PT embedding awful, awful noises into my audio. Houston, we have a problem....

[emorganproductions]

I had a weird experience today.

So, I did a record 6 months ago, which I recorded and mixed on my 7.4LErig (see sig), problem free. Recently, the band wanted to redo some vocal parts, so we booked a studio which was running PT 8 HD on a macpro.

After PT converted my sessions to 8 HD sessions, some of my plugins and busses were acting funny, giving off awful white noise/digital screeches. usually disabling the plugs and sends would kill it, if not, a full power cycle would. kind of annoying, but not really my problem, as it's not my system. Informed the studio tech, got a couple free days for the headaches and was on my way.

I opened my sessions back on my PT 7.4 LE system, it converted the PTFs back to 7.4 sessions and the Noises came with! Disabling plugs and sends no longer killed the sound. I trashed prefs & database, all the usual stuff, no avail. I figured maybe my session file got corrupted during the conversion some how, so I made a fresh 7.4 session, imported data, and the noise came with. The noises were occurring in consistent spots now where as on the 8 system they seemed to come randomly. I made a new session, with a new track and dragged in the offending audio. A quick recalculation of the waveform showed that some where along the way PT put white noise into my actual audio files.

Now these weren't file we recorded on the 8 system, these were drums recorded a long time ago in 7.4, which in importing to the 8 system, or possibly importing back to 7, were embedded with noise. Luckly I had backups of the pre converted sessions files to reimported the tracks from.

My good friend Kris75 has had some major issues with white noise in 8 on the Windows side, could this be a relevant issue?
http://duc.digidesign.com/showthread.php?t=264148

Maybe DTS or someone can chim in, did I miss something? did I cause this corruption of my audio. I love to know so I can prevent it in the future. Kinda scary that somehow my audio got permanently changed/ruined without my knowledge.

I made a dropsite with some media to help diagnose this problem.
1. an audio file of the sound I'm talking about. Full mix with the sound coming from the snare top track. (PLEASE WATCH YOUR EARS, its pretty offensive, it starts right off the top of the tune, goes away and then comes back at 0:35, FULL VOLUME!! Please listen with care.)
2. some pictures showing the offending track, in session with plugs on and off, and in a new 7.4 session before and after the waveform redraw.

http://drop.io/EmorganProductions/media

Let me know if you have experienced this or have any ideas.

Cheers,

[Kris75]

Holy crap.

I have seen this and did not know the root cause.

I was doing a drum session with Shan and this popped up. I always back up as soon as the recording is done, and before any edits so luckily we had a back up. Importing the new snare into the session fixed it.

There was also a few Windows HD forum also posts about this, but I can't find any of the threads.

This is not however what happens with the noise burst. Well, I guess it kind of is, because you get BLASTED with noise. But in 8.03 it does not place it in the track. At least not for me (I ditched 8.03 ASAP) and it may also screw with audio sync. 8.03 was unusable with my Tango.

Pro Tools is quickly becoming a Beta program, and that scares the crap out of me. I really want PT to get back to being the best and most stable program out there. Hopefully they can pull it together.

[daeron80]

4.x was a similarly scary situation, but 5.x was better and 5.3 remains hands down the best version of PT ever. It was magnificent. Here's hoping we'll be headed back to happy land soon. Before 9.3 pleeeeeeease!

[Slim Shady]

Hard drive failure perhaps? How were the sessions stored/backed up? Do you have a redundant backup you can test?

[emorganproductions]

it was stored on a OWC mercury FW400 drive, floated between the studio and home. I have backups for sure, be I can't recreate the scenario with the backups unless I head back into the studio and re convert the old files.

[Kris75]

This is not Hard Drive failure. I have seen it on two separate systems.

[Kris75]

This was placed on the windows HD side. Is this what you are talking about?

http://duc.digidesign.com/showthread.php?t=259997

[kfoody]

So I was having this same problem with 4 tracks of recorded violins over an hour of music. Very stressful. Shutting down, deleting prefs/dae prefs/temp files did the trick for me. But before I opened PT's after the complete shut down (not restart) I went into the audio files folder of my session, found the file that was corrupted in the session and just opened the .wav file in Windows Media Player. It worked totally fine and sounded perfect. Don't know why - but now I'm not having the problem anymore. Hope this helps!