Waveform/audio playback problems

[PointPin]

Hello! I've been experiencing problems with audio playback in After Effects for some time now. For any project I work on, when I preview within AE the audio plays sooner than what appears in the waveform, and it plays back glitchy. I've tested with just putting a 48 kHz 16-bit stereo linear PCM WAV file into a new project and creating a new comp with it - the problem even exists with this simple setup.

I'm working on a PC with Windows 10 Pro, Intel Core i7 -8700K CPU, with 32GB RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Ti. Working with the most recent version of AE.

I am struggling with even the simplest of tasks that require me to sync audio with video. It generally seems that the audio is correct and the waveform is delayed (it's normally only out by a few frames, but it's enough to notice). I'm sure I've had much better previews in AE on much worse machines in the past. Not sure if I need to check some settings or if there's a bigger problem here.

Any help greatly appreciated - thank you!

[OussK]

check your project settings audio sample rate, file/project settings/audio

[PointPin]

Thanks OussK - I'd already gone into this setting previously and checked whether it was on 48,000kHz (and it was). Any other settings I might be overlooking?

[Jose Panadero]

Are you using a third party audio/video card for audio output?

[Roland Kahlenberg]

Try these -

1) Enable Caching Before Playback

2) In AE's Preferences>Preview, enable Mute Audio When Preview is Not Real-time

[PointPin]

Thanks Roland, again these are settings I'd already changed. Muting when the preview is not real-time is useful to an extent, in that the audio doesn't stretch it just glitches, but I'm confused why AE has problems previewing even such a simple project.

[Dave_LaRonde]

I'll guess that it's some sort of compressed audio, which AE absolutely abhors.  I recommend taking the audio into Audition, exporting an uncompressed wav or aiff file and using it in AE.

If the increased file sizes are a problem, you are woefully short on memory and storage. Uncompressed audio file sizes are insignificant when compared to video file sizes.

[PointPin]

Thought I'd post to bump this discussion, unfortunately none of the solutions have worked so far.

Thanks Dave LaRonde, but even exporting an uncompressed WAV/AIFF file for a single piece of audio and pulling it into a new AE file, the audio is still out of sync from the waveform and is glitchy. There's plenty of space on all drives on my PC and the RAM on this machine is 32GB, with nearly all of it assigned to Adobe software.