Voice weirdness: tracks play wrong voice - any suggestions?

[citysoundman]

I'm doing a mix to picture over the course of 5 days, and this one particular session is acting REALLY strange:
When soloing a particular track or tracks, the track will not play its audio, it will play the audio from a completely different voice. Once, this "different voice" played when any track was soloed. It seems that the problem track is playing a different voice than its proper voice.

This problem occurs after opening my session. (I got a related error when opening it one time: "Error - unavailable system resources", but I'm not maxed out on my DSP) Once opened, I can "rebuild" the session by track importing the problem tracks (the ones that seem to play a different voice than what that track is assigned to). After rebuilding the session, it's fine till I have to open the session again. Then, same kind of problem. Usually there's just 1 or 2 "bad" tracks to rebuild.

I tried:
-auto voice vs. assigned voice
-trashing digisetup
-saving session to different partition

My setup:
PT 5.1.1 TDM, Mix Plus, Mix I/O
G3 beige 300 w/ SBS 7 slot exp. chassis
OS 9.1

The problem seems specific to this session. BTW this is a session built from an OMF, refering to many audio files for a 75 minute documentary. It was fine the first two days of mixing. All audio files are on one partition of my Cheetah drive. I've mixed this type of session many times with my setup, this is just a really weird new problem. Any suggestions?
[img]images/icons/confused.gif[/img]

[FajitaTone]

Diskwarrior

[Boom Chic]

How full are your drives?

Have you tried "Save Session Copy" and select audio files, and see if you have the same problem when opening the copy?

[citysoundman]

FajitaTone:
My session was started to a freshly optimized (Norton) partition. I haven't used disk warrior. Any specific reason it would help?

Boom Chic:
My drives are not nearly full. And it would take too long, at this point, to copy all media files.

[PTLance]

Disk Warrior will fix problems that Norton dosen't even find. It might solve your problem, but if not, it's still worth it to have it. It has saved us more than a few times.

[Philthy]

I had the same thing happen to me.

The key to the problem is the OMF. When I saw the topic of your post I knew that I would see OMF in your message.

The audio is embedded in the OMF and for some reason it or the pointers to it get jumbled.

On all the tracks with the regions that are from the OMF- use the "consolidate audio" command- this will write entirely new audio files so the session will stop reading from the audio embedded in the OMF.

That could do the trick for you. You might have trouble though if the pointers are totally shot-

In my situation, everything was fine until I made an edit at the end of a track, and then everything would be mixed up... wrong audio on wrong tracks, etc etc. So I was able to undo to the point before I made that edit and consolidate to freeze things there.

If you're really stuck you could rebuild the OMF into ProTools in a seperate project and then import the tracks to replace the troubled ones.

It was a bizarre, bizarre thing when it happened... for about 5 minutes I was completely panicked and thought I was losing my mind (this was 16 hours into a total hell session! You get five days to mix a feature for post? ahh the luxury... I was mixing a whole feature score in a day!!! Now if I could find clients who weren't so damn cheap!!!)

Hope that makes sense- you can probably stop f%$king with your drives now... [img]images/icons/shocked.gif[/img]

[citysoundman]

Philthy,
You're probably right about some files being corrupt due to the OMF. The video editor mentioned she had corrupt files at one point. Well, the mix is done and I didn't have time to try the consolidate, but maybe I'll try it later on, and post my results.

[jackruston]

Me too!

I have had this problem recently with a non OMF session. I was working on a normal 24bit 44.1k session, tracked here, and I was getting incorrect files played back on soloing. I rebooted and it was solved, but things did get a little wierd for a moment there. I was forced to ask myself, as we all tend to do over here 'wot the bloody ell's goin on 'ere then guvnor?'

Jack

G4 867 HD2 to firewire.

[Philthy]

Hmmm, now I'm not so sure Bob, what Jack's describing sounds even closer to what you described.

Could it be two different bugs?

At least it's (they're) rare....

[jackruston]

Mine was also a totally isolated event. I've never had it before or since. It's only that my system has been behaving strangely recently that I was really bothered at all. It may be worth noting that I was also running video (quicktime/fuse) with that session.
J