Audio clip suddenly silent

[angelah100]

One of my audio clips has gone silent and I'm not sure what I did since it worked before. The audio clips (music) before and after the non-functioning one work fine. The volume (yellow line) on the non-functioning clip appears to match the volume on the audio clips that work. I must have adjusted something somewhere and not realized it. Any advice on what to check? Or should I just delete that clip and then add it in again? (Of course, the latter may require some jigging around of clips so I would prefer to fix whatever I broke not to mention understand what I did wrong.)

A few things that I knew enough to check - clip is enabled, nothing is bypassed. If I click 'edit original clip' then I can hear the sound fine.

[Peru]

I don't know if it will work, but you can try to "save as" and use a different name. Then open the new file.

You can also see if there is an auto save file which works.

[Chuck Engels]

Right click on the clip and select 'CLEAR', that will leave a gap.
Now just add the clip back to the same spot again and see if that fixes the problem.

As Peru says, you can also just do a 'Save As' of your current project and give it a new name.
That sometimes fixes strange problems. Could be that you moved the audio clip to another folder and Premiere Elements can't find it anymore also.

[angelah100]

If the file had been moved, wouldn't I get some kind of error message? If not, that 's a good thing to remember if something similar happens.

I copied the audio file to a new name and tried to use the copy, but it had the same problem. I believe whatever attributes I assigned to the clip were kept by the copy. I had another copy of the same file on a different computer (one that had not been accessed by the program), copied that one with a new name and it works.

Thank you for your help!

[Peru]

I copied the audio file to a new name and tried to use the copy, but it had the same problem.
Thank you for your help!

I meant using "save as" with the project, not the audio file.

[Chuck Engels]

Sometimes when projects start doing strange things it helps to save your project with a different name, that's what Peru is talking about. File/Save As in Premiere Elements and then create a copy of your project with a new name. That sometimes fixes problems.

In this case it sounds like it was a problem with the file, glad you had a good copy that worked

[angelah100]

Ah, 'save as' with the project. Well that is a good tip to know since it seems this software might be a bit quirky. I'm almost done with my first little project (basketball highlights from my 3rd graders games) - it is GREAT to be able to post here and know that I will get a helpful answer so quickly!

[angelah100]

Ack! It happened again, this time with a different clip. I had just burned the movie to a rewritable DVD so I could view it on TV and see how it turned out. I am pretty certain, tho not positive, that I had burned to DVD yesterday immediately before it happened the first time. This time I tried 'save as' with the project but the one clip is still silent on the new copy of the project. This appears to be some sort of software bug. Has this happened to anyone else and is there any way to prevent it?

[Chuck Engels]

Are they always MP3 clips Angela? Where did the problem clips come from?

[angelah100]

Yes, they are all mp3 clips and I downloaded them from beemp3.com. I wonder if the same thing would happen if I burned to a folder? Might be worth a try. One thing that is different from yesterday: when I double-click on the audio clip to bring up the preview window, and play it in preview, I can hear the clip. Yesterday when I did the same thing, it was silent within the preview clip.

[Chuck Engels]

Might be worth a try to export the audio and save it as a WAV file. Then replace the MP3 with the WAV.
You could also convert the file with Audacity (free software), and save it as a new MP3 file.
Let us know if you are interested in doing that and we can help.

Do you have problems with MP3 files from any other sources?

[angelah100]

All my music files on this soundtrack came from the same source. When I first started working on this project, all the music files were stored on a different computer (wireless network) and I had used "get media" to get the music files. I thought that had copied them locally, but it didn't. Later I made copies of the music to store on my project's computer but didn't change all of the music clips to the local copies. Even though there were no network issues, it appears that the fact that the music clips were on the network and not local may have contributed to this problem.

Maybe I should start a new thread for this question.... but here I go anyway:
My movie is made up of many mini-clips of basketball games. I put some nice jock jams music clips to go along with it. It sounded great on my computer but when I play the DVD, the background noise from the gym is a bit too loud (on all the clips and there are at least 50). Is there a way to lower the volume on ALL the clips at once? If I have the mixer open and decrease the volume level, will it universally lower the volume on all the movie clips? Or do I need to lasso all the clips before making the adjustment? Or must I do it clip by clip?

[Chuck Engels]

There may be a way from the Sceneline to lower just the audio from the clips but not the music.
I know you could lasso them all, then right click and delete the audio, but you may want to have some ambient audio from the gym in the background.

[Steve Grisetti]

Angela, are you judging the audio levels as you edit by how it sounds in your computer's speakers? That can be misleading.

Go to the Window drop-down menu and select Audio Mixer. The Audio Mixer will show you the levels of the sound for all of your clips. You'll want your music peaking at around zero -- and your gym or background sound at around -12 or -10.

[angelah100]

As a test, I used lasso to highlight all the clips, and then in the audio mixer I lowered the volume to infinity (which should have muted those clips) but when I hit 'play', the clips were at the original volume level. When I click 'mute', they are really muted but I don't want them totally mute, I wanted a bit of the background gym noise heard. So I guess I will have to do it clip-by-clip.....