Audio Waveform Bug (redux)

A while ago I posted about how FCP (6.x) has trouble with displaying Audio Waveforms while it's not zoomed in. Today I ran into another interesting Audio Waveform issue again with FCP 6.x (thanks to the client's machine I'm working on).

Here's the before:

You can see that only one waveform is shown and even that's fragmented. The top two audio tracks are disabled via Control + B. When I delete them since they're not needed this is the consistent result:

Suddenly FCP decides to show the lower audio track's waveforms all the time when it was horribly inconsistent before. In fact, it was so bad before that I wasn't able to really edit the audio precisely quickly because the waveforms would come and go. I tried restarting FCP, the Mac, clearing caches (including the waveform cache) and nothing helped until I just deleted the audio tracks that aren't needed anymore (until the client wants them back or some nonsense)

Audio Waveforms Only Display When Zoomed

In FCP 6.0.6 I've mentioned the audio waveform display bug before, but here's a new twist to an old problem.

In the Timeline one set of audio will display the waveform while another one won't. They're identical as far as I can see and in fact, were recorded at the same time only on two separate yet identical cameras.



That's what it looks like in the Timeline. The upper channels are flatlined, but if you load that audio clip into the Viewer you'll see something like this:



Now, if you zoom in one more iteration you'll see the waveform:



Most of the time quitting and relaunching FCP (6.0.6) will clear this up but not always. Trashing the waveform cache can help as well but it's not a 100% guaranteed fix.

Audio Waveforms Not Displaying

There's a long standing bug in FCP where the audio waveforms don't show up in the timeline. There are many threads on this at Apple's discussion board like this one and this one.

I've experienced this bug in version 6.0.6 of FCP and previous ones on my current and earlier different hardware. The only thing that seems to help occasionally when I encounter this bug is to zoom in or out on the timeline and then scrub the timeline so the clips move out of view and then back in. But even this only works about 30% of the time.

I suspect the bug has to do with FCP having trouble with some specific types of audio formats or them being slightly off kHZ (which is another post, luckily QT 7.6.x seems to have addressed it). But one of my friends said it's a little endian problem. Who knows? It's an annoying bug nonetheless.