Disable Essential Sound Tagging

[CLWill]

I'm running 24.4.1 on MacOS Sonoma 14.5. Whenever I add a clip to my timeline Essential Sound has just started auto-tagging things as dialogue. I've spent many hours tweaking my audio setup, and building a chain of audio effects exactly like I want them.

How do I turn this behavior off? It seems to have just started with the latest update (or maybe I didn't notice it). I don't want Essential Sound anywhere near my audio. Ever. Can I turn this off?

[CLWill]

Oh my, Adobe. This is crazy. This is the default, and there's no UI I can find to turn it off.

However, someone posted a reply in this thread https://community.adobe.com/t5/premiere-pro-discussions/how-do-you-turn-off-auto-tagging-audio-in-pr...

It describes in detail how to edit your preferences file to turn this noxious behavior off. It works.

Wow.

[mattchristensen]

@CLWill You're looking for Preferences > Audio > Auto-tag audio types in the timeline. Unchecking that will prevent automatic analysis. Note that the analysis is only to determine which of four Essential Sound types the clip is, by default it does not apply any modifications to the audio.

[Ann Bens]

@mattchristensen 

This setting in the preferences should be default off imo.

It is such annoying when you reset pref and found out later all your audio has been tagged, as it is often wrong.

Now we dont have sync settings how do you save your preferences.

[CLWill]

1) despite searching for quite a while this was not obvious

2) why is this destructive setting on by default?

3) Yes, the default DOES apply modifications. The default for "dialogue" includes all of:

- Enhance speech

- Loudness

- Repair

- Clarity

All checked ON by default.

[mattchristensen]

@CLWill  I'll be sure to pass along the feedback regarding the default state of the preference. Enhance Speech and Loudness are not run until you click "Enhance" or "Auto Match". Repair and Clarity do not actually apply to the clip until you change one of the parameters, you can confirm this in the Effects Control panel.

In a project where you have not used the Essential Sound panel controls, tagging the audio clip does not modify the sound output at all, it only tags them.

[CLWill]

Then why, when I turn off the Clip Type, does my sound completely change? Back to my carefully configured audio? Maybe just the loudness, which then gets pumped into my audio chain, and messed up?

[Ann Bens]

@mattchristensen 

I usually manually set a few audio clips to see if it sounds ok.

Now with this auto tagging all get the same tag and I dont know anymore which one I did cause the color badges are gone!!

Dont ask me to hover as that is a big step back.

[aaronfross]

The Loudness switch is enabled by default for Music clips.

I saw the post that said "Loudeness isn't run until you click Enhance or Auto Match". But that Loudness switch being on by default is misleading. Anyone looking at this UI would assume that a dynamic adjustment is being applied by virtue of that checkbox being enabled.

[R Neil Haugen]

@mattchristensen ... at this time, it is definitely irritating to have auto tag be set to default of on.

It is SO poor at working correctly!

I've got a sequence of clips testing out working at my desk with two different mics on booms. Depending on which direction I'm facing. I'm running them through a Xenyx mixer into an Atem mini pro. Doing minute changes to the two channels in the mixer to get them to sound identical.

There are very, very small differences in tonal waveforms on the clips. Loudness is identical, and you can barely hear any differences on my powered studio monitors.

Yet, of the ten nearly identical clips on the same sequence, one sequence I created had one clip auto-tagged as dialog.

The other sequence I created of the same ten clips, had two clips auto-tagged as dialog.

When all ten were nearly identical in every respect, voice only recordings.