Adobe’s suite of creative apps is one of the most popular on the planet. This also includes Premiere Pro, a video editing program used by everyone from complete beginners to movie editing professionals.
That said, Premiere Pro is far from perfect and random crashes, glitches and bugs are a day-to-day occurrence. In this article, we’re taking a look at the “there was an error decompressing audio” error in Premiere Pro.
Also read: 5 ways to fix Adobe short media token validation error: invalid_signature
What causes this error?
The error is usually triggered in one of the following two cases.
- You’re trying to import an unsupported video or audio codec.
- Your media cache is corrupted.
How to fix this?
Here are five fixes you can try out.
Check the audio format and codec
The first thing to do is to check and see if the audio format and codec that you’re trying to support are actually supported. You can refer to this page for a list of all supported formats and codecs.
If the audio you’re trying to import isn’t compatible with Premiere, you’re going to have to convert it into another format using the Adobe Media Encoder, Audition or any other program. We recommend using MP3 or WAV as those are the most hassle-free audio format in Premiere.
Check the file name or location
The next thing to do is to check the file name or the location. Several characters that may be acceptable as file names in Windows or macOS might not work in Premiere Pro. Additionally, if the file is stored in a location where Premiere doesn’t have read access, you might not be able to import anything from that specific location.
The easiest way to get around this error is to just rename the file to a simpler name (preferably without any special characters) and move it to a more accessible location such as the root folder of a drive partition.
Install Quicktime player
Installing Apple’s Quicktime player can also help with audio import issues with Premiere as it adds support for several audio formats including the ones recorded on iPhones and Apple devices.
You can download the Quicktime player here.
Clear the media cache
A corrupt media cache is the cause of a lot of different headaches in the program. Try clearing it to see if that makes a difference.
Step 1: Open Premiere Pro and head over to Edit, followed by Preferences and then Media Cache.
Step 2: Under Media Cache, click the Delete button to clear out your media cache.
Now restart Premiere and it should work just fine. Alternatively, you can just rename the old media cache and let Premiere generate a new one.
Reinstall Premiere
If nothing else works, try reinstalling the software from scratch to fix your issues. Reinstalling Premiere is also rather easy, although we recommend you do it from the Creative Cloud panel and not through Windows settings.
All you have to do is open Creative Cloud. head over to All Apps and you’ll see Premiere listed below. Click the three horizontal dots next to it and select Uninstall. Once the uninstallation is complete, you can use the Creative Cloud panel to install Premiere again and hopefully resolve any issues you’re facing.
Also read: How to make a Screen Mask Transition in Premiere Pro?
