Audio bitrate messed up while editing videos

[jamesr96]

I wanted to mess around with some old videos I had years ago, so I imported them and when I previewed them the audio quality and bitrate sound screwed up, it sounded compressed and poor. Which is weird because when I play them normally on VLC or WMP, the audio sounds nice and clean. But the weird thing is only certain videos are affected by this while others don't drop the audio quality at all.

This has seriously annoyed me because I have certain videos where the audio bitrate is 128kbps with sample rate 44.1 kHz and then Premiere Pro screws them up and ruins my project, it's irritating as hell and I want to fix this. I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling Premiere Pro but the problem's still there. Do I need to delete any Media Cache or Common folders? Do I have to download a file to fix this issue? Can someone please help me out what's wrong with this program?

[Vidya Sagar · Accepted solution]

Hi jamesr96,

We are sorry to hear that you are facing issues with Audio. Try clearing the old media cache: FAQ: How to clean (delete or trash) media cache files? and check if it fixes the issue.

What is the dot version of Premiere Pro? FAQ: How to find the exact version of Premiere Pro you're using?

You can also transcode the files in https://handbrake.fr/ and see if it fixes the files.

Thanks,

Vidya

[jamesr96]

Tried Handbrake and imported that video to Premiere and the audio's back to normal now. Still annoyed that I can't use the original video. I think I now know why it didn't work properly, could be because it was an AVI video whereas an MP4 video played fine with the audio bitrate intact.

[Ann Bens]

Check audio hardware in the Preferences: set input to none.

See how that goes.

[Jaonz5FFB]

THANK YOU SO MUCHHHHHHH!!! I've had this annoying bug for so long and this is the only answer that's helped out of dozens of other sources.