Audio scrubbing choppy on Blender 2.82a

Hi, very new Blender user here. I am using Blender 2.82a on a 2.9GHz 32G 2018 MacBook Pro running macOS 10.14.3. I searched for solutions to my problem online with no luck.

I’m trying to do some simple hobby animation, lip synching an animated face to a prerecorded audio track.

I have enabled Audio Scrubbing in the Timeline, I added an audio file to the video sequence editor.

If I play (using the play button or spacebar) the timeline, everything works great, and the audio sounds great.

When I try to scrub the audio back and forth to work on lip synching, the audio playback is very choppy. It appears that as I scrub, as I pass over each subframe, the audio plays little “chunks” of the audio, often repeating the same chunk repeatedly. The result is incomprehensible - like the audio is being chopped through a fan.

I have seen video tutorials where audio scrubbing works like I’d expect in a product like Davinci Resolve - sometimes slow or backwards, but not chopped up like what I’m seeing here.

I’ve tried many solutions with no effect (all behave identically with choppy audio scrubbing)

  • WAV and MP3 variants of my sound
  • creating a new video editing project with a random video clip.
  • turning on and off “Subframes” playback
  • Trying multiple playback sync modes “AV-Sync”, “No Sync”, “Frame Dropping”

I assume I’m just doing something stupid.

I’m hoping somebody on this forum might have a clue as to how I can fix this.

Thank you so much for your time!

Hello fellow damned soul! Did you find a solution to your issue? Turns out I’m having the same run of bad luck.

Using 2.9:
I was having this trouble. Frame rate was set by VSE, I thought, and that was 30fps. For kicks I tried it at 24fps and audo-sync. Now scrubbing works perfectly.

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