10.6 Audio Waveforms Take Forever to Load

I'm editing a project right now. 38min runtime, 1 HD video, 4 audio-only tracks. For about 20 min FCP is fast and responsive. but it just hit the wall, and waveforms were not loading for a good 15 seconds Unsure why.. But that's usually what my experience with this issue has been, it goes fine until it doesn't. and when it doesn't, it's really bad.

Although as I finish this post, they've now refreshed.

RGP that is my EXACT experience right now! 20 minutes or so of flawless editing... then it hits!

Thought I'd share a sort of workaround that helped me today. Same thing, around half way through the project at 22 min in the timeline, the sluggish waveform came back on my 2016 MBP. I Copied the last half of my project into a new Project, restarted, and was able to edit as normal until the end of that one. Now just copy and paste into the original project. Hope this helps others!

Here to join the club! 🤬
Everything seemed to be working fine yesterday. Today new mulitcam sequence edited into a new project and slow waveform updates, I'm editing out words, and ums. Every zoom in and out takes forever to refresh. I think it was fine for the first 20+ minutes of editing. I'll pay more attention now. These are .wav files synced to 3 camera angles. I'm also working through Postlab.

I've provided feedback on this issue to Apple via the "Provide Final Cut Pro Feedback" and the macOS "Feedback Assistant" application. I might do it another two times for good measure.

Please do at least one of those if you're affected by this.

Yup, thanks for the reminder. Of course after I finished complaining here. I went back to FCP and it seems to be behaving.

Just signed up to rant and say this is happening to me on a brand new Macbook Pro 16inch M1 Max 32gb. The whole of mac os is full of bugs not to mention FCP 10.6.1

I've had final cut crash on me numerous times, from something as little as view clips in the browser. I have submitted feedback to apple as this simply unacceptable.

Well that's disheartening. my M1 Max is due to arrive the end of this week. I've been impatiently waiting

RGPphotog wrote:

Well that's disheartening. my M1 Max is due to arrive the end of this week. I've been impatiently waiting

Don't get me wrong, the laptop is incredible but it's being let down by software massively. But I will say watching a 1 hour 4k multicam podcast export in under 15 minutes was a joy to see! 

Just chiming in to say that I have the exact same problem on an i9 2019 Macbook Pro.
Waveforms take ages to redraw after a cut.
It doesn't matter if the file comes from an MP4 file- here it also happens on PCM Wav files 44.1khz that have been recorded separately.

Did you update to 10.6.1?

Yes, running 10.6.1 
Waveforms draw but after a cut you have to wait for several seconds for them to re-appear.

I finally got my M1 Max, and mixed results so far; it's wicked fast util it isn't.

Running Monterey 12.2 Beta and while I can't say the problem is resolved, it seems less frequent. I've not found a reliable work around. The new project trick didn't quite work for me.

Image thumbnails have no issue, waveforms just don't want to load.

I also suspect the issue might be RAM related. But I can't get consistent enough results to be sure. (64GB on this M1 MAX) . But the few times I've noticed the problem appear, I've saturated the available system RAM, not entirely with FCP, but system wide. (including the amount of inactive RAM, less than a few hundred MB completely unused)

Others across the web have claimed many RAM related issues in various forms with Monterey, hence the suspicion. Plus, the new world of integrated SOC RAM, it might require some time for developers to work out the kinks, even if you don't have an SOC; the new code may still have an effect.

But take all this speculation with a micron of salt.

Luckily I've had better results on my 2015 base MBP 13. The waveforms do disappear after each cut but usually I don't have to wait more than 8 seconds for them to refresh. I know those 8 seconds add up VERY QUICKLY, but upgrading is not yet an option for me, so I'm lucky it's not half as bad as it could be.

Having very similar problem on 10.6.1 Intel MBP. If I wait long enough the waveforms draw in the inspector window. My sources are 4-8 channels mono.

I'm doing lots of multicam and it drives me nuts.

It's now March 5 2022 and I'm still having this issue with the waveforms not loading. It'll be working fine for hours then all of a sudden stops.
Has anyone seen a difference if you transcode your clips? Not seeing the waveforms literally stops my editing cold, I can't continue without seeing them.

I got my new MacBook Pro M1 Max and hoped it would fix the problem but it doesn't. It is better because the M1 Max is faster but the problem still exists. Can't wait for Apple to fix this. 😔

Same here Freddy, I got a shiny new 16" M1 MBP, and half way through a project it starts up again, but only takes a few seconds as opposed to the many seconds on my old Mac Pro... still painful and ridiculous to have to deal with this! (ps: had the same issue on Mac Pro and old mbp NOT in Monterey... and this new machine has 64GB RAM!)

I did the "copy content" + paste in a new project and it seems like it helps a little but not completely. So I noticed that may be it's related to that but also I tried this and it helped way more: make sure that all your audio sources and the project itself have the same bitrate. I had some audios in 44.1 and other in 48, but after setting them all in 48 all the delays stopped... may be that's the thing... hope it helps y'all