Timeline won't play

My system:

Windows 10 Home 64-bit

Intel Core i5 9400F @ 2.90GHz

32.0GB Dual-Channel DDR4 @ 1333MHz (19-19-19-43)

Gigabyte Technology Co. Ltd. H310M S2H 2.0 (U3E1)

2047MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER (Gigabyte)

Nvidia Studio Driver 526.98 Release date 11/16/2022

Hard Drives:

1863GB Micron Crucial X8 SSD SCSI Disk Device (USB (SSD))

1863GB Micron Crucial X8 SSD SCSI Disk Device (USB (SSD))

I have been editing a large project which is currently 50 minutes in length.

Because I make use of the Alex Audio Butler audio plugin; I have been forced to use version 22.5.0 which is the last version it works with.

The raw footage is 3840*2160 (16:9) at 25fps and MP4 files.

Within the project everything has been ingested to:

1280*720 at 25fps Quality 100 Apple Prores 422 Proxy

Uncompressed 48000 Hz, Stereo, 16bit

Most of the time opening the project works fine but there are frequent crashes and Premiere will just say there is an error and crash out.  I haven’t had any crashes except for when loading the project.

Rebooting the PC will sometimes allow the project to load next time.

I’ve tried creating a new project and importing the existing project into the new one.  Sometimes it will work and other times it will crash.

As I am using the Alex Audio Butler (AAB) standalone program End Boost; I need to export all 7 audio tracks separately as individual wav files.  Since End Boost requires clean audio tracks; I have to remove the AAB settings from the timeline to allow me to do that.

Exporting to the 7 AV files has been problematic.  Sometimes they work and other times Premiere just shuts down.

I did wonder if the problem was due to the size of the project so I have managed to split it up into four separate sections.

The project files open without a problem but I have a new issue.

If I click on the play button in the Program Monitor window nothing happens.

I did a “render audio” from the sequence menu and the audio was rendered and then following that the entire timeline was played back successfully in the Program Monitor window.  Unfortunately that’s as far as it goes because if you click on the play button it still doesn’t do anything.

What I have done to try to fix this:

• In preferences changed the Audio Hardware Settings to something else and then back to the current one (SPDIF Interface (USB SPDIF Adapter)
• Reset Workspace to saved layout
• Deleted all cache files
• Reset Premiere Pro back to default settings
• Removed AAB from the timeline and imported into Premiere Beta 23.2.0 Beta Build 8

The timeline just won’t play.  Any suggestions what to try now?

Thanks