LOUD audio distortion from 10 Band Graphic Equalizer clip effect during playback

[Anna226285521f4c]

Today I opened a sequence that was playing and sounding fine yesterday, but now I'm getting VERY loud distortion at certain points of my sequence during playback. I have also had the audio drop out. The loudness and dropping out seem to be two results of the same issue. This seems to be happening becuase of the 10 Band Graphic Equalizer effect I have on my music tracks in my timeline - because the issue goes away when I disable those effects.  The terrible distortion seems to be happening at moments when my audio was peaking, however it continued to happen even after I lowered my levels both in my tracks and in the Audio Track Mixer. The loudness and dropping out also carried through into a test export. I also removed the effects on a test sequence and then re-built my 10 Band Graphic EQs from scratch with the same result. I was able to get a clean export by utilizing the Loudness Normalization effect during export, however this issue is making it almost impossible to work with my sequence.

Most grateful for any advice.

I'm in Premiere Pro v15.4.1 on Mac OS Catalina 10.15.7

[R Neil Haugen]

For something like this, it's possibly got a corrupted bit of metadata in the project file ... likely stored in the cache files. So close all projects, go to your Preferences, Media Cache, and delete all cache files.

Reboot, relaunch, and see if that helps.

Neil

[Anna226285521f4c]

Upon first playback after following your steps that seems to have fixed it. Thank you so much!

[Anna226285521f4c · Accepted solution]

Update: clearing the cash and restarting did work - but only for one round of playback.

I realized some of my EQs were on top in the order of effects so I re-ordered the effects on my music clips, putting the Graphic EQ below everything else and so far that has proven to be the true solution.