audio cutting out during playback and in renders

First, I searched the forum, and didn't find a satisfactory answer, although this appears to be a recurring and too common issue.

I've been working on a :60 for three days. Yesterday, my audio on my mono VO and dialog tracks panned center are cutting out periodically on one of the stereo output channels.

It's intermittent, too. Sometimes my VO & dialog are there on both tracks; some times they cut out on one channel. On one out of five or six relaunches, the problem magically disappears, but then it comes back a while later. I'm not sensing a pattern yet.

I do realize that intermittent problems are the hardest to solve. That goes for cars, NLEs, electronics, HVAC units, and girl friends.

I have 7 audio tracks. 1-6 are configured (in Fairlight) mono (for VO and SFX). Track 7 is stereo (for music).
Only tracks 1 & 2 (panned center) are cutting out (again, on one output channel only). Tracks 3-7 are functioning properly.

Here's what I've tried to fix, to no avail:
- quit app and relaunch
- create new Timeline, and copy paste from old to new Timeline
- deleted the Resolve preferences
- uninstalled and reinstalled Resolve
- tried various audio buffer settings between 512 and 4096
- tried different Render Speed settings in the Deliver > File page (This is known to fix some audio dropouts on Render)
- trashed cache files
- reinstalled Catalina OSX

I'm not using any third party effects on my audio tracks or clips. I have EQ and panning applied on some (panning only on SFX) clips (not tracks). I've used the Fairlight Limiter and Multiband Compressor. The audio was cutting out on my VO track before I applied the Compressor. Deleting or disabling them has no effect.

The Timeline has 65 SFX. Audio files are a mixture of AIF, WAV, .MXF and MOV at 44.1 or 48 Khz 16 & 24 bit.

Modern NLEs and DAWs should be able to handle mixed formats like this with aplomb. If you look at my signature, you'll see I'm not new to DAWs & NLEs, just Resolve. I usually figure out stuff like this myself, but I'm stumped.

Convert all audio to uncompressed 48 kHz and try again.

While Fairlight handles mixed format and codec media with mixed sample rates and bit depths without issue on a single Timeline, do confirm that no variable frame rate media is used on that Timeline.

Hi Jim,
I feel your pain, you have probably seen my posts here in this forum regarding this issue. I have found no solution yet.
I'm also very experienced with DAWS and computer audio in general and have never before faced a problem like this without knowing how to troubleshoot and find a solution. For example, I can understand there can be issues during playback due to small buffers, disk I/O bottlenecks or other causes. When you are an old-school Pro Tools user you have seen all sorts of wierd stuff. But that these random dropouts appear in the exports is unseen in any other DAW or NLE and unforgiveable.
Like I said, I have done numerous systematic tests and found no pattern, only that buffer size and render speed affects, but does not cure these random audio drop outs.
I'm using ProRes video and PCM audio at 48kHz/24bit on Mac.
I'm absolutely sure this is a bug, that many people don't even notice because drop-outs in my case can be shorter than half a frame, but that's enough to make a deliverable 200 GB export worthless.
It's very frustrating. My only hope is that blackmagic acknowledge the problem and figure out a solution.

Thanks for the replies, friends. I'm reporting back with tales of some success.

I was able to get proper playback and export temporarily by doing these actions, but sadly, the issue reappeared after about 15 minutes:

1. Export my Timeline
2. Close the Project.
3. Start a new Project.
4. Import the exported Timeline from step 1.

And this:
a. Option-lasso all my audio tracks.
b. Drag the audio down two track spaces (creating two new tracks in the process).
c. Re-apply the audio compressor and limiter on tracks 3 & 4 (which now hold my VO and OC audio clips).
d. (Optional) Delete empty tracks.

Why this gives me 15 minutes of proper behavior is still a mystery, but I suspect something is corrupting something. Sorry I can't be more definite, but maybe these extreme measures will work for you - for long enough to get your work done. At least this should allow me to deliver this job, which is the paramount consideration. I'm hoping this won't keep recurring, and is caused by one bad SFX audio file which I haven't ID'd as the culprit yet. My experience is that one corrupt file can wreak havoc on all NLEs, not just Resolve. I had the same sad experience on Avid, FCP, and Premiere. Search and Destroy is often required - seek out the corrupt file, and destroy it (after rewriting it to a new file, which often does the trick).

I'm wondering: Has anybody failed to deliver a project on time because of this issue?

I'm due to receive an hour long multi-cam project on March 2 that has a 24 hour turnaround (It's mostly a cleanup job of a panel discussion.), and I'm seriously concerned about trying to use Resolve for this. I've done some similar projects in the past using Premiere, and might have to resort to going back, because I know of Pr's reliability (and lack thereof) in this regard. The last thing I need is to encounter this project-killer under a tight deadline.

I'm also wondering how common this is. I do suspect my issue was related to media corruption, and I had media from a variety of sources, including a number of SFX. I suspect that this issue is less likely when all the media comes from a single source. But, OTOH, I've also had media corruption on one shot among dozens of others on a project that only had one type of video media.

A friend noted that this issue isn't mentioned in the list of what's been fixed on the most recent version of Resolve.

Jim Simon's reply informed me that I posted this on the wrong thread. The audio issue that's recurring (audio dropout on exports) is a different one than the one this thread describes. Apologies.

This certainly isn't normal, nor widely reported.

Do you have another machine for testing?

Or, are you able to share a .dra of a project that shows the issue?

Whoops. I just realized I posted to the wrong thread I had started about a different audio bug. This one has to do with there being an audio dropout about one second into exports from the Deliver page.

Please forgive my error. I'll try to find the right thread and repost.

Thanks for your reply, Jim Simon.

I've just had this happen as well and it drove me nuts. Playback and renders would cut out audio in random places, on average about 1-2 secs at a time, occurring roughly 1-2 a minute. After about an hour of turning various things on and off, updating and restarting Windows 10, I started the edit from scratch to see where things would break, and in the end, it was the disabled audio plugins I had in Fairlight. They weren't active (a bunch of RX 9 Standard plugins), but the audio kept cutting out until I actually removed them from the tracks. Once removed, there was no further issue. Hope this helps someone!

What gheedough said about the fairlight plugins was incredibly helpful. I'm on version 18 and encountered this same exact bug with audio cutting out at random times. It turns out that I had a plugin acting on track 2 that I wasn't using. I deleted it and everything's back to normal.

Note that the Bypass toggle on the plugin only disables the plugin instance and that processing will remain enabled on the path.

The Disable Plugin option takes the plugin instance out of the path and disables processing without requiring the plugin instance to be deleted.

I'm wondering: Has anybody failed to deliver a project on time because of this issue?

I've failed to deliver most timed projects because of this and other issues with Resolve. I've lost clients and my business because of this and other issues with Resolve. It just does not work. I am currently trying to finish my final Resolve project before I make the switch to Avid. I have about 20 1080p clips and putting 5 nodes on in color on one clip has completely destroyed the project. It takes about 10 seconds for any change to appear, and this includes in use of BM's own color panel. I've done my standard hours of troubleshooting so I can limp along and complete this huge 2 minute movie. It's just ridiculous. I'm done. What's really done it for me is BM's silence on widely-reported issues and their standard approach of fixing them never.

If anybody wants a killer deal on a micro panel with about 2 hours use, e-pci w/ Decklink 4k, and / or an LG C2 w/ Calman Home and a calibrator, HMU.

What a disappointing store. Sorry for your loss.

I was brand new to Resolve (after years on Avid, FCP & Premiere) when I wrote that post in Feb. 2022. Since then, I've delivered at least 100 projects on Resolve, all on time without issues I wasn't able to work around.

Early on, I learned the audio dropouts I was experiencing could be avoided by setting the Render Speed to 10%. I think that issue has been fixed, as I send out my lower res H264 review versions at full speed and haven't noticed dropouts in a long time.

My wild guess is it may be your configuration. I've been cutting on NLEs since their beginning (on Windows & Mac), and they all have bugs. The crashiest by far has been Premiere, and I'd had more near heart attacks due to instability and failure to load with Avid than the others (back in the nineties). The only way probably to make them bullet-proof is to make them so simple as to be unusable for 99% of pros and semi-pros.

Resolve still has annoying bugs, but I haven't experienced any issue so bad I couldn't finish a project or missed a deadline.

Sorry to hear you've had such a bad experience. You might try wiping your computer (or get a second one strictly for editing), reinstall the OS and Resolve only. That's very drastic, but it's the only way I know you can blame your issues on Resolve. Your problems may be more related to your computer and OS than Resolve. Could be bad RAM or some other hardware failure.

I'm wondering: Has anybody failed to deliver a project on time because of this issue?

I've failed to deliver most timed projects because of this and other issues with Resolve. I've lost clients and my business because of this and other issues with Resolve. It just does not work. I am currently trying to finish my final Resolve project before I make the switch to Avid. I have about 20 1080p clips and putting 5 nodes on in color on one clip has completely destroyed the project. It takes about 10 seconds for any change to appear, and this includes in use of BM's own color panel. I've done my standard hours of troubleshooting so I can limp along and complete this huge 2 minute movie. It's just ridiculous. I'm done. What's really done it for me is BM's silence on widely-reported issues and their standard approach of fixing them never.

If anybody wants a killer deal on a micro panel with about 2 hours use, e-pci w/ Decklink 4k, and / or an LG C2 w/ Calman Home and a calibrator, HMU.