[BobK88]

I have to agree that PT collaboration is a joke in its current state. So is the support, unfortunately. I've spent about six hours troubleshooting in the past week or two, maybe more.

Today Pro Tools 12 deleted all three Projects in my local Cache, and I'm unable to download them from the cloud: When I click on a Project in the Dashboard, the Dashboard disappears and nothing happens. Task Manager remains empty.

If I had a hard deadline, I'd be in serious trouble.

I've been in touch with Avid support, but so far, nothing has been resolved.

Today they told me there are known collaboration bugs in 12.8 and to go back to 12.7. I did a clean manual uninstall of 12.8 (except for plugins) and installed a freshly-downloaded 12.7.1. Didn't help at all.

They also said there's a problem with the cloud servers. They had no details, no estimate of when it will be fixed, and no way to monitor the status of the cloud service.

Earlier today, I saw all three of my Projects in the local Project Cache. Later, they were all gone. PT deleted them.

The support agent asked me if I had a local copy in Session form that I could work on. Are you effing kidding?

The Reference Guide makes no mention of using Project-to-Session conversion as a backup option - only as something you do when you're done collaborating and want to free up some space on the cloud. It would be time-consuming and inefficient for backing up, though of course now I wish I'd done it.

The combination of the local Project cache and the "Backup to cloud" option are supposed to have you covered.

In addition to the issues mentioned above, others include:

- Inconsistency between online status shown in the Dashboard and under the File menu.

- PT saying I wasn't connected to the internet when I was. This happened mainly when I tried to Sign In from the Dashboard. (I'm connected via Ethernet, and have had no other internet connectivity problems.)

- Getting a blank window after selecting File > Sign In

- Slow upload and/or download, even of small changes not involving audio data

- Failed downloads with varying error messages in Task Manager

- PT not seeing the local cache and downloading everything from the cloud. This happened multiple times. I'm pretty sure that in some cases the local cache did exist, though I didn't check multiple times during a troubleshooting session until today, when I discovered that caches I'd seen a few minutes earlier were now gone.

- "First invite shares all tracks" Preference enabled by default on my colleague's and my systems, even though it shouldn't have been.

- Cloud storage meter was blank. This is a known issue, and it went away - maybe after I signed out and signed back in. I don't remember exactly because I was trying to resolve bigger issues.

When it has worked, it's been more convenient than Dropboxing audio files. But the time my colleague and I have spent troubleshooting has probably negated any benefit of PT collaboration.

Avid should be ashamed.

EDIT: The day after writing the above post, I was able to download the Projects and save them as Sessions. After multiple failed attempts in PT 12.7.1, I installed 12.8 from App Manager, and then was able to download the Projects. There were still problems, though:

- PT said there were 22 revisions of one of the Projects. I'm confident that half of those (or less) were real, actual revisions done by me and my colleague, and that the rest were likely due to the bug(s).

- One of the bugs they mentioned involved PT duplicating audio files and uploading/downloading them unnecessarily; my cloud storage went from around 43 percent a few days ago to 55 percent earlier today to 59 percent by late afternoon, all without any new files from me or my colleague.

- When I closed the Projects, PT said there were changes to be uploaded, even though I'd done nothing more than press "Play." When I selected "close", it started uploading anyway. When I canceled the task in Task Manager, in one case there was still disk activity in one of the Audio Files folders in the Project Cache bundle: files were being added and then deleted. This continued for several minutes until I quit PT.

There was more, but that's enough for now.