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.

[The Turtle Moves]

I had this same issue in version 2024 & 2025. No amount of clicking different preferences stopped the program from auto tagging, and the option to overwrite multiple tags ALSO did nothing.

I ended up selecting all the clips that were of someone talking, that Premiere so wisly tagged as 'SFX', then remove tags on those only, then repeated for dialogue and music, yes music. Premiere took a clip of a guy talking and working on cars, and labeled it music...  After I Finally got all the amazing Auto-Tags cleard, I was able to properly label and edit the Dialogue... as Dialogue.

If anyone finds a better solution, please for the love of Glod, let us know

[alex_5393]

Essential Sound has destroyed my ability to work in Premiere. I tag about a hundred spots a week and cannot afford to turn off the essential sound settings on every single clip, every single time. I have the auto tagging turned off in preferences, have re set my preferences, then turned it off before opening my project, cleared my caches, all the usual to reset premiere. It will not stop auto adjusting all my audio, and has literally destroyed my entire workflow and ability to work. Every single file that gets added to the timeline gets all the Essential Sound settings turned on automatically and there seems to be no way for me to stop it without manually turning off Enhance Speech, Loudness, Repair, Clarity, and Creative. While an adobe employee in this thread says it doesn't actually apply modifications, it absolutely does. I turn all of the settings off, then it goes back to sounding normal. It adds a noticeable amount of compression and volume adjustment to everything that gets put in the timeline. I'm at a complete loss of how to do my job in time each week at the moment. Going to roll back Premiere as far as I can. It's been a growing issue every since it was released but was never this bad.

[alex_5393]

I'm on Sequoia 15.5, Macbook Pro M4 Pro, Premiere version 25.2.3. 

[foswald]

Hi Alex,

sorry to hear that you are having trouble with the Essential Sound panel. Indeed it should not do any audible adjustments even when Auto Tagging is enabled.

To try to identify the problem, a screen recording of the issue you see would be tremendously helpful. Please make sure that the "Effects Controls" panel and the "Essential Sound" panel are visible in the recording.

Also, did you by any chance manually adjust the Essential Sound presets in the Documents/Adobe/Premiere Pro folder?

[Ann Bens]

This auto tagging is a real real real pain.