iMovie sound not working

This has happened to me twice now and both times it was a corrupt file. Once I found the file and removed it, my video worked fine. Some people suggest duplicating the project to find the file but both times it has happened, the file in question has had a warning sign on it for me.

Hi,

Click on the loudspeaker icon in the toolbar at the top right of your screen. You might have had the box checked that says "lower volume of other clips". If you uncheck the box that might resolve the problem. On the other hand, it might have been just a project related glitch.

-- Rich

Hello, I had a similar problem on IMovie 11 (9.0.2).

After some editing (I suspect a massive edit that I then undo'ed), the sound started not to play for some voice over musique or volume setting not taken into consideration (although the wave form is correct and you can play it in "edit" mode).

I tried everything like removing all sound effects, trying to consolidate all the files, detaching audio from video... nothing worked... ( I read almost all forums on that topic I think... 😉

After two days I found a solution. Things work well now:

- It seems one of the sequences was corrupted (maybe not related to sound, but this affected the full project sound behaviour). I removed this 2s sequence (just erased it, or even cut it and then paste it again) and everything came back into order.

My reco on how to proceed:

- In the file manager, do a copy of your project (go in video/imovie projects and duplicate your project, place this copy in the "imovie projects" folder so you can see it in iMovie)

- In Imovie, open this copy of the project (so you keep your original "bugged" project aside for now)

- then select a sequence, erase it, test if the sound bevahe correctly on the rest of the project. If no, select the next one and erase it until you find the guilty one.... My advise, do not start by the end of the project (as I did first), but by the beginning (in my case, the very first sequence was corrupted).

- Go back in your original project and cut the guilty sequence and paste it again (or re-insert it)...

this worked for me.

- You can now dispose the "duplicate project" and continue working on your project.

Hope this can help.

hi had same problem after working on a project for a month, followed jf idea untill all sound effects had gone and tried to add again still not working then found a little green triangle at the very start of the project top left corner and deleted it with the first frame and now its all back up and running fine

hope this helps.

Both davidfromaldershot & jf_from_marseille have a great recommendation. This trouble-shooting technique of creating a duplicate then deleting 'suspicious' pieces usually works. Even more so for 'random' Project crashes or crashes on Export. The Project file can get corrupted occasionally, but sometimes it's very recoverable if you can do the process of elimination to find the one piece that's gone haywire. Sometimes its transitions, or titles that start the process of things going Pear-shaped (so to speak).

IT WORKED! Audio is now FIXED!

I did what jf said and found that the culprit was one of the first video's I inserted. I tested each one, removed the bad one and now I can record voice-overs and add sound bites again. Man!!! this was a hard one to troubleshoot and took me a long time to find this post. Thanks jf.

Here's his suggestion on how to fix iMovie if the audio stops working:

- It seems one of the sequences was corrupted (maybe not related to sound, but this affected the full project sound behaviour). I removed this 2s sequence (just erased it, or even cut it and then paste it again) and everything came back into order.

- In the file manager, do a copy of your project (go in video/imovie projects and duplicate your project, place this copy in the "imovie projects" folder so you can see it in iMovie)

- In Imovie, open this copy of the project (so you keep your original "bugged" project aside for now)

- then select a sequence, erase it, test if the sound bevahe correctly on the rest of the project. If no, select the next one and erase it until you find the guilty one.... My advise, do not start by the end of the project (as I did first), but by the beginning (in my case, the very first sequence was corrupted).

- Go back in your original project and cut the guilty sequence and paste it again (or re-insert it)...

this worked for me.

- You can now dispose the "duplicate project" and continue working on your project.

After further edits it happened again, I was only able to load one track of sound, then I found the little green triangle on my second sound clip and deleted it and the audio mishaps went away for good.

This was the ultimate fix.

jf you are my hero!!! You have saved me so much frustration with your simple solution. I was ready to give up until I saw your approach, and within 5 minutes I had corrected the problem! Thank you so much!

I had this problem as well and discovered that when I brought a sound file that was in 48,000 Hz and then introduced another sound file that was 44,100 Hz that I got ZERO sound from all tracks.

I had to remake my project and convert (using Logic Pro 9) my 44,100 Hz audio file to 48,000 Hz (for movies) and then introduce it to iMovie and the sounds all worked since they were all at 48,000.

Really weird bug.

I just had this situation in iMovie '09. I recorded one voiceover which played fine, did a few edits, and all subsequent attempts showed input levels monitored and a wave form in the track, but played nothing back. All audio sources were good, I tried restarting iMovie.

Thanks for the pointed to try and find a rogue clip. I just started deleting and undoing. I got lucky and deleted the bad clip on the second try.