Audio Popping in CC 2015?

[bsbeamer]

Is anyone else experiencing audio "popping" in CC 2015 when playing back a timeline?  Happens at random times.  If I stop playing and restart over the area that had a pop, it is no longer there.  There is no popping on the source audio and this problem did not exist in CC 2014.

[Slyrr]

I'll give that link a try then. Thanks for your patience and understanding. I know dealing with grousy customers is a pain, but to get results we sometimes have to put on the angry hat so we're not ignored...

Sent from my iPhone

[Kevin-Monahan]

I'll give that link a try then.  Thanks for your patience and understanding.  I know dealing with grousy customers is a pain, but to get results we sometimes have to put on the angry hat so we're not ignored...

No problem. Might be better if you send me a PM with your region, phone number, and best time to call. I can have them call you.

Thanks,

Kevin

[Slyrr]

I followed the link you supplied and went to the 'report bug' page and sent in a form explaining this.  I also linked them to this thread, and to your profile.  Will that be sufficient, or do I actually need to call them?  They say they are only open until 7pm, and I wasn't fooling about having to work during the day, so my window of opportunity to jump through all their hoops will be extremely narrow...

[Slyrr]

Very well - I went through the Adobe way stations in Chumbawumba and they say the case number is 187064617.  You said you would not be able to do anything without a case number.  Hopefully this will help.  Please coordinate with your people and see what you can do to fix this.

As I predicted, they wanted first to fiddle and futz with the system settings - to no avail.

[Kevin-Monahan]

Very well - I went through the Adobe way stations in Chumbawumba and they say the case number is 187064617.  You said you would not be able to do anything without a case number.  Hopefully this will help.  Please coordinate with your people and see what you can do to fix this.

As I predicted, they wanted first to fiddle and futz with the system settings - to no avail.

Thanks. I am going to send you a PM right now.

Kevin

[W3RX]

Hey Slyrr,

Feel free to post your findings with the rest of us since it appears you are only going to get information via PM.

Thanks

[Slyrr]

Will do.  Hope their programmers have success with finding an answer.  So far though, you know as much as I do.  I spent a deal of time with their outsourced phone people jumping through all the usual hoops.  I hope I don't have to do that again.

I made dang sure they knew about this thread, so now they can see and actually USE the data submitted by the many users who are suffering from this flaw.  Hopefully they can get all their ducks in a row now, and avoid re-treading the same questions and suggestions that have been tried and discarded as useless.  Good luck to 'em.

[W3RX]

Given this informative response from Adobe, I'll tell you our workaround for the meantime. We are sending OMF out of 2015 for audio mastering. We are coloring in Resolve so we just decided to bake the video. We are then bringing both of those finished files into Premiere 2014 and exporting for the network. No popping issues have occurred on any of our exports out of 2014.

[imagetic]

For now, we're exporting audio and video separately and marrying them back together in CC 2014, like W3RX‌ mentions 2 posts up.

But this is a huge pain for a large television production with multiple editors and graphics crews.  We have over 50 Adobe CC licenses and we're unable to find any rhyme or reason as to what is causing the issue besides it's basically a universal bug and must be in the code, not the hardware or configurations.

We were aware of the issue going into production, which was a risk. I was honestly hoping that 2 months down the road Adobe would have released a fix or made a public statement with workarounds that would allow for our final productions to be output without a ton of extra work being required.  Tracking that many exports and rebuilding those projects is a very tedious task. I'm very happy we have an unlimited supply of coffee right now.

Yesterday I brought this up on Social Media, hoping somebody would have some insight that could help me.  I've had luck with Adobe Reps in the United States before when we've hit roadblocks and they went above and beyond to help us, but like most people in the forums and search results, Adobe instructed me to file a ticket and I end up talking to a customer support person who has zero connection to the actual Premiere developers.

[CoralVision]

Hi Slyrr,

Does the problem show up in any of your outputs?

Eric D

[imagetic]

It's specifically a problem with outputs.  Most multichannel content suffers from audio pops after export.

[Slyrr]

Yep, what he said.  It only seems to happen when exporting media.

[mjshade]

I've had the displeasure of experiencing random pops in my audio tracks during playback since I updated to CC 2015. Stopping playback and returning the playhead to a few seconds before the pops usually resolves the issue, and it's necessary to do each time in order to ensure that the pops don't actually exist in my audio.

This has been frustrating, though manageable, until yesterday.

I had to do some basic audio polishing for a work in progress screening of a feature-length doc. Upon exporting, I realized that Premiere was inserting pops into my exported file. After re-exporting the sections in question multiple times, I searched for the issue and found this thread. I have tried:

• Exporting all of my audio as a WAV and AIFF and inserting it into my timeline
• Rendering and replacing the Audio with Audition
• Changing the audio and video codecs for export
• Soloing all audio tracks
• Creating a completely new sequence and pasting the old sequence in
• Deleting my render files
• Removing my audio effects (which are complicated and necessary)

Nothing. Nothing worked. Finally, I went to the clips in question and changed their duration by a few frames. Finally, this worked in my test export - the pops were gone. So, I exported a new, full version overnight. New pops are present in a different place. Ridiculous. Since I didn't have time for another export, I had to screen a major work in progress with noticeably flawed audio to a large audience.

I am exasperated and am planning to switch to Avid for my next long form project.

[W3RX]

If you still need to get out a screener for any reason you can xml back to 2014 and you won't have popping issues. 2014 is still available for download in CC downloads. Sucks, but it's the only true workaround we have found. Still experiencing silence from Adobe, but we were able to get an engineer to tell us they are aware of it.

[CoralVision]

Hi Mjshade,

How is your issue working out? I hope you eventually met your goal and delivered on time. Can you describe your solution? Did you XML back to CC2014?

Hang in there - the Adobe staff on forum don't have much more info than we do, and there really are smart people in a room somewhere trying to fix all the problems all the time. I know it doesn't help much when your tool fails you at crunch time, but they're probably testing a solution right now. Good Luck!

Eric D - CoralVision

[Slyrr]

Hope you're right.  I know these things can't be done on a dime, but it's had this issue for a while now, and it doesn't get any less annoying with the passage of time, especially when we have to pay a monthly bill for it...

[psion99]

I am also having this problem.  Going to submit a bug report.   I'm trying out someone's suggested method of Soling all of the audio tracks.  Will let you know if it works.

Edit:  Soloing the tracks did not work.

[mjshade]

I haven't found a resolution to this issue. As I mentioned in my last post, changing the duration of the clips in question by a few frames (just from the handles) solved the issue, but then I would start to get pops in other sections of the audio later in the exported file.

I continue to be at a loss with this issue - it's the cause of a lot of anxiety each time I export, and the problem is compounded by the fact that my project is feature-length, and each export takes several hours.

[W3RX]

I have and update and some better news. We received our audio back from mastering today. When I export (Prores, multichannel), I'm not getting popping. The reason is because I'm dropping in full length wav files into the timeline with no cuts in them. Channels 1-2 are full mix Channels 3-4 are mix minus. I haven't tested further, but I'm assuming an easier workaround than going back to 2014 is to get all of your audio into a single file and drop that into your timelines before exporting.

[Slyrr]

I thought that might be it as well, and tried it a week or so ago.  It reduced the amount of popping, but did not eliminate it.

[W3RX]

You can't have any gaps on ANY of the tracks you are using. Each track must be completely filled when you send to export. I exported straight out of Premiere when I tested (not media encoder) if that makes any difference. Can you confirm that ALL of your audio tracks were completely full with no gaps?

[Slyrr]

Probably not, but it seems unduly combersome.  Would this not require a seperate export of each audio track as an MP3 audio file, then re-importing it and re-inserting each one into a new track, while erasing all the other audio from all the other tracks?

The program shouldn't require that kind of jiggering to do something that it ought to do without such steps....

Edit:  I have a project with no audio gaps, only cuts made using the razor tool.  It experiences the same pops and bursts.

[W3RX]

Agreed. It shouldn't require these steps, but at the moment its the easiest workaround until Adobe fixes the bug. Also, I don't know if I would use .mp3. At least use wav. mp3 is a lot of compression. In our situation we sent all of our audio out as an OMF to a mastering house. (We're working on a television show and have the budget). When it returned we laid it back in as a single clip. You can do the same if you either A. export as a wav or B. send to Audition, master, then export as a wav. After that you just wipe your sequence audio and lay in the new FULL tracks. Also if you aren't delivering Prores, h264 seems to work fine in most cases (we have experienced popping on random occasions). We definitlely experience it while exporting multichannel audio Prores files. I would assume DNx will behave the same, but I haven't tested it.

[Slyrr]

I tried an experiment, and passed the results on to the Adobe people for their consideration.

Even in audio editing software such as Windows WaveStudio, I can get those pops and clicks - IF I take two audio cuts and join them together.  The program does not seem able to compensate for a sudden change in sound frequency.  At the exact point where the two cuts join together, it will create a popping sound.

Premiere seems to be extremely hypersensitive and does the same thing.  ANY sound frequency variation between two cuts in joined audio will create a popping sound.  Usually, you can't hear it because it's very soft.  But if you add any filters, such as the reverb filter, or pitchshift filters, it will magnify the pop until it becomes extremely loud and jarring.

I was able to clean up the pops between two mis-matching cuts by going into the effects control tab, then the audio/volume/level controls.  At the start and end of each audio cut, I would insert a keyfame at the very start, and at the very end, where the volume drops to zero.  Then every other frame in the cut would be keyframed to normal volume.  Like flipping a switch, this cleaned out the pops and clicks and the audio was clean because there were no mismatched frequencies as the cuts joined together - they all started and ended at zero volume, so the frequencies matched and Premiere seemed to be OK with that.

That was if the audio had NO FILTERS added.  However, once filters were included, even with the volume keyframes at zero for start/finish of joined cuts, it would pop and click like crazy. 

So Premiere filters are somehow adding mismatched audio frequencies between each cut in a timeline.  And this creates the popping sounds.   This seems to be the case, even with very slight audio frequency mismatches, such as are created by normal air conditioner sounds or other white background noise in a room.  Only perfectly matched audio frequencies between cuts seem to produce a pop-free join.

I told the Adobe people about this.  We'll see what they can do with it.  In the meantime, anyone else experiencing these pops and clicks might try going into their timelines, and adding the audio keyframes of which I spoke, to see if that cleans up your audio so it's pop-free. 

All bets are off if you've added any filters to any of your audio cuts.  Premiere will created it's own mis-matched frequencies in that case, and start popping like Orville Redenbacher....

[Slyrr]

Well, I heard back from the Adobe people.  They said: "We worked on this for quite a while and we have reproducible cases and bugs logged.  We have passed this on to developers who are going to look into the problem. I will let you know their results."

I hope they do.  But we've heard this kind of diplo-speak from support people in many kinds of companies.  This is usually the point where they disappear and the problem, whatever it is, gets quietly dropped.

We shall see.  When a company says they will 'look into the problem', that means tech supports sends one email to one guy in development.  The guy reads it, shrugs, puts it in the trash, then heads to the ping-pong table in the break room and forgets all about it.  And we, the paying customers, wind up right back where we started.  I hope I'm wrong, but we have intelligence guided by past experience which says the odds of that happening are rather high.  Sorry to sound cynical - but again, 'intelligence guided by past experience'...

Here's hoping these anonymous developers turn up here soon with a progress report.  Given the amount of money Adobe takes monthly, the customers deserve voluntary, regular reports from a company without us having to shout and stamp our feet in these forums to get their attention regarding a faulty product.