Thanks for the reply, Kevin. After a couple of weeks of trying to troubleshoot... going back to an older version didn't work for the rest of my sequences. I couldn't replicate the issue in a brand-new project in any of the versions of Premiere Pro I had installed. My theory is that I had worked on this Premiere project through a few different versions of Premiere Pro. And for some reason, I think there is a bug from doing that --that creates crackling in the audio if I squeeze the audio using the rate stretch tool when I render or export the audio. It doesn't crackle from the sequence if the audio hasn't bened rendered.
My fix for this was to open up the Premiere Pro project file through Audition and then exporting the audio through that. You can't do the "Edit with Audition" from Premiere though, because it'll render the audio first with the crackles. You have to open the Premiere project file in Audition.
My solution was a little tricky though, because I'm dealing with these ProRes archive files that have multi-channel audio with several different languages. Depending on how the audio channels are set up, it seems to cause issues. If it is discrete/mono channels, then it seemed to export some weird moving panning issue from Audition. But I only had first episode like that. The other episodes, Adobe Premiere seems to read them as stereo couples ...and that seems to work better for my fix. But I had to go back to the last version of Audition 2023 because Audition 2024 was doing some weird thing where the channels were all wrong. Even after I change the routing channels in Audition, the waveform changes to the correct channels, BUT the audio does not change. Audition 2023 still had the wrong channels, but the audio would be correct when I changed the routing channels. However, to be able to open the Premiere project in Audition 2023, I had to use an online tool to downgrade my Premiere project to an older version. This was a very convoluted fix, but I hope writing this out might help people in a similar situation.
I just redid the work in a brand-new project for that first episode that wouldn't work with this fix. I didn't want to redo all the work for all the episodes because I'm working with over a hundred episodes and don't have the time to redo all the work I did for the past several months. A lot of the audio wasn't correctly synced in our archive files that the lab made for us, and it needed some sliding and squeezing.
The lesson I learned from this is not to update Premiere while working on a Premiere project.
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