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

[badboymusic]

Originally Posted by Sean Russell

What Tim said. Totally Agree.

Same here.

[DigiTechSupt]

Originally Posted by TimNielsen

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' ?

If you deleted all fades for the session and it still wouldn't open, then the corruption goes beyond it being just a fade - and the reason it couldn't be repaired or loaded. It likely is corrupted to the point that there's not enough data to 'go ahead and load it anyway' - it doesn't know what's missing or what to load.

[TimNielsen]

Simply not true. I deleted all my fades. On launching, the session opened, telling me the fades were missing. I would tell it to redraw them all. And every time, it would start drawing them, and hang on a specific, single fade. Every time. And the session would basically lock up.

The tracks were 'open', I could see my session, but PT would simply stop working when it got to trying that fade. It's ridiculous.

Not to mention the times when ProTools has started referring to fades as 'audio' files and corrupted them beyond repair, or the times when ProTools would let me write 'reversing in time automation breakpoints' that would take down the entire session, or....

And no offense, but you haven't addressed my other point, which is namely that ProTools has ZERO robustness in terms with dealing with errors. It offers no assistance other than a cryptic and usually useless error message. You haven't addressed my point that in the case of this user, one single file, is enough to render his entire session useless. It offers up a useless error message, and refuses to go any further. And that is just kinda pathetic. When I have sessions that might reference a thousand audio files, and several thousand fades, that a single one of the getting corrupted somehow (and I stand by my statement that it's got to be ProTools itself that's messing up the file) and that can take down my entire session, that's just ridiculous.

Avid really needs to start thinking about this.

I mean, if say the audio file in question lost one sample, and has a nasty snat in it from missing information, so what? Why isn't ProTools loading it anyway, flagging it, and letting the USER proceed? I mean, maybe the error in the file would occur in complete silence, and the user would have been able to draw out the error, or duplicate the file to make a new file.

Why can't ProTools offer ANY assistance in this case. This is my question, and you haven't addressed it at all.

[DigiTechSupt]

Tim -

I'll take your advice and pass this on to program managers who would delegate responsibility for investigation and implementation of a more robust error checks and solutions.

[TimNielsen]

Thanks, I do think it would be a very welcome addition to ProTools. It just seems that PT has always been fairly useless in it's error messages (like 20 different things might cause a certain DAE error) or in this case.

It would help a lot of us to have PT have some more features to help us through any errors or corruption, and it would I'm sure save a lot of calls to Tech Support too.

[itsmemagic]

12 years later and still the same error message with all the clues what went wrong. LOL Avid!