No waveform after Compact

[cbergm7210]

Anyone else experience this? After Compacting a project, half (not all) of the waveforms are just horizontal lines. The audio is still there, but no waveforms.

[David Polich]

Hmmm..why did you compact the project? "Compact" is a feature left over from last decade
and the days of way smaller hard drives. I don't think you need to do it anymore.

[cbergm7210]

Hmmm..why did you compact the project? "Compact" is a feature left over from last decade
and the days of way smaller hard drives. I don't think you need to do it anymore.

DP, indeed I never do usually. This was a special case that is not worth the explanation. I agree it's not necessary and in the handful of times I've done it I actually lost some audio a couple of times.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

I agree not to compact but if it's there it should work. It just never has.

[FMiguelez]

I REALLY do like compacting my projects.

I've found that the perfect moment to do it is immediately after you finish recording audio , i.e, right after printing all my MIDI tracks and having gotten rid of any silence (cropping the tracks).

Why?

Because that way, I can simply record-enable all my tracks and record everything as is in one pass, without minding if an instrument plays at the beginning, middle or end. Some instruments only have a couple of measures or even one simple "hit" participation, so it makes no sense to waste so much disk space with mostly blank tracks.
I know these days HDs are cheap, but still... When I archive my projects, I like to only leave what I actually used, and, in the long run, this cuts backup times as well. Every time I do this, the size of my folder project gets cut by half.
I don't see anything inherently wrong with using this command.

Brother CBerg, I see the same thing when I compact my projects. If I look at the SE while compacting, at least half the waveforms won't appear until I either, close and reopen the SE window, or close and reopen the project, especially when I check the "Delete Analysis files" option.

But sooner or later, they always reappear normally.

[cbergm7210]

Brother CBerg, I see the same thing when I compact my projects. If I look at the SE while compacting, at least half the waveforms won't appear until I either, close and reopen the SE window, or close and reopen the project, especially when I check the "Delete Analysis files" option.

But sooner or later, they always reappear normally.

FM, the handlful of times I've compacted they did eventually come back, but in these files part of a large project they have not after closing and opening, rebooting, etc. Odd.

[FMiguelez]

That´s odd, indeed.

I suppose you already deleted the analysis files and still see that, correct? I haven´t seen anything like that since DP4, but IIRC, re-applying the compact command solved it (do it from a test backup copy, just in case).

That does look like a nasty malfunction. Scary, actually... But, at least, you still hear your audio!

[bayswater]

I use it too. Better to have a couple of dozen regions in the archive instead of hundreds. The waveforms disappear, but they do come back. I haven't lost required audio, but there is a warning in the manual about conditions where compacting doesn't work.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

And one should be careful when compacting that bounced audio that isn't part of the project sequences isn't inadvertently deleted in the process.

[Shooshie]

I use it too. Better to have a couple of dozen regions in the archive instead of hundreds. The waveforms disappear, but they do come back. I haven't lost required audio, but there is a warning in the manual about conditions where compacting doesn't work.

There is? Damn! I haven't seen that. (or like half of what I used to know, I've forgotten it)

Time to RTFM. Again.

Shoosh

[Shooshie]

And one should be careful when compacting that bounced audio that isn't part of the project sequences isn't inadvertently deleted in the process.

It took a couple readings to grasp those thats, but yeah, that would be very important, wouldn't it? Protect bounced audio. One way to do that would be to add bounced audio to the sequence when bouncing. I never liked doing that; creates messy files, but it would protect against that particular problem.

Shoosh

[stubbsonic]

I like to compact audio in finished projects just before I archive them. I've not had any problems with this.

I've only skimmed so forgive me if someone has mentioned this already.

There is a field for "PRESERVE" which extends the soundbite's size by some number of milliseconds. This is provided because of crossfades which use additional audio beyond the soundbite's original boundaries. In the graphic above, you can see that some crossfades are a different color, perhaps because they can no longer be rendered after the compacting killed everything beyond the 500ms default preserve buffer.

Option 1: set this to some high number so you know that none of your crossfades will be ruined. perhaps 2 or 3 seconds, depending on how long your crossfades are.

Option 2: merge soundbites in your tracks, then choose "Select Unused Soundbites" then delete them. This just renders all your edits permanently, so you have to commit to how the edits are before you choose this option.

This might be unrelated to the issue at hand (loss of waveform display), but is useful to note about the compact function.