After Effects audio preview stops working after a few minutes

I am having a recurring problem, working on a fairly new imac (64 gb ram.) Problem started in the previous version of AE (2021) and continues after I updated to latest version (2022) yesterday.

I am working on a project where I need to sync up animation to a video reference, specifically to the sound. When I open the program, AE will preview the sound fine. After a few minutes, it just... stops playing the sound during the preview. Every time. Restarting the program fixes it temporarily, restarting the computer also fixes it temporarily, but so far I can't figure out how to get the sound to preview for more than 5 minutes or so. This is a pretty bad problem for me, I can't restart after effects every few minutes while I'm working. Any ideas for how to fix it?