"magic ID does not match" - What's up with that?

[fightingzero]

Originally Posted by formfunction

You are playing in the wrong neighborhood... "not cool". Read the thread, Magic id is explained. Also read those stickies at the top, and you are much more likely to get helped. Good Luck!! FF

Well, it sounds like you're quick to give out doses of self-righteous behavior, but not quick enough to rethink your post. But, thanks for taking time out of your day to act in such a pointed fashion with such a deep response.

A.) As a consumer, an answer of "a magic ID is a unique identifier" is not acceptable. Well, no kidding it's a unique identifier. According to Digidesign, it's also has mystical powers. I asked for the explanation of the cause/fix considering that my PT session never crashed, if you so took the time to read that from my post.

B.) As for being the wrong neighborhood, I'll be the judge of that. Considering the fact that I searched this forum (and obviously read this thread which you adversely insinuated) trying to find explanations/fixes past "it's a unique identifier" and "just use a backup," I posted where the topic was hot or at least lukewarm.

And yes, it is 'not cool' on their part. Providing a workaround instead of a fix is a band-aid. I never lost any part of my session because it never crashed and I had backups, but the issue will still exist and happen. I stand by my post as I'm sure you'll stand by yours.

Best of luck to you, also.

-FZ

[DigiTechSupt]

The most likely explanation for all these issues is corrupted sessions or audio files.

I should have been more explanatory about the Magic ID - it's something we put into files we write (like sessions, waveform cache, prefs, and more) so we can be sure that we're reading in the thing we're expecting to. It's like a signature stuck in the middle of a file that says (for example) "The video settings begin at this part of the file" - we make sure that's there before actually trying to read the file in. If the file is corrupted, when we look at the place where we expect video settings and we don't see signature saying "Video settings start here", then we'll throw the "magic ID doesn't match" error.

While there was a fix for a Magic ID issue, it was isolated to G5's and only certain sessions - definitely not an 'across the board' problem. Those same sessions would open fine on an Intel Mac. I'm looking into talking to the engineer that fixed this to get more detail...

More than likely what we're seeing in most cases on this thread is related to corruption.

[JimLeb]

I just got this error.

I'm running SN and PT 8.1.cs1

Trying to import tracks from another session on my network.

that session is open...

Thought I'd add this grist to the mill.

Jim

[brianjanthony]

I just got the dreaded error. On a massive session with hundreds of edits. PT 7.4.2. Pinwheel of doom and then the session got corrupted. Why? I installed nothing new and did nothing different.

I autosave every 5 min/99, so I might lose a few hours of work (bad enough). But we had just finished some really cool things which we cannot import via Import Session Data because the file is totally corrupt. Client was ticked and I had no answers.

wish I knew what did this.

[Sean Russell]

Digi has told me that this can happen when the session goes over a network or onto a FAT32 volume and back.

I hate this error. I don't see it often, but there are guys here who get it every now and then. Sucks it's still following us on SL/8.1.

[TimNielsen]

Originally Posted by DigiTechSupt

The most likely explanation for all these issues is corrupted sessions or audio files.

I should have been more explanatory about the Magic ID - it's something we put into files we write (like sessions, waveform cache, prefs, and more) so we can be sure that we're reading in the thing we're expecting to. It's like a signature stuck in the middle of a file that says (for example) "The video settings begin at this part of the file" - we make sure that's there before actually trying to read the file in. If the file is corrupted, when we look at the place where we expect video settings and we don't see signature saying "Video settings start here", then we'll throw the "magic ID doesn't match" error.

While there was a fix for a Magic ID issue, it was isolated to G5's and only certain sessions - definitely not an 'across the board' problem. Those same sessions would open fine on an Intel Mac. I'm looking into talking to the engineer that fixed this to get more detail...

More than likely what we're seeing in most cases on this thread is related to corruption.

But here is the thing that I'm finding increasingly frustrating, you're saying this could be related to a corrupt audio file. Then why the hell can't ProTools, KNOWING obviously while file is throwing up this error, come back and say 'File XXX is corrupted, would you like me to repair, or quarantine, or remove, or SOMETHING, this file...

I mean, I ran into a situation a few months ago, where some fade got corrupted, and it took my down my ENTIRE session. Lost. Could not repair it, recover it, import tracks from it. Nothing. Spent a full day on it, and screwed.

PT8 seems so much more prone to these kinds of things than any other version of PT. And I mean, it must BE ProTools that's causing this corruption. I never have had a single file from any other system, program, anything, on my mac, get corrupted. Yet PT files, especially session files and fade files, get fracked up all the time.

Why?

And why when one audio file does get corrupted, by whatever means, will ProTools just throw up a generic 'magic ID error' and then refuse to even open the session at all. That just seems silly that you could couldn't build in some better robustness into this program. It has seemingly so many Achilles' Heels to take it down, a single fade, one audio file getting messed up could screw up your entire session.

Why not say 'This audio file seems corrupted, should I go ahead and load it anyway, and highlight it in bright red and tell you where it is on the timeline so you can investigate', instead of just saying 'some ID doesn't match, can't open session, game over' ?

[Sean Russell]

What Tim said. Totally Agree.

[WernerF]

+1 to what Tim said. And well said it is.

[midnightrambler]

+1

Because Avid are probably spending too much time developing "new" features that all the plebs round here seem to want. After all, there's not much money to be made in getting software to be "robust", is there....?

Maybe that could be their strapline for PT9. "Hey, some of this shît we put in 5 years ago actually works properly now!"

[browniespeaks]

Lol that would be so much better than "don't be evil"