Playback stops working completely in Premiere 2025

[hrjdavidson]

Playback stops working altogether.

All works smoothly for a few minutes but then I press spacebar to play the timeline and it doe not start. The play buttons in the source and record monitor panels do not work either. The issue is consistently triggered by switching to another app then back to Premiere but the issue has also occured when I have not switched out of Premiere at all 

It is not a choppy playback/performance issue, I'm currently only editing with audio files (.wav, .mp3 and .m4a). 

Fix suggestions I have tried that have failed to work for me:

- Playing with the Audio Hardware settings (switching to different outputs, switching back etc).

- Clearing Media Cache

- Resetting Preferences

- Resetting Workspace

- Unistalling and reinstalling

- Restarting my laptop

- Praying

The issue occurs with v25.2.1 and v 24.6.5.

Any help would be much appreciated!

Macbook Pro 16-inch, 2019

AMD Radeon Pro 5500M 8 GB, Intel UHD Graphics 630 1536 MB

64 GB 2667 MHz DDR4

2.4 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i9

[IanB_360]

Hi @hrjdavidson 
welcome to the Premiere Pro Forum community.  Thank you for taking your time to file a bug report. Have you seen any error messages around the audio not playing back? This is a time line of just audio that you are working with correct? 

Ian

[hrjdavidson]

Hello @IanB_360, thank you for responding.

No error messages involved. And yes, the timeline is only audio (just started an paper edit).

Issue seems to be fixed though...

I was using a .mp3 file (sourced from online video rip website), a .wav file (from an online AI music isolater), and .m4a file (from Apple voice notes app). I transcoded them all in Media Encoder to .wav and the issue has stopped occuring. It was getting trigger almost 100% of the time when switching out then back into the app but that's now not happening.

Is there a known issue with certain types of audio files?

A relief to find a solved and hopefully helpful for others caught with this!

[Russell24610417j2mx]

I'm having the same issue. If i switch out of premiere then back it the whole thing crashes. I have a few differet types of audio. are you suggest I have to make them all one type?

[IanB_360]

That is good to hear that it is working for you now. I would say .wav files are typically better for editing with than mp3's or M4a. Premiere Pro does support mp3 and M4a, however in some cases if Premiere Pro isn't working with MP3 files, it's often due to incompatible encoding or a mismatch between the file extension and the actual file content. Troubleshooting steps include clearing the media cache, converting the MP3 file to a more compatible format like WAV or AIFF, or renaming the MP3 file extension to WAV. 

Best of luck , we are here to help.

Ian

[kenna_7914]

Did you find a solution to this? I am currently dealing with the same issue.