Premiere Pro merges multiple audio tracks, how do I fix it?

[lsullivancorbell]

For the past few weeks, Premiere Pro has been constantly merging the audio clips of my videos. My videos typically use two audio tracks: a track for my desktop audio, and a track for my microphone audio. They work fine normally but when I move them into Premiere, both audio tracks contain the same audio and it causes an echo effect that wasn't there previously.

How do I prevent this from happening in future?

[David Arbor]

Can you post a screenshot? When you say "both audio tracks contain the same audio" that's a little unclear. Do you mean your video now has a single stereo track with both audio sources and you can't select them separately?

[lsullivancorbell]

Both tracks are present, as they should be, but both tracks contain the exact same audio, which they shouldn't. The desktop audio track has the mic audio included in it, and the mic audio track includes the desktop audio in it.

[David Arbor]

Can you post a screenshot of your entire interface with a clip in the timeline?

Can you also send a screenshot of the window that pops up when you right-click on your clip and choose Modify>Audio Channels?

[lsullivancorbell]

[David Arbor]

Thank you for posting those.

When you listen to these tracks in headphones outside of Premiere, do you hear things incorrectly, i.e. desktop in one ear and mic in the other? If so, then something happened during your recording or exporting.

You could (and probably should) also set up your audio to be mono for each source. Microphones are almost always mono (there are some stereo mics out there), but you're adding extra tracks and irritation if each channel is exactly the same source. This way you can work with a video that has 2 tracks, one for your desktop audio and the other for your mic. I don't know if you can re-export your video like this.

[lsullivancorbell]

When listening to the video outside of Premiere, it sounds exactly how it should and has been doing before this recent error.

I even did a test recording where I would talk with a video in the background while I monitored the audio levels of the recording. The Mic track would always respond to my voice and never to the desktop audio, and the desktop audio track would always respond to the desktop audio and never my voice.

[David Arbor]

You should be able to narrow this down or fix/avoid this issue by going back to Modify>Audio Channels, changing the preset to Mono with 2 clips and  check only two boxes in the matrix. L-1 for clip 1 and L-2 for clip 2. This should give you one channel from each file, which are hopefully desktop and mic audio, but without clicking around your setup or project it's hard to tell. You will have to drag your clips into the timeline again though. You can route already placed clips in the timeline, but you already have dual stereo tracks which is unnecessary for only two audio sources that might as well be mono.

[lsullivancorbell]

It doesn't seem to of worked 😕

[David Arbor]

Well that's not a lot to go on, but here's what I would have done from the start. Go into your preferences and change the way stereo files are handled. I always come back with footage that has a lav on channel 1 and a shotgun on channel 2. I want access to the shotgun but I don't ever want it mixed with my lav. See the attached screenshot for my default preferences for handling stereo audio.

This means that all of my stereo files are treated as dual mono. When I drag them into a timeline I get individual, accessible tracks—one track per source channel. This gives me full flexibility. Then you can delete what you don't want and mix however you do.

The only caveat to this is that you must re-import any files if you want this preference to take effect. It doesn't change anything that's already imported.

[lsullivancorbell]

For whatever reason it's now created 4 different tracks, none of which have separate audio for the mic and desktop audio. It's the same problem but now doubled.

[David Arbor]

Well it was supposed to create four separate tracks since you told it to treat all audio as mono. Before you had dual stereo tracks, so two tracks with two channels each = four mono tracks.

So are you saying that if you solo just A1 or A2 you hear audio from both sources? If that's the case you should try clearing your Media Cache. https://www.premiumbeat.com/blog/three-things-you-need-to-know-about-premiere-pro-cc/

[lsullivancorbell]

So as an experiment created a new save, which made no difference.

Should I try uninstalling it and reinstalling it and see if that makes a difference?

[David Arbor]

Did you try clearing your media cache, per the instructions in the link above? You could try resintalling, making sure to remove preferences when you uninstall, but that doesn't always help these kinds of issues. I'm inclined to think it won't, but I've seen trashing preferences fix weirder issues.

[lsullivancorbell]

I'll try uninstalling, but I don't want to lose my saves. Will they go? If so, I'll try to find them and move them into a different folder to keep them.

[David Arbor]

No, uninstalling the application doesn't touch your project file. But even so, it's always good to have a backup of your work

[lsullivancorbell · Accepted solution]

That didn't work, unfortunately. However, I decided to try something I should have tried ages ago: putting older footage I had recorded into the same project. There were no issues, meaning Premiere Pro wasn't the culprit and was instead the fault of OBS, the software I use to record with.

I thank you very much for helping me through this problem, even if the solution wasn't related to Premiere, have a wonderful day