Why is Final Cut Pro Beeping At Me?
If you have exceeded your system's capability to play back the audio you have in your sequence in real-time, then you will hear beeping when you try to play back your project. If you look under user preferences in the General tab, you will see options for Real-time Audio Mixing and Audio Playback Quality. The Real-time Audio Mixing value is the number of tracks that Final Cut Pro will playback without having to render. Keep in mind that any filter you add to an audio track counts as an additional audio track. For example, if you had 5 audio tracks, each with 2 filters, then you essentially have created 10 tracks. If you have exceeded the number of tracks set in this option, you will have to render. Although this number can be changed, your system hardware will ultimately dictate the Real-time audio Mixing setting.
In reference to the Audio Playback Quality, if you have this option set to High and you have placed audio at multiple sample rates into your timeline, when your sequence settings are set at 48k, FCP will have to struggle to convert all of those audio files during playback.
