50 tracks no more than 6 are playing at once)

I'm using an imac on OSX 10.9.5, with plenty of free disc space, 3.4GHz quad-core i7 processor, AMD Radeon HD 6970M graphics, and audio through my MOTU 828mkii. I have 13Gb RAM assigned to Audition and Premiere Pro, Premiere is actually not even open, so basically 13Gb assigned to Audition.

I've upped the I/O buffer size to the max available, and cleaned my media cache.

So why is my audio jittering on playback? It's unfortunately impossible to edit like this.

It seems to me I'm not asking Audition to do a great deal other than mix 3 or 4 tracks together at any one time, and simultaneously playback the dynamically linked video. In fact, when I work in Premiere I can have a huge amount more going on without any jitter in video or audio playback. I should clarify in my explanation that it is only the audio playback that stutters, not the video which plays fine in the video window.

Adobe CC2015, Audition 8.1.0.162

Thanks

Duncan

This topic has been closed for replies.

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elkalamarAuthor

Inspiring

"Also as far as keeping older installed versions of Adobe software working when doing an update to a new version/release I have found that you can probably hang on to your older version if you go in and change the name of the Adobe installation folder. So, for instance, if you are using CC 2015.1 and you want to update to 2015.2 rename Audition CC 2015.1 to Audition CC 2015old. Then the update shouldn't overwrite the older version and you should be able to still use it. I have virtually all versions of Audition installed from way back for test purposes and they all still work. However you may find that the CC app requires you to deactivate a version if it thinks that you have too many running at once."

Thanks this is useful to know.

"I believe that the video playback engine in Audition has considerable revisions done in the last few versions. Since you are running the much older CC 2015 version that may have been considerable improvements in video playback since 2015."

I hope that's the case. Nonetheless I'm working with a version of Audition which is only a year old, and the fact is if dynamic link can't deal with ProRes 422 at 1080p which has been around for years, then the software is just not doing what it claims to do. Imagine how much worse the problem becomes if I'm working with multiple codecs on my Premiere Pro timeline!! (which Premiere Pro now handles very well and is one of it's advantages over the Final Cut 7 that everyone used to love so much).

ryclark

Participating Frequently

CC 2015 is nearer two years old now. And as I mentioned I believe that the video engine in Audition has since progressed a lot to be very similar (if not the same) as that in Premiere in order to facilitate the better integration between the two programs. So I would have thought the latest versions should be a lot better. But we would need one of the developers to confirm that this is the case.

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elkalamarAuthor

Inspiring

The version I'm working in was released in November 2015 which is not two years ago. But it's irrelevant - we've been working with 1080p ProRes 422 for years so a 2015 release of Audition with dynamic link between Premiere Pro and Audition should be able to deal with this. I hope you're right, but I don't see any reason to assume that's the case.

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elkalamarAuthor

Inspiring

Has nobody else on here had any experience of this?

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elkalamarAuthor

Inspiring

I have tried two things and at the moment I'm no longer getting the stuttering audio (though I fear for it coming back, not knowing exactly what the cause is).

1. I deleted some pretty large cache files which had built up with Adobe After Effects. This freed up a fair amount of space on my primary drive (the 400Gb solid state drive on which I have my Adobe software installed). I did have over 20% free on this drive prior to deleting the cache files, some I'm not sure it should effect the issue, nonetheless it's a step I took just in case.

2. Sometime I have both Premiere Pro and Audition open at the same time. At the time I was last experiencing the jittery audio I definitely only had Audition open, since I didn't need to change anything in the Premiere Pro timeline.

However I just spent the past hour editing in the same Audition multitrack session, with Premiere Pro also open. During that hour I had no problems with audio playback.

Can it be that Premiere Pro also needs to be open, even if I'm not doing anything with it?

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elkalamarAuthor

Inspiring

Any of the staff no anything about this?:

"2. Sometime I have both Premiere Pro and Audition open at the same time. At the time I was last experiencing the jittery audio I definitely only had Audition open, since I didn't need to change anything in the Premiere Pro timeline.

However I just spent the past hour editing in the same Audition multitrack session, with Premiere Pro also open. During that hour I had no problems with audio playback.

Can it be that Premiere Pro also needs to be open, even if I'm not doing anything with it?"

Excuse me quoting myself but I still don't have a solution on this. My instinct would have been to have Audition open only, so as not to take up RAM holding Premiere Pro open in the background (for the same reason I don't tend to have internet browsers, word documents etc open whilst editing if I can avoid it). Does Premiere Pro being open or not make any difference at all to how Audition handles the dynamically linked video?

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elkalamarAuthor

Inspiring

ps I'm not sure why there is a label on the post that says "assumed answered" because it's it not.

ryclark

Participating Frequently

What format is the video track? Some compressed video formats can take a lot of CPU power to decode. Is your Audition session at the correct sample rate of 48kHz to match the normal audio for video sample rate?

Also I notice that you are using a rather old version of Audition. We are now up to 10.0.2.27, CC 2017.0.2.

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elkalamarAuthor

Inspiring

Hi,

Thanks for your response.

The Audition multitrack session is 48k. It's a dynamically linked session from Premiere Pro. The video timeline in Premiere Pro is 1080p and the material is all Pro Res 422. I can't see that being the problem anyway, as I mentioned in Premiere Pro I can be working with much more going on without any kind of dropout in the audio or video e.g Pro Res 4444 files, LUTS and various effects, and plenty of audio tracks.

I know the version I'm using is not the most recent, but I'm not interested in changing versions mid-project to be honest it's much too risky (though I will do once this project is complete)

stefan_gru

Inspiring

elkalamar wrote
I know the version I'm using is not the most recent, but I'm not interested in changing versions mid-project to be honest it's much too risky (though I will do once this project is complete)

By the way, you can install an update alongside your current version. See: Update Creative Cloud apps. Pay attention to: "By default, when you install a new Creative Cloud 2017 app, it will remove the previous versions of the app on your computer. If you want to keep your previous versions installed, click Advanced Options and deselect the Remove old versions checkbox in the update confirmation dialog box."

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