Audio cutting out in Premiere - it's killing me.

Update: I fixed it!  copies files to my computer so they're not reading from an external drive.  Looking into a faster drive, but concerned becuae I thought I had the fastest one out there.  Also stranger audio files would drop out.  I have 4K video files so I get those would need lots of speed, but the audio?

I've read through all these and it doesn't seem like there's a silver bullet.  I started having this problem on a film with many layers of audio and assumed it was just too much for my computer to handle.  However I just started a new projet there's only one video file and one audio file in there and it keeps cutting out. I tried clearing cache, and made sure sequence matches files.  I have seperate audio files 48000K/24, but even when I just listen to the camera audio it cuts.   Still of audio settings attached.  

I teach basic editing at a film school. I'd love to have an answer if students have this issue.

Can you please share a screenshot of your Audio Hardware settings?

Hey @mstegner, I could use some help, I have this problem, I have an hour long play to edit and deliver in the next 15hours and premiere is unusable with this bug.

@mstegner sure, thanks! I've fixed the immediate issue by rolling back to 22.6.3. But it is still happening aggressively in 23.1. 

@amphibious_burrito  Would you be willing to get on a call with me?

without reviewing this entire thread, just a couple of quick ideas.  for amphibious_burrito, just revert to the previous version that was working...   and you might try setting your preferences: audio hardware:  input to none which seems to solve many audio issues...

This will only be relevant for the folks in the comments that have their audio dropping out for a second at regular intervals, but I had this problem and finally worked out that, while all plug-ins in use were active, updating Premiere had somehow unregistered my Izotope plug-ins. This meant that they were still "active", but in a demo mode that meant it deliberately cut out a second of audio every 10 seconds or so. Drove me absolutely crazy for a few days so I was hugely relieved to work it out!

@mstegner I am dealing with this issue right now after updating to 23.1. Have tried everything but the audio drops out on the simplest timeline and makes editing near-impossible.

It especially can't handle when there's dialogue of any kind (even a few seconds, with just one or two clips stacked) or a single music track. Making proxies or rendering the timeline doesn't make a difference. There are no FX added either. I've tested the project file on multiple computers and clean re-installed my drivers as well. 

The same project was working just fine in 22 on Windows 10. (I updated the project file from 22 to 23.1 as well.) The new desktop has a way nicer graphics card so there should be no issue there at all.

(Running Windows 11, NVIDIA RTX 4090, plenty of RAM; Editing 4k FX6 footage). 

Hi All, I wanted to thank @Jacob27505314m1hq  for getting on a video call with me as I tried to figure out what the issue was.  After various debugging/trouble shooting we determined that his render files were causing the audio to stop playing after about 4 seconds (as you can see in the video he posted).  Ultimately we were able to fix his issue by deleting his rendered files (Sequence>Delete Render Files…).  After that, the audio was fine, and new render files were fine. 

I'm still investigating his files as he was nice enough to provide them to me and don't know the root cause quite yet. 

Please, if anyone else wants to do a video call or post a video, it will still be helpful.