Occasional digital distortion on a recorded track on 9.05

[SteveBoker]

I am clueless about this one.

Occasionally... once every few weeks... I record a track that when played back through 9.05 is wildly distorted. Like the most significant bit is off. Total digital mayhem. But, when I play the .wav file through the Mac 10.6.8 finder, it plays fine. I've tried reimporting the .wav file, but it still is not correctly recognized by ProTools. Reboot, restarting ProTools, etc. do nothing to help. All other programs can play the .wav file for the track, but ProTools (which recorded the file to begin with) barfs.

Any ideas, guys? This one is new to 9.05, as far as my experience goes.

[SteveBoker]

Sorry to reply to my own post.

More data.

I can load the track into Cubase, export a mixdown of the track from Cubase and import it into ProTools 9.05 and it plays fine. There must be some metadata that ProTools is saving that is occasionally barfed on. Loading and saving from Cubase strips the metadata and ProTools is fine with the track again.

This is a bug, guys.

[zedhed]

See if this helps;
http://duc.avid.com/showthread.php?t=307757

[bradch00]

Do you have "Minimize Additional I/O Latency" deselected in the "Setup" > playback Engine" window?

It should be deselected as there is a problem with it in 9.0.5.

[SteveBoker]

Yes, "Minimize Additional I/O Latency" has been un-checked all along. I did see that previous post. Thanks.

It happened again today. Symptoms today are on an overdub of a track on a large project. First, there was no playback of the overdub, which had clearly been recorded since (a) the waveform shows up in PT9.05 and (b) the .wav file is playable in Mac 10.6.8 finder. But segments prior to and after this overdub play fine and the rest of the tracks play fine. Just this one segment is not recognized correctly by PT.

I tried two more overdubs, wondering whether this phenomenon would repeat itself. Yes, silence on playback for 1 overdub. The second overdub created the static issue I reported earlier in this same thread.

I rebooted and tried again. Back to silence for a newly recorded overdub.

This is a fairly large project with more than 2000 entries in the (compacted) region list. I'm wondering if I'm running into some limit.

[SteveBoker]

I am now in a spot in this project where any new recorded track on this complex project exhibits the digital over noise symptom.

As a "hit the side of the TV set and see if it helps" measure I tried trashing PT prefs and rebooting. No change. I tried creating a new track, no change. If I load up another, simpler project, no problem; I can record fine. Go back to the complex project, the same problem returns. I tried the trick I tried earlier: load the overdub into Cubase and bounce it back to disk. As soon as I do that, the previously unplayable overdub loads fine into PT 9.05 and plays fine. It seems clear that corrupted metadata (likely PT specific) is being saved into the overdub track as PT records it that makes it unplayable only by PT. This is now happening for any newly recorded region in the complex project.

I suspect I've run into some upper limit of project complexity. In order to keep working, I guess I'll try consolidating and exporting each of the tracks and loading them all into a new project. This is a pain, not to mention my losing all of my edit region information. But I have to keep working....

I do believe this is a bug in 9.05. It is not the "Minimize Additional Latency" bug. Makes me wish I'd not upgraded. 9.02 was quite stable on my system (Mac Pro 8 core with RAID 0 internal data disks separate from the boot disk, 10.6.8, Lynx Aurora 16 w/AES IO, & RME HDSP-AES16).

[SteveBoker]

Sorry to keep replying to my own posts. But I thought I would mention this in case Avid programmers are reading:

I have a short example .wav file that was recorded in PT9.05, plays fine in PT9.05's Workspace panel, but when the file is dragged from the Workspace panel into a project does not play. This should help them track down the bug.

[SteveBoker]

Well, I'm definitely talking to myself now. I guess no one else has encountered this problem. If I'm the first, it is my job to document the problem as completely as possible.

To document the problem, both for possible Avid developers (does anyone from Avid actually read this forum? I have received no contact, even after offering a minimal file that reliably triggers the bug) and for future user-sufferers, here is what I did and how I got to my current state.

I tried re-installing 9.05 after a "clean unistall". No difference: ANY new record creates a file that is unreadable within the ProTools main Edit or Mix windows, but plays fine within the Project panel.

I tried consolidating tracks on the complex project. The consolidated tracks exhibit the same symptom as the newly recorded tracks: do not play (or sometimes play with digital mayhem distortion) in the Edit or Mix panel, but play correctly in the Project panel.

I next tried creating a new project to see if the complex project was somehow corrupted. The new project (only one mono track) exhibited the same behavior on a newly recorded track: Does not play in Edit or Mix, but does play in Project. So it's not the complexity of the project.

I next tried backing out to 9.02 using a 9.02 full install. This did not work. I could not bring 9.02 up at all.

I next tried a clean uninstall of 9.02 and a re-install of 9.05 from the full installer. This is the first positive result. A new project with a single newly recorded track played back correctly in the Mix and Edit windows.

I next opened up the complex project with the consolidated tracks. The consolidated tracks still do not play in the Mix or Edit windows. Clearly there must be some sort of ProTools-specific metadata written into those tracks that preclude them playing in the Mix or Edit windows.

Luckily, in the spirit of "if anything can go wrong it will", I made a backup of the complex project just prior to the consolidation of tracks. I next restored the backup of the complex project.

Next, I tried recording a new track in the complex project. A couple of claps into a mic. The recorded track played fine in the Project window. But, when played within the Mix or Edit windows, the file played was a seemingly random bass track from an entirely different project!! I tried another short recording of three claps. On playback in the Edit or Mix window I got digital noise.

OK. So now I think I'm starting to get what the problem is. ProTools Edit and Mix windows are bringing up a more or less random file to play, rather than the file that was actually recorded. I will next search for that problem. If I find a solution, I will post it here. If I do not find a solution, I will start a new thread with the more well-defined bug symptom. I do not know how to proceed from here. ProTools has become completely unusable for creating any new content on my system. There must be some Protools database that links to the actual .wav files and which has become corrupted. I need to find out how to repair this database or rebuild it!

Finally, I quit ProTools 9.05, and then re-opened it. Created a new project with a single mono track. Recorded claps. Silence in the Mix and Edit windows, but correct playback in the Project window. So, somehow, by playing the complex project I have retriggered the bug. Now, there is no way I can record new content without reinstalling as before.

I am completely stumped. As a work-around I am going to try the following: Bounce all the tracks from the complex project to disk, one at a time. Save the MIDI tracks one at a time. Uninstall ProTools 9.05. Install ProTools 9.02. Uninstall ProTools 9.02. Install ProTools 9.05. Load all of the bounced tracks and MIDI files into a new project and recreate all of the plugin and insert settings. I am guessing this is almost a full day of work. Sure wish someone here knew the secret magic. All I can say is, I hope this never happens to you...

[KMcK]

Bug reports go here: http://protools.ideascale.com/a/idea...cussionID=1088

Out of curiosity, have you tried a different Hard Drive? Maybe something is messed up in the indexing of the drive you're using.

[SteveBoker]

Thanks for the pointer to the bug report link.

I think it is unlikely to be disk indexing outside of protools because (a) the files can be correctly found by other programs and (b) even some parts of ProTools (the Project Panel and Workspace Panel) point to the correct files. Just the Edit Panel and Mix Panel seem to be confused as to the file handles.

This is on a large (4 TB) RAID with several million files. I wonder if it is an internal file handle overflow in ProTools 9.05?

Anyway, I'll report this as a bug and see what happens.

It is a good suggestion to try another disk. If there is an indexing overflow in ProTools, it might work fine on a disk with fewer files and blocks. I'll give it a try on a small external firewire disk.