Audio drops out randomly in timeline Premiere Pro 2023

[Spacecadet1968]

Hi,

The audio drops out randomly in the timeline during playback.

Additionally, the video is choppy in random places, just before or just after the audio drops out. It’s almost as if Premiere is running out of memory, yet when I checked settings, it’s got 26GB allocated.

After speaking with Adobe support, with the only solution that seemed to work was to open Premiere in Intel mode and change the rendering engine to Mercury Playback Engine Software Only, rather than Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration (Metal). This worked once, but the problem has since returned.

I was told that the issue is “Apple’s drivers are not able to cooperate with the latest version” of Premiere,(direct quote) and to contact Apple, but that doesn’t make sense. 

Is anyone else having the same issues?

I’m running a Mac Studio, macOS Ventura, with an M1 Max and 32 GB of RAM.

Thanks!

Michael  

[KonaLyman]

Been about 18 months for me. Audio drops out everyday. I just live with it. Hopefully PPro '25 will have a fix. 

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi,

I meant try a test with a single monitor. Does it work? What is the resolution of your monitors? Are they larger than 4K? Have you tried the workaround? Enable Displays have separate Spaces in macOS System Settings > Desktop & Dock. https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/kb/known-issues.html

See if that works for you.

Thanks,
Kevin

[ashwatch]

Hi Kevin,

I'm on a PC, with 2 DELL 24" monitors - are there any specific settings I need to update there?

Cheers.

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi @ashwatch,

Thanks for the post. Sorry for the problems. Let us know more about your system and the media. Specifically the audio sample rate of your source and your sequence settings. Please see this FAQ: https://community.adobe.com/t5/premiere-pro-discussions/faq-what-information-should-i-provide-when-a...

Thanks,
Kevin

[ashwatch]

PPro 23.6.0 (Build 65)

Please let me know if there are any other details you require.

Thanks.

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi @ashwatch,

If you right click a clip and choose Properties, it would be great to see a screenshot so we can see your audio properties. If we could see a screenshot of Sequence > Sequence Settings, that would be great too. 

Thanks,

Kevin

[Russ5E13]

I have this problem, too. It's constant on an M1 Macbook Pro with the latest version of Premiere 2023 (2024 does not currently work with Logitech's mouse and keyboard software which is crucial to my workflow). I have tried everything mentioned in this thread and nothing makes a difference. It's infuriating.

[Kevin-Monahan]

See if it works with a single monitor, @Russ5E13. Let me know if it worked.

Thanks,
Kevin

[pittsure]

I have been dealing with this issue for months and nothing works. 

[gourlie.goods]

I've been struggling with this problem for over a year and tried every solution I've found on these fourms and only just now figured out a fix. For me, unlinking my audio and video seems to resolve the problem (right click video in timeline --> Unlink). It means you'll have to chop your video and audio seperately which is really annoying but at least playback is smooth!

I'll just add this to my ever-growing, aggrivating quirks of Premiere that are leading me to towards that buy button on Final Cut Pro. 🙃

[Disaster Media]

I have also been dealing with this issue for over a year on a MabBookPro. 

While editing a project ni Premiere 2023 or 2024, when timline is plyed to review work, audio and video play together, then the sound drops out after about 8 seconds, after awhile (1-minute or more) it will come back on for a second or two then cut out again.

In the 4-minute edit I am curretnly working on, I may hear about 6-15 seconds total of broken audio total in the 4 minutes the clip plays. 

If I hit the spacebar to stop/start the playback the audio will start up again at that point for another 5-8 seconds and then drops out again. 

Audio track without video plays just fine. 

Video withtout audio plays just fine. 

But it seems to not be able to process both video and audio on playback and will always drop audio. 

Makes editing almost impossible. 

[KonaLyman]

fair warning - Adobe cannot fix this. Been trying for over a year. Move on
to Davinci Resolve.


Lyman Medeiros
Program Director

[Disaster Media]

I'm wondering if it's a hardware issue? I have a friend who is using Premiere Preo to edit commercials and music videos with both newer Mac Pro tower and MacBook Pro tower and he never has any issues with this. 

[ciaranl76720475]

Something that does seem to work: proxy everything to low-res (>1080) prores lt. This seems to solve the audio drop-out for me. It does seem ridiculous that I have to do this with EVERY file - even 1080 mp4s were causing trouble on a high spec edit suite.

It is not ideal. But nothing about premiere is ideal.

[malbutnotbad]

Hi Michael, I'm experiencing this, too. I've had this issue off and on with different updates throughout the last 10 years using Adobe CC. Here's a great thread offering lots of different solutions to this problem. Just a checklist to go through, usually one will solve it. This last time, creating a new project and copying the old project into it via the built-in media browser in PP solved it for me. I had no dropouts after doing that for a little while. Then when it happens again, I just do the same thing.

https://community.adobe.com/t5/premiere-pro-discussions/audio-dropping-out-during-playback-in-timeli...

best,

Mark 

[malbutnotbad]

Also check out this Reddit thread giving more options to explore: https://www.reddit.com/r/VideoEditing/comments/964bs7/need_advice_premiere_pro_audio_dropouts_during...

[Time_Bas]

I  may have figured it out. During many years I often encountered this problem.
I work a lot with nested sequences and ProRes footage that dont have audio, but do have an audio track.

Today I encountered the problem again, and decided I would render the audio. It said rendering 17 tracks, allthough I was only using one music MP3.

All the empty audiotracks were still on the timeline as well.

I decided to delete all empty audio tracks from my edit timeline, and voila, no more drop outs.

My advice is, look in your project if there are empty audio tracks that can be deleted in your timeline. Maybe that will do the trick!

[ralph_3771]

Thanks worked for me

[ciaranl76720475]

I work in a small production company. We have top spec Mac Pro Towers from 2021, and a lower spec PC - 3900x 12 core, m.2 drives, 64GB  RAM, RTX 3080 graphics.

3 different editors working on different machines, repeatedly having this issue (and other equally crippling ones, like video lag) across different versions of Premiere. Someone will find a fix that works for a few hours, or a few days, but then problems come back and need time-consuming trouble-shooting again.

Adobe seems to have lost interest in catering for the professional market. Time consuming, workflow-destroying fixes seem to be the norm - e.g. try working on one monitor, copy your project to a new drive, don't work with empty audio layers.

Bad software.

[pittsure]

When I finish the film I'm currently working on, Premiere is going in the trash. It used to be a professional piece of editing software but not anymore. I'm moving to Da Vinci. 

[MattCoddaire]

Nothing in this thread has helped - HOWEVER, finding this tidbit on reddt just changed my life. 

I found that on a PC, I entered the 'Console' menu of premiere pro by pressing control+f12 (Cmd+F12 on a mac), clicked on the 3 lines at the top and displayed debug view.

I then searched audio in the search bar, and changed the setting for the line 'AudioSupport.MonitorMixer.PrefetchRangeDuration' to 6 instead of 2. On a fast enough machine, this seems to fix the issue. You can try 4, I currently have my machine on 10.
My audio problems were fixed. Everything else mentioned here didn't work for me.
Hope this helps!

[Peter25587330m3rd]

I use my Pixel to shoot family movies a lot. I convert to ProRes 422 and use those as my source files. Never had an audio dropout issue until today. I tried the "adjust your Audio Input" advice, and that worked. For some reason the software was reporting an issue with my default audio input (currently set to my webcam), but I was able to select the webcam directly and it reported no issues. The audio dropouts stopped immediately.

I do have a strange bar of garbage across the bottom of my video preview now, though. I'm hoping that's temporary or at least doesn't render that way.