I’ve been trying to Google search this to no luck so thought I’d fire in here to see if anyone’s come across anything similar. It’s very strange.
So to try and explain, you know on mac how you can press the spacebar on an audio track and it will play an audio playback of the track, well some audio files won’t playback, it doesn’t even show a finder window as if it hasn’t recognised that its an audio I’ve selected. Even if i double click the audio it doesn’t load up to play. Not unless i right click and ‘open with - VLC’, then it loads into VLC and plays.
Once I’ve done this, then the finder playback option works on the audio.
Now I’ve not been able to resolve this for a few weeks but it’s causing some issues when it comes to Ableton as well because, Ableton won’t recognise some audio files within it’s project samples, so the project comes up and won’t play some of the samples within the track.
That is unless i go into ‘imported / Processed / recorded / etc’ and ‘open with VLC’, then after they’ve all run through VLC, i reload the ableton project and the samples now play.
As i said, it’s a really odd case, I’ve never come across this before and I’ve no idea how to fix it. You can probably imagine also why I’m having no luck with google searching a resolve.
Odd one indeed, what audio files format are we talking about here BTW ?
Are those files regular .wav or .aiff files ?
If it happens only with some files, things I would look into would be :
Files format and encoding + bit rate of those files you can’t preview. You can get the file info in VLC I believe but also if you open those audio files with Quick Time and then press cmd + I ( for Info )
The files location, could be a folder permissions issue in MacOS maybe / Does it happen with the same files if you move/copy them to another location ?
Open your Audio Midi Settings in MacOS, select the Audio display, then select your Audio Interface and right click and check the “configure speakers” settings → make sure your output channels are correctly set, but if that was the issue, it’s more likely that you won’t be able to preview any audio files and not just those particular ones.
For VLC, there’s files extension association in the settings when you install it. The thing is that I couldn’t find a way to access those settings. They have an article which seems to be outdated, no such options and settings in latest version of VLC.
Anyway, that will just help to change what “default” app is set to open some audio files formats on your Mac, so not directly related to the fact that you can’t get the audio preview by pressing the space bar.
For Ableton, do you get a warning message " Media files Missing" when you open those projects ? Again, could be the location, permission or file format or encoding bit rate maybe.
But yes, odd one and Google search did not really help either so far on my end
I have found it with both my Wavs and mp3s so it’s not specific, but i have just tried clearing the Nvram, someone suggested this can sometimes fix odd issues.
I’ve put it through and just gotta play around now and see if its fixed it. I didn’t notice much diff with a project i was working on, but audio files on my desktop didn’t have any issues anymore, but then they might have been ok anyways even before the nvram, I’m just gonna have to see. Hope it’s fixed it!
Opening a terminal, paste this in: qlmanage -r Didn’t fix it.
SMC reset didn’t fix it
I"m not really sure what to do, projects open and I’ve got to try find the sample, its 100% not to do with me moving the samples or moving the project folder (aside from the fact i always ‘collect all and save’ anyways, also it wouldn’t explain why some audio audio files are being like the above.)
I noticed as well when DJing on Serato that some tracks I’ll try to drag into my deck and it wont work, its like they’re just not being recognised as audio files until i right click and ‘open with VLC’, some how doing that lets my computer know it’s an audio file and i then have no issues with Finder preview, Serato, Ableton, etc.
It’s really grating me cos so many projects just hardly open any samples, so i have to manually find each one and then try fix each sample.
Still not sure what’s the issue but it has to be something rather simple, problem is to nail down what’s wrong.
At this point I would try the followings :
Completely uninstall VLC ( might be worth to check on their site if there’s a manual uninstall guide )
Reason for doing this is files association, and you can always reinstall it afterwards if needed.
Check if you are using Core Audio as the default audio driver on your Mac.
Sometime after installing other apps, there are drivers and audio daemons getting installed, you may want to check if you haven’t got anything new or weird in those path and delete them and reboot your Mac.
/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/HAL ( to check the installed Audio Drivers )
/Library/LaunchDaemons ( if you remove a driver from the previous path, there might be a matching launch daemon to delete as well, otherwise it will run again after rebooting ).
We are talking Main MacOS Library path here, not the User Library.
Check your Hard Drive format via Disk Utility and info and make sure you haven’t a Volume Type with “Case Sensitive”
Then the last option would be to reset your Mac from the Recovery partition or Time Machine, recovery on Mojave should keep your personal files.
