Remove auto-add audio tracks

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Currently, Premiere Pro adds audio tracks to a sequence whenever a file with more audio tracks than the sequence contains is opened in the Source Monitor. So, say I have a sequence with four audio tracks. If I open a clip in the Source Monitor that has 8, four more tracks are automatically added to the Sequence. This is behavior is fine for the auto-generation of NEW sequences, but frustrating in that it modifies an existing sequence with no user input whatsoever. The functionality for adding tracks, as well as source patching and track targeting, works fine, and this behavior is more of a bug than a feature.

[ScottSimmons]

Ahhh thanks @Ben Holmes Editout for commemorating this 2-year anniversary of such a simple feature request. It's so strange that we are 2+ years into this little suggested fix and yet nothing. I almost think at this point it's not being fixed just out of spite for all of us that's been asking / begging / complaining about this for so long.

[Bruce Bullis]

> ...this little suggested fix...

The effort and testing the change would require are in no way'little'. 🙂

> I almost think at this point it's not being fixed just out of spite...

Not so; you actually have allies 'on the inside'.

The "Under review" status on this thread, is accurate.

[ScottSimmons]

The effort and testing the change would require are in no way'little'.

Please explain how exactly. How is adding a preference of whether to do it automatically or not so difficult that it requires so much testing? Blackmagic literally added a check mark for this toggle after one ask in a forum thread. Ben said it's a two-year anniversary, but it's been going longer than that. I honestly believe that's probably hundreds of editor hours lost battling these unneeded and unwanted audio tracks that were added. 

[TKane31]

It's insane. You can't even make a timeline without audio tracks if your cutting something without sound.

[ScottSimmons]

We also can't hide the Mix track which is annyoing but a whole sepereate issue. That's been asked for as well. 

[mstegner]

@Ben Holmes Editout 

"dynamic waveforms which have introduced multiple bugs into 25.2 like inconsistent copy/paste behaviour and playback problems."

Can you be specific?  I'm not aware of bugs that Dynamic Waveforms have introduced and I'd need to follow up with bugs.

[efficient_serendipity3286]

Pretty sure I started this thread or maybe it was another with the same issue. I worked on Avid for 20+yrs and watched Premiere eat their lunch cuz Avid took their editors for granted. I see the same thing happening now with Premiere. More and more producers are requesting I cut on Resolve, which I've had to learn. I hope Adobe is aware of the customer mistakes that Avid made and how they lost their position on top. 

[TKane31]

I think the auto add track issue is even worse in Resolve. I was editing once in resolve and looked down and had 97 audio tracks. My edit required 2. 

[ScottSimmons]

How so?

When this was brought to BMD's attention they quite literally added this setting in the next update. It's baffling why we can't get this in PPro. 

[TKane31]

Thanks for this info. That's great they did that. I'm still on 19 so haven't been able to check that out yet.

[Ben Holmes Editout]

Collegues have raised bug reports about this already. I don't know if its specifically because of dynamic waveforms, its just present in the update that includes it. The main one is that frequently in projects paste attributes for audio levels simply stops working. In all honesty I'm just venting somewhat as its frustrating that whilst Adobe has the bandwidth to add a new audio feature they can't fix a pretty simple workflow issue that has plagued us for years. I could mention in the same breath the issue of multicam layers not reappeating when they have been turned on and off in their nested sequence (something people do regularly in order to grade the angles) which has been a problem for so long I can't even remember a time before it happened. Overall I find Premiere to be a pleasant, stable piece of software to work in, but constant updates that break things (the last big one was a bug where ME simply stopped rendering captions) cause so much problem for those of us with complex workflows. Adobe would do well do just slow it down a little sometimes.

[Ben Holmes Editout]

Note - the above post was in response to Matt Stegner's query above - I mistakenly assumed hitting 'reply' on his post would thread it or quote it in some way..

[ScottSimmons]

As a continued discussion here ... we have a team of editors working on a doc series and we are getting many files from archives with 16 channels of audio. Most of it is silent with the audio we need on tracks 7 and 8. This footage has been rolling in for a couple of weeks now and it's an internal discussion about having to constantly deal with Premiere adding the extra audio tracks we don't need when using this footage. Sure we can just leave the extra 10 tracks of audio in the timeline but it's wasted screen real estate and still a battle to make sure we don't have the extra channels patched when editing. All an unnecessary time suck. 

More than anything ... it's still a state of disbelief we can't get a preference to turn this behavior off. 

[jason-hare]

I still believe this should feature should be selectable in a preference option…however, I have a potential workaround for you. Richt click one of the clips ad modify the audio. Change the audio config so it only has the channels you need. You can then save this as a present.

As you import material you can select it all in the bin, right click and apply this preset.

OR

In the timeline settings in preferences you can set the mono multichannel option to use your preset. Then all clips that are imported will conform to this method.

Both of this will prevent the issue of auto creating tracks, but can be annoying if different sources have different audio configurations, in which case I would use the first option above.

Hope this helps.

[ScottSimmons]

@jason-hare oh yes I'm well aware of modifying audio channels. That isn't a viable option when you have multiple editors working with duplicate files in different locations, and/or sending audio to mix. And as we've found in the case of these archive files the audio tracks mapping isn't always consistent depending on the era and origination of the files. 

More than anything this thread is a reminder of how a simple change can save countless hours of work.