DATA LOST,MIDI CHUNK LIST,SONG DATA IS GONE!!!!!!!!!???
 

I starting working on a slow groove that I called black just for reference.I was useing battery 2 & 5 xpands.I went to save after spending about 4 hours on it & a block came up saying that it 'cannot save black cause an access violation had accured in 'MIDI chunk' list'?
So I went on ahead & restarted black with saving that last time,& the session file was GONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
No place to be found on my computer.I had saved the session as of yesterday & didn't do anything to have this happen.I'm lucky I remembered all of the instrumentation & the sequence,but damn! What caused this? cause I would have hated to have someone elses session in PTle & this was to happen.....oh could you imagine? Any help would be nice.

Re: DATA LOST,MIDI CHUNK LIST,SONG DATA IS GONE!!!!!!!!!???
 

I was reading the answerebase & found the problem but I still don't know how it happened.Any answere's? Help.

Re: DATA LOST,MIDI CHUNK LIST,SONG DATA IS GONE!!!!!!!!!???
 

I had this happen back on my original 6.4 system and never got the song back. I hope someone else has some help for you.

Re: DATA LOST,MIDI CHUNK LIST,SONG DATA IS GONE!!!!!!!!!???
 

Gregory, are you able to recover any backup sessions?







filosofem

Re: DATA LOST,MIDI CHUNK LIST,SONG DATA IS GONE!!!!!!!!!???
 

I've had the same problem and it really is the worst. The only thing to do is go one by one through your backup sessions until you find one that opens up, and then rebuild from there.

I will say this to all past, present, and future encounterers of this problem. After getting hit with the error message, I started going backwards through my back up sessions, trying to open them one by one. I do a lot of "save as"'s because I'm constantly trying different things and always want to know I can jump back to given points. Well I finally got to a session that opened. Turns out the backup session that I could open was right before I did a "Save As" and started trying lots of major arrangement things in the song; moving big blocks of midi, doing a lot of trimming and editing of midi regions, and so forth. So I wonder if some amount of that, in which the computer has to start creating lots of weird little MIDI regions and such, is the cause. Seems to be logical since the error is dealing with "midi chunks" whatever that means. ProTools is pretty strange with MIDI, the way notes disappear and reappear as you trim regions and such.

Of course I have no way of knowing if that actually is the problem; it could have been some weird glitch that is undetectable and has nothing to do with that stuff. But maybe, if you have some midi in your session and are about to start serious trimming of regions and rearranging, save the whole thing to another drive, and keep closing and reopening the session as you work to see if the nightmare turns up. At least then you'll know right when it happens and have a recent backup.

good luck!

Re: DATA LOST,MIDI CHUNK LIST,SONG DATA IS GONE!!!!!!!!!???
 

No,I was working & I just kept saving but I never made a "save as"black2...I tried after the error,but it didn't work.

Re: DATA LOST,MIDI CHUNK LIST,SONG DATA IS GONE!!!!!!!!!???
 

I think what filosofem was referring to is "Do you have auto-backup turned on, and have you tried one of the auto backed up sessions?"

Re: DATA LOST,MIDI CHUNK LIST,SONG DATA IS GONE!!!!!!!!!???
 

When we've had sessions sent to us that experienced this problem, it's been due to session corruption. Depending on when and how the corruption occurred, you may be able to either:

1. Use Import Session Data from a new session to import tracks one by one from the corrupted session. You'll almost certainly have at least one track that cannot be imported due to corruption.
2. If you can't use Import Session Data (you get the same error when selecting the corrupted session in the Import dialog), you'll have to see if you can open a previous version or a backup.

I strongly recommend a regimen of 'Save As..' when you're working to have the best chance of data integrity in the case of corruption. Merely doing a 'Save' every few minutes means you have only 1 session file at any time and, if that session becomes corrupted, you're relying on your session backups - which may also be corrupted, since they're based off the same session.

The better method is to do a 'Save As' every 10 or 15 minutes, this way you run a much lower risk of losing important data and time. My method is to put a version number after each session name - such as 'My Song_v1' - then increment the number for each save, using 'dot' versions as indicators of minor changes and whole numbers for major changes (My Song_v1.1, My Song_v1.2, etc.). This will give you a completely independent file for every save.

Always have 2 copies of any critical data or sessions and have a utility or script handy that will do an auto-backup of your data when you take a break. I use SuperDuper and have it open as I work - when I go to take a break, I hit the 'Copy Now' button, which does a sync of my working drive to a backup drive.

Hopefully one of your session backups will open and/or you can recover some of the data from this session.

Re: DATA LOST,MIDI CHUNK LIST,SONG DATA IS GONE!!!!!!!!!???
 

SuperDuper looks great, too bad it's Mac only. For us here in red headed stepchild land, Acronis True Image should do the same thing using Incremental Backup.

Cheers,

Re: DATA LOST,MIDI CHUNK LIST,SONG DATA IS GONE!!!!!!!!!???
 

Absolutely! I forgot I was replying in a Windows forum - as you can probably tell, I use Mac at the studio...