Soundbites Window Empty! All Edit data lost.

[db13231]

I was hoping someone else had run into this problem and found a fix. I've been working on about 10 different projects for about 6 months now in DP, starting with 6 and then moving up to 7. I'm currently running 7.11, but 7.02 has this issue too.

I was working on a project, doing a mix, and out of nowhere the soundbite window empties. It's as if the DP project file doesn't see the audio folder anymore. This is fine at first because the project still plays back. When I save the project though, I'll reopen it, and everything is gone. The audio in the soundbites window, and every edit and mix move I made in the Sequence Editor. I'm losing days and days of time on this. Two projects have had this happen already. Although I'm backing up at various stages, I still end up losing a bunch of time if the project does this.

Now that I'm aware of it I noticed a curious thing today. I have a project that's about to do the same thing but it's in limbo. The Soundbites Window emptied itself so I saved and back everything up. Then I play with the "view options" in the Soundbites window. Under "Time Created" nothing was there. When I switched to "Name" all the soundbites reappeared and acted normally. If I switched back to "Time Created" they disappeared again.

Two of the projects seem to be toast, but the audio files are there. It'll just take weeks to rebuild, with all the take files that exist. Anybody now what's happening? Am I viewing something wrong?

Also there are no major VI’s or anything running. Just audio at this point. I use the Waves Studio Classics bundle, a lot of PSP Audioware, and MOTU’s plugin’s but that’s it.

Thanks for any advice!

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Machine specs and OS, DP version, etc. would be helpful as would the state of your hard drives. Sounds like an OS issue, maybe a corrupted directory.

Start the machine from the OS install disk and run the disk repair routine as well as repair permissions. If you have disk warrior of similar program (except Norton!) run it and see if your disk is to blame. Since it is in several projects it sounds like this is your problem. You might also install DP again.

Do you see the soundbites from the Finder?

[James Steele]

Another one of those bizarre issues I've never seen before. Gotta love it.

[Dan Worley]

I agree with MLC, it sure sounds like a drive problem. I recently had a drive go bad on me and it did all kinds of weird stuff before it completely gave up the ghost. Try using another drive and see if things get back to normal.

Very strange behavior indeed.

Good luck.

c-ya,

Dan Worley

[db13231]

Hey thanks so much, I will try moving everything to another drive and then running all the usual disk repair.

I am running a Dual 2.7 Ghz Power PC G5 with 8 gigs of RAM at OSX 10.4.11. Hadn’t upgraded the OS yet based on some old plugin’s that hadn’t come around yet, Tritone Digital in particular.

My main working projects were on one of my internal drives.

I have transferred these projects back and forth to my laptop to do drum edits. It’s a MacBook Pro 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo. The problem shows up there too, and happened at least once from there.

You’re probably all correct about the drive thing though. I’ll reformat an external drive, and just use that as my working drive and let you guys know if anything related happens again.

I still wish there was a fix though. I forgot to mention, if I roll back in the Undo History to a place where an actual audio edit was made, DP7 (all versions) crashes out immediately, with no error code. Just says that DP unexpectedly quit. I was hoping I could go back before the soundbites disappeared.

Thanks again!

[db13231]

Oh and this in response to Midlife Crisis:

I can see the Soundbites or the actual WAV files in the Finder. It's not as if I've lost all data, it's that all the work I did with the data has to be rebuilt. So it stinks that I may have to go through “take” files on quite a few things to figure out what I had decided on, and start the actual mix from scratch. I may be able to go back a few backups and recover most of this, and then input any audio files that were in the newer version of the project. I had to have a drummer redo some parts, and that would be the only serious thing I'd have to bring back in, re-edit, and then like I said, start the mix all over.

What’s odd is that it looks like DP’s project file lost it’s path to the “Audio” files folder. Then stemming from that loss, all the sequence editor edits disappeared because there was no audio to back them up.

I was hoping for a quicker fix, but it looks like I’ll have to rebuild the house. ☺ At least I still have the materials.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

You might try starting a new DP project and LOADING the chunks into it. Than move (copy!) all the sound files to the new Audio Files folder created by DP - DP will ask for them when needed. Once the sound files are copied, instruct DP to find them in the new location and you might be golden.

If it is a DP file corruption, that might work. I would definitely reinstall DP at this point. If you're getting multiple projects like this, then it is likely either an OS issue (as above) or possibly a corrupted DP install. Still have your instal disks and manual?

[tomeaton]

From Motu:

* PowerPC G4 CPU 1 GHz or faster (including PPC G5 CPUs and all Intel processor Macs)
* 1 GB RAM or more
* Mac OS X version 10.5 or 10.6; v10.5.8 or later is required
* 1024 x 768 display resolution
* CD-ROM drive for installation and authorization



You might try going to an OS that the system has been approved to work on!

I had freakouts when I first tried to run DP7 on 10.4.11 also.

tom

[eriknorlander]

Hi all,

I have just encountered the exact same problem as db13231. Here's my story ...

I started a new project yesterday to edit drum tracks recorded in Pro Tools (26 tracks, 24-bit, 48kHz). The song is about 6 minutes long, and I went through the arduous process of going through nearly every kick, snare and hat hit, making a new soundbite with command-Y, and then moving it manually or percent quantizing it. As you would imagine, this process creates hundreds or even thousands of soundbites for each track, depending on how fussy I get.

I save backups of my project files every couple of hours or whenever I do something significant, and I name them Song BU01, Song BU02 ... Song BU77, etc. When I opened the project this morning, all of the soundbites were gone from the Tracks, Sequence and Soundbite windows, just as db13231 reported. I opened the last backup file, same thing. I went to the previous backup file ... aha! No problems on that one. The backup with all the data was made 2 hours prior to the last edit, so 2 hours of editing lost. I thought this was just a fluke thing, and I started to edit again from the backup file (a copy, of course). An hour into the editing, I quit DP and did some other work on the computer. Then when I reopened the DP file ... argh! The same problem. All soundbites gone. I went back to a backup made 30 minutes earlier ... same problem. So this morning's work has been lost as well.

I have repaired permissions, run Cocktail (utility that clears caches, etc.), shut down, restarted, copied the project to another drive ... no success with any of that.

The only thing I can come up with is that I have created too many soundbites. Is that possible? Is there a limit? My last working project has 1,159 soundbites for each of the 26 tracks (30,134 soundbites total). In one of the corrupt projects, I was able to drag WAV files from the Audio Files folder back into the DP soundbites window and see all of the soundbites there -- looks like all of them are intact there. The last corrupt project has 1,403 soundbites for each of the 26 tracks (36,478 total soundbites).

I wonder if I crossed some kind of illegal threshold between 30,134 and 36,478 soundbites?

My system for this project is:

Intel MacBook 2.4 GHz / 2GB RAM / OS 10.5.8 / DP 7.02 / OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro 7200 RPM Firewire drive / no audio interface

Any ideas? Anybody? Bueller?

Cheers,
Erik

[MIDI Life Crisis]

@ Erik and the o/p:

I assume you can also see your soundbites from the finder?

I would guess that 30k soundbites is an awful lot for any DAW to keep track of. If I might suggest a workaround to try?

Duplicate your last working version, go to the soundbites window and "Select Unused Soundbites" from the dropdown. Then select "delete" and save the file.

Make a few thousand edits ☺ and save and see if they remain. My guess is that (to paraphrase from the movie "Amadeus") you simply have 'too many soundbites.' Simply cut a few and it will be perfect! Which few? Fortunately, DP will automate that part for you.

Hope that works.

IN FACT, you might also simply try going into the "corrupt" file and trying the procedure outlined above (select unused-> delete selected) and see if you don't get your edits back.

Heck, worth a try.

[eriknorlander]

@MIDI Life Crisis, thanks for your reply. I'm going to do just that and will report back. I'm going to try merging some of the new edited soundbites as well to try to reduce the soundbite count.

@db13231, does your problem project by any chance also have a freakishly high number of soundbites?

BTW, I did try the old faithful load sequence into new project trick. No luck with that, unfortunately.

Cheers,
Erik

[eriknorlander]

@ Erik and the o/p:

Duplicate your last working version, go to the soundbites window and "Select Unused Soundbites" from the dropdown. Then select "delete" and save the file.

Make a few thousand edits ☺ and save and see if they remain. My guess is that (to paraphrase from the movie "Amadeus") you simply have 'too many soundbites.' Simply cut a few and it will be perfect! Which few? Fortunately, DP will automate that part for you.

Hope that works.

Here's the report, as promised. I have deleted unused soundbites repeatedly and also merged edits with which I'm happy (then deleted the construction bits afterwards) with the goal of reducing the absurdly high number of soundbites in the project. Knock wood, so far, so good.

IN FACT, you might also simply try going into the "corrupt" file and trying the procedure outlined above (select unused-> delete selected) and see if you don't get your edits back.

This last idea unfortunately doesn't work because when you have a bunch of soundbites in the Soundbites window with nothing showing in the Tracks or Sequence window (the problem we're facing here) and then choose "Select Unused Soundbites" ... ALL of the soundbites get selected because DP thinks that they are all unused soundbites. Harumph!

But the former method of just keeping the soundbite count to something reasonable (say, less than 20,000) seems to be working so far.

Thanks again,
Erik

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Cool. Whatever works. Wonder if the o/p can use the same fix?

You might want to report this to MOTU as a techlink as well.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

The only thing I forgot to mention is be careful to not delete your master recording material (original performance). Once you start to edit it and use the edited version, the original soundbite will also appear as "unused" and get deleted with the rest if you're not aware it has been selected.

[David Polich]

I've had some scary experiences with missing soundbites myself. So far,
I've found the following to be the best solution.

Assuming you have a project open and all tracks are playing, select and
highlight each audio track from wherever it begins to wherever it ends
(even if it contains large gaps of silence) and do a "merge soundbites"
for that track. This creates new soundbites from the old ones. Once
done, go to the soundbites window and select unused soundbites, and delete.
You should now see only soundbites in the window that are identified as
merged soundbites. If you see any marked "editing", throw those out.
Ditto for any marked "recording". You need to end up with just merged
soundbites in the soundbites window.

Then do a "Save a Copy As.." and make sure you checkmark the box that
says "duplicate audio and copy shared samples to project".

Close your project and open the copied one, to make sure it's playing
back fine. If satisfied, close DP and quit, then delete the original source
project you made the copy from. Now, open the copied project again and
DP will go through analysis of the soundbites, which may take a little while.

"Save" this when done. Now you'll have what is essentially a "fresh"
project with nothing but current soundbites that DP knows how to locate.

I never had this problem in DP 5.13, but when I moved to DP7 its started
showing up, leading me to believe that DP7 is more fussy about referencing
audio files that were originally recorded on drives other than the drive it
resides on. Older projects started on earlier versions of DP, and on Macs
I no longer have, seem to be the most prone to this missing soundbites issue.