Premiere Hangs While Rendering MP3 Audio

The timeline is a talking-head show, two or three hours, nothing clever in the picture. It renders in an older Premiere and hangs in a newer one, always around a third of the way. Video-only stretches render. The hang is the audio, and the audio is MP3.

Stop asking Premiere to decode the MP3

Premiere’s handling of MP3, especially variable-bitrate MP3, breaks between versions. Clearing the cache and changing the video renderer does not touch it, which is why those steps feel like they do nothing. Convert the music and the other MP3s to WAV or AIFF at the sequence sample rate, in any tool that is not Premiere. Audacity, the Finder, or Media Encoder will do.

In the project, make the MP3s offline and relink each one to the WAV you just made. Render again. The timeline is now playing uncompressed audio, which is what the older version was effectively stumbling through and the newer one refuses to finish.

Leave the MP3s out of the project

Keep the MP3 as the download. Put the WAV in the project. An hour of MP3 is a small file and a bad edit master. The same hang comes back the next time a new song arrives as an MP3 and goes straight on the timeline.