Missing MIDI?

[marcushane]

I worked on a project until 3am last night and when I went to check on it today there was nothing. I am missing a ton of MIDI files. What concerns me even more is that none of the tracks are named. I save obsessively. I am turning on my spotlight to search my system. Any idea what happened? This is the first time this has happened.

I am running on an imac 2.0 and DP5


Thanks,


Marcus

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Could you be more specific? DP doesn't save MIDI files, it saves DP project files. Is the MIDI data missing from those? If so, have you tried playing them back regardless of whether you can see the data? You might check your View Filter in DP. This is often the cause of "lost data" MIDI and audio. It is a major gotcha in DP and has been for YEARS!

Could you simply be in a new chunk? What size is the DP project in kb?

[Dan Worley]

Could you be more specific? DP doesn't save MIDI files, it saves DP project files. Is the MIDI data missing from those? If so, have you tried playing them back regardless of whether you can see the data? You might check your View Filter in DP. This is often the cause of "lost data" MIDI and audio. It is a major gotcha in DP and has been for YEARS!

Could you simply be in a new chunk? What size is the DP project in kb?

Good advice and good questions, MLC. I wanted to offer something because if that were happening to me I'd be freaking out, but I had no idea what to say.

c-ya,

Dan Worley

[zed]

Good advice and good questions, MLC. I wanted to offer something because if that were happening to me I'd be freaking out, but I had no idea what to say.

Me too. Awaiting more details...

[marcushane]

Thanks for the replies guys. Yes freaking out is a good word for it. At this point it's not just a matter of missing MIDI, it's as if the entire session never existed. I have searched everywhere and nothing. I tried everything you suggested MIDI Life Crisis. I don't think it saved once. I think that it must have been something with my keyboard or a bug that I'm not aware of. I noticed that the marquee would not change from selector. So I was able to create MIDI after I press the P key but it remained the selector tool, and so on. Any way there is nothing. It's gone. It was a good piece too. Damn.


Thanks for your help.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

What about Open Recent? Any files show up?

[marcushane]

Yeah I tried that right away. Files show up. I feel like I must have drank a bottle of Nyquil and maybe the session never happened. Baffling and scary. It might be time to upgrade the entire system. Buying a new keyboard today. My 1 year old bangs on it sometimes(1 for him 1 for me from now on). Covering all my bases.


Marcus

[MIDI Life Crisis]

OK, I'll ask the obvious and hopefully not insulting question. Do you remember saving the file? If it shows up in recent but is empty, but otherwise seems like a functional (IOW not corrupted) file then perhaps you did something [who knows what?] to re-save a blank file with that name.

But if the file is there but empty, there is one hope left. UNDO history. See if that has anything in it and then (working from a copy of the file!) see if you can trace where the error was made.

Depending on how important the file is, you might try getting you hands on a file recovery software packageand see if you can recover the previous version. Other than that, you don't have a lot of options as far as I can tell.

[marcushane]

Thanks for the reply MLC. Yes I took a look at the undue history. This is where the dread really set in. I can see work on only 1 track. This is my original melody scratch track. Nothing was saved. Complete Voodoo. I will be up tonight redoing it.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Been there. Good luck!

[zed]

Thanks for the reply MLC. Yes I took a look at the undue history. This is where the dread really set in. I can see work on only 1 track. This is my original melody scratch track. Nothing was saved. Complete Voodoo. I will be up tonight redoing it.

So sorry to hear that marcushane.

My strong recommendation is that you do what I do with my projects... I always copy the project file and rename it (by adding the date) every time I open the session. This way when the Voodoo occurs, I can always get back to the previous session's work. You should also try to save every five or ten minutes, and if you want to be extra sure that nothing will go wrong with your project file you might even duplicate it once or twice during the course of an important session.

The extra work is a nuisance... but you will be thankful to have the additional backups when a project gets corrupted. It has happened to me numerous times.

Sorry again for your troubles.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Incremental backups are essential in all projects and especially in critical (money making) projects. I was running Time Machine for hourly backups until I moved the ™ disk out to an 800FW enclosure. Now I backup maybe twice a day and at the end of the day. But I still do "incrementals" at least every day and when there are lots of changes and edits, every few hours.

[marcushane]

I just finished up here. Thanks for the tips guys. I'll incorporate both methods.

[wylie1]

This sort of thing happen to me a while back.
I was saving each take to a different file song1,2,3,4,5 and so.
When we started to edit we went back to song2 and worked for hours.
The next day when I came back and opened song5 everything was gone.
Once my heart started again the panic attack was over I went back to song2 everything was fine.

Is it possible you did a save as and renamed the song?

[marcushane]

That's really what I think happened ultimately. I must have been saving it at different location under a new file name and then trashed it before I shut down. I re-finished the piece last night. Let's just say that I will be approaching backup more astutely.