[George Pappy]

Thanks for the ideas. I actually fixed it after reading up on various newsgroups – here\’s what I found out/did:

I had the audio tracks in nested sequences – there is apparently a longstanding FCP problem with the render files for nested audio clips being corrupted and resulting in the occasional audio dropout. I got rid of nesting and put all my audio imported tracks directly into the final project timeline.

Also, I had to go into User Preferences and set Realtime Audio Mixing to 12 tracks (it had only been set to 8 – since I had more than 8 tracks of audio, the setting of 8 was forcing FCP to do an audio render – upping the setting to 12 resulted in no need fir audio rendering).

So, the safe bet with lots of audio tracks like this seems to be try to find a way to avoid having FCP render audio at all.

Hope this can be of some help to someone else down the line!