No audio Playback in Premiere CS3

[Jay Webster]

Suddenly have lost audio playback in CS3 (Running on Vista) in the middle of a project.
The track is there (shows in the Vu meters on the right side of the interface etc.) and audio is enabled on timeline, have gone through all the pref and project settings, but can't figure it out. All audio plays fine otherwise on the machine?? So, it must be something I stupidly did and can't figure out?? It seems to be across the board on all Premiere projects!
This is a timely project, so if anybody has any ideas, I am greatly appreciative!

[Jay West]

Three suggestions.

(a) Have you tried exiting from premiere and rebooting?
(b) If you are losing audio on your most recent segment, have you tried moving the particular clips to a new sequence? (You may be able to edit there and then drop that sequence back into your original sequence's timeline.)
(c) if all else fails, make sure you did not inadvertently drop the audio band (the one in the middle of the audio tracks). There's a thick band there. If you hit with your mouse when trying to move a track, it is possible to pull down the level without meaning to do so. The band that moves down (to signify changing the audio) is pretty thin and it is possible to miss seeing that it has been dropped.

Losing audio output happened to me several times; a couple of times last fall when using CS3 after I first upgraded my editing system to use Win 7 with I7/920 & ASUS P6T mobo, and then several times in the last week when editing with Premiere CS4. All of the issues occurred in the latter stages of long multi-cam projects and occurred after a couple of hours of uninterrupted editing. With three exceptions, rebooting cleared up the problem. In one case, there was some sort of corruption in the project file. (It's the kind of thing that makes me do "double saves" -- once with File > Save, and once with File>Save as Copy). I was able to recover using the project "copy" after rebooting. (Alternatively, I might have been able to use one of the auto-save files). In two most recent instances when I still was not getting audio, I created a new multi-cam sequence and moved the remaining sections of video & audio there. I edited the final segments in the new sequence and then nested that sequence back into the main timeline.

[Jay Webster]

Thanks Jay,
All great points.
I have tried all of the things you mentioned. It seems that I am having some type of corruption within Premiere since after rebooting, reimporting a few of the clips, dropping into new sequence etc... I still have no audio output. The audio levels etc. all look fine, I just can't hear anything. Even exported to Soundbooth where they output fine. Opened another separate project and... same thing. So, I'm stumped. I might have to try re-installing Premiere off the CS3 Suite disk, but would rather avoid that if possible. I have no idea what could have happened... Aaarghhh!
If you have any other thoughts, I'm all ears...
Much Thanks!

[Yossi Margolin]

Do you have a camcorder or deck attached to FireWire? If you do, and it's powered on, you could be sending audio out to the camera instead of your soundcard. Go into Playback settings and change "External Device" to None.

You might also go into "Preferences > Audio hardware" and make sure the default device is set to the correct sound card.

[Jay Webster]

Thanks Jay & Yossi!
I really appreciate your responses. I tried everything you guys suggested and still no go!
I finally resorted to doing a windows system restore. Fortunately there was a recent enough restore point that I did not loose very much of the project I am working on. It worked and I now have audio playback! Yippeee!
The only question is what the heck happened in the first place??? Still don't know what I or the operating system did, just hope I don't do it again!
Greatly appreciate your responses. Good food for thought and reminders of proper work flow and procedures that can easily be overlooked..etc. At least by me!
Thanks again guys!
Cheers...

[Battle Vaughan]

Suggest checking if you have hit the "toggle track" icon on the audio timeline, or the "mute track" in the audio mixer, see attached images....best wishes / Battle Vaughan

[Jay Webster]

Hey Battle,
I very well might have hit the mute track in the audio mixer, still not sure exactly what happened, but pretty convinced it was something stupid on my part. I know the timeline mute was OK.
Anyway, got it back now (after loosing a few needed hours of work and sleep ...etc.)
I guess that's what you get for keeping on when you know you're already too tired not to make dumb mistakes.
I see you are in Miami. I used to live down there and after a winter like we had in the North East...well, makes one think.
Enjoy, and...Thank you very much for your reply!

[Battle Vaughan]

80 degrees today, blue skys, white puffy clouds, perfect spring day....hate to rub it in....! /BV

[Jay Webster]

Wise Guy! LOL!