Audio track suddenly greyed out and not playing

Hello,

since the last update of FCPX I am facing a weird problem. Specially on one project (but not the only one) the music track gets suddenly greyed out and doesn't play anymore. It is not disabled and it is not possible to relink it. The audio configuration for this track is greyed out also and it is not possible to enable it or choose any configuration.

I tried moving the original audio file to a different location and it didn't help.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

Radim

have you turned off a Role? Take a look in the timeline index

Hi Peter, I found this answer already elsewhere but the problem is elsewhere.

Another strange thing is that I rebooted my Mac and the music track is fine again. But I can't tell for how long.
It looks like a serious bug.

What is the file exactly, and where is it stored? The message you got makes it seem as if it's a compound clip or something like that.

Sorry for the late reply.

It happened several times with .wav files (but probably not limited to) and the audio is not in a compound clip. It doesn't matter where the file is stored - I'm using several external drives and mostly the audio file is on the same drive and in the same folder as the video files used in the project. But it happened as well when the file was on another drive.

Up to now the only solution was to remove the greyed out clip and add the track again. But the problem is that I often edit the music track, so it fits the video track and I have to redo it after replacing the track.

Hi Radim,

Two questions:
1. Are you working from libraries on the same disk as your media?
2. What are your disk specs? (type, format, partition map, interface)

Hi,

1. Yes, usually I have all the media od the same drive as the Library. I usually store all the project files in one folder.

2. As my main working drive I use an external NVMe SSD formatted with HFS+ (as I had many issues with APFS on external drives, when files were often getting corrupt and I have found this file system to be unreliable). The drive is in a OWC Thunderbolt 3 enclosure and connected to a Thunderbolt 3 port.

dmetz wrote:

Hi Radim,

Two questions:
1. Are you working from libraries on the same disk as your media?
2. What are your disk specs? (type, format, partition map, interface)

Hm. Very strange. I was checking to see if you'd been using ExFAT since most externals are formatted that way out of the box, and then to see if there were any hardware bottlenecks. Anyway....

If you select the grey clip in your timeline and Reveal in Browser, does it point back to the real file that you can preview in the browser?

And when you say you often edit the track, is that after it's in the timeline, or is that in another audio program outside of FCP?

One last thing you could do as a workaround is to import the music track, and immediately put it into a compound clip. Then drop the compound clip into your timeline and edit that as if it were the source file. This way, if it goes missing again, you can open the compound clip in the browser and drop a new copy of the file in there, while your edits remain on the timeline. I do this with watermarked music all the time, and simply drop the licensed track into the compound, delete the preview track, and it's done.