AE stutters with a single audio track

[THATfish]

I'm doing some animated music videos and am experiencing lots of stutter during playback. Both NumPad 0 and space bar previewing have lots of stutter... with just a single audio track... That's right... not a single graphics layer!

The timeline shows the green bar demonstrating that it's completely been rendered in RAM and still the stutter is there. During playback I can see the frame rate in the Info panel as it dips below my comp's settings of 24fps frequently and the audio slows in response... sometimes as little as 12fps with no graphic layers. When I do have lots of layers and effects I would expect and do see the occasional pauses for rendering. I simply wait for the RAM preview to build the frames then try playback. The stutter is still there.

I have tried configuring cache from both SSD and non-SSD drives. My SSD is my Windows boot disk, but should still be quicker than my storage media. Neither makes a difference. I have tried preview settings at half, third, and fourth and see no difference. I have changed to ASIO for audio and AE just crashes so had to switch back.

My system should be pretty capable:

     Windows 10

     Core i7 8700K - stock speed

     16GB RAM - stock speed

     GeForce GTX 1070 with latest drivers - stock speed

     Onboard Audio

     ASUS MoBo

CPU shows less than 5%. GPU shows 14%. RAM at less than 50%. Plenty of overhead, and it runs everything else just fine. Premiere renders are lightning fast. Oculus Rift runs smooth as butter.

Happy to provide any additional info.

Any suggestions would be appreciated. I am working, but could work faster if it could keep up. Thanks.

Dave Shaver

[P.M.B]

In your memory settings, make sure you have no more than 12 gigs of RAM available & see if that changes anything.

Also what's the spec of you're audio file.  khz, bitRate & file type?

I've heard sometimes AE has problems compressed audo files like .mp3

[THATfish]

Thanks for your quick response. I was using MP3, but converted to 16KHz and 32-bit WAV file and am still seeing the stuttering.

Any other file settings I should try?

Thanks again.

[P.M.B]

16Khz?   That's strange.  Did you apply that setting on purpose or was the original file like that?  44.1khz is the standard for audio playback.

I suspect the problem is the audio file.  Does it play in other apps like a media player?

Do other audio files play back without problems in After Effects?.  Try a standard mp3 file.

If you don;t have one maybe buy one off amazon or itunes for 99 cents

extract the sound from web video or something.

I think you just got a bum audio file...