Urgent audio tracks problem, please help

Question

I am on deadline, and suddenly a major audio problem has popped up. As far as I can tell, it started when I exported some sequences to QuickTime (uncompressed, self-contained) to show my client.
The exported MOVs look and sound fine, but now that I've gone back into FCP to do some final edits, the sound tracks are playing corrupted music. I have tracks A1 and A2 playing stereo music, in AIFF. The waveforms look fine, but they are playing out of sync, with the tracks dropping out randomly. I tried deleting the music and reimporting, but no luck. I also tried laying down a different mp3, rendering that, and playing--also no luck. I tried creating a new project. I went into my AutoSave Vault and opened up a previous version of the project, before the issue appeared, and even that no longer plays properly. I don't believe I changed any settings, and my sequence settings are the same, but clearly FCP is not playing my audio tracks correctly.
Anyone come across anything like this before? I couldn't find anything on any forums. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

It sounds like the issue only appears once the audio clips have been rendered (which is what would happen when you output a QT for a client). Do the audio clips have small lime-green bars at the top like on p. 649 of the manual? First, use the render manager to delete all your audio render files. Does that clear up the problem? If it does, you need to determine in what way your audio differs from the sequence settings. I would guess it's a different sample rate. If you convert the sample rate to match your sequence settings (probably 48 kHz, 16-bit) using Soundtrack Pro or QT before you import into FCP that might make a difference.