Audio dropouts during 4K playback - Premiere Pro 22.5

[blakekimmel]

This is something I remember having problems with years ago in Premiere (like 2016 era) and it must have disapperaed as I upgraded my Mac computers... until NOW. Brand new, 2021 M1Pro MacBook 32GB Ram running Monterey OS and Premiere Ver 22.5.0. 

SO many dropouts during playback of simple interview sequences (two cameras / 4 audio tracks). I have moved the media cache once, deleted the old media cache, checked that my sequence sample rate & clip sample match (they do) as well as incrased the IO Buffer. Same results. Extremely frustrating. I thought this was a 2016 problem gone forever. Here I am on lightening fast new mac processors with newest premiere version and I am having this problem. Please Adobe, make this a priority to fix. Audio should be an EASY playback item, it is far less intensive in bitrate and processing power than 4K video. 

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi Blake,

Audio dropouts could be caused by many reasons, so there is no one correct answer. Typically, it is because of one of the following:

1. Insufficient computer resources (hardware not powerful enough for certain media, media files are long in duration).
2. Materials were not ingested properly (H.264 or HEVC media needs to be transcoded or proxies created).
3. Out of memory (memory cache is full and needs to be cleared via rebooting or otherwise).
4. Sequence Settings for audio sample rate do not match clip settings.
5. .mp3s or other highly compressed media is used instead of uncompressed .wav or .aif files.
6. Complicated sequences may need audio to be rendered before playback: Sequence > Render Audio.

I would be interested in the media you are using. Is it 4K 4:2:2 10-bit? If so, few computers can handle this non-performant format natively. I suggest you create transcodes or proxies. Can you test with an intermediate codec, like ProRes or ProRes LT? I hope we can help you.

Thanks,
Kevin