missing audio files

[brownj24]

I open up a session that I have been working on for the past few weeks today and all of sudden I'm missing 42 audio files -all the guitar tracks are gone. The only thing I've done to the files since recording them is duplicate the entire project onto another internal hard drive. Automaticaly relink doesn't work. Has this happened to you? What can I do? It's like the files have been deleted, but I never deleted any files at any time during this project. I've only backed up a duplicate copy of the entire project onto the other internal harddrive every week. Any suggestions about what's going on here? Thanks!! Need to try and clear this up before tomorrow afternoon!!

[guitardom]

have you looked in your audio files folder and verified if they are there or not??

[SkylineGypsy]

Hey All:

I too have recently experienced the exact same problem with randomly lost audio. The situation was similar--the first time it happened was during guitar tracking. I opened a session at the beginning of a day just to find that all the guitar overdubs performed the night before were gone. The boxes where the waveforms used to be were there, just with no audio inside. The night before when we finished tracking, I did nothing but save, close the session, quit ProTools, copy the project to another drive for backup, and reopen the original session the next day. Then came the "missing files" dialog with empty waveform boxes--the files were not in the audio folder, nor anywhere else in the system. (Even the redundant backup had the same problem!!)

Tracking continued after we re-cut the missing guitar parts, and went on without event for the next few weeks. The next instance was on the same project during vocal tracking--same scenario, we get two killer cuts finished vocally and the next day the audio was just gone. By this point I was losing my mind and feeling like I was losing face with the client, having to apologize profusely and then recut the missing files. Got 'em recut, finished the ENTIRE RECORD, made sure EVERYTHING was in place, saved and backed up, even did a DVD backup. Reopened the files the next day, listened, did some cleanup preparing for the mix process, double checked everything, and burned a board mix. All files were present and accounted for, saved, and double backed-up at this point. Done, right?

Yesterday, my mix engineer opens the sessions to get started and guess what? Random vocal parts are missing from 7 of 9 songs on the record. We then spent the rest of the day searching the system to find out where the hell these files could be going. Disc allocation is correct, round robin is OFF,
yet these files just aren't there in the audio folder. Or anywhere. Not on the project drive, not on the backup drive, and not even on the DVD copies. I'm at a loss with what to do...I'm a Digi-certified engineer, my mix engineer has 28 years of engineering experience (he's been with Digi since SoundTools) and he can't explain it. I've spoken with other engineers and they've all shared similar stories. I'm running PT 6.4.1cs4 on a Mix3 system, G4 dual 1GHz machine. I've been pricing HD3 systems and considering the upgrade, but if I can't figure out where these files are going or why this keeps happening, it's about time to think about going to Logic or Nuendo. I just can't accept a platform that decides to randomly drop audio. Ever. Can someone, anyone (DIGI!!!) shed some light on what's going on? Am I overlooking something? I'm at wit's end with a four-month project that's now regressed into retracking lost audio for the THIRD TIME. On the SAME PROJECT. Sheesh. Any help would probably get ya a Christmas card and a fruitcake.

Sorry for the long post, just wanted to give as detailed a description as possible. Looking forward to some new input. Thanks in advance.

J

[mano111]

Had to comment on this very sad story as i've had a similar thing happen to me though not as bad, it seems.
I've lost a day of work recording sound fx for a movie due to wrong disk allocation at recording time. after retracing my steps it seems they were recorded to a firewire HD that was connected at the time of recording. unfortunatly it was a disk used for transfers and one of the engeneers deleted the folder as he figured i was done with it.

Just to be clear, I've learned that the only true backup for a session is "save session copy in" and check the "copy all audio files" check box. this will gather all files from whatever location and copy them to a new folder.
Also make sure all HDs but the audio drive are set to transfer in the workspace window. this will garentee the audio be recorded only to the one HD.
One more thing, when relinking I allways use the "manually find and relink" its much faster and typically i know where to look so it wouldnt take forever.

Sorry for your loss,

(feels like a funeral)

Is DIGI getting burried?

[brownj24]

Hey All:

I too have recently experienced the exact same problem with randomly lost audio. The situation was similar--the first time it happened was during guitar tracking. I opened a session at the beginning of a day just to find that all the guitar overdubs performed the night before were gone. The boxes where the waveforms used to be were there, just with no audio inside. The night before when we finished tracking, I did nothing but save, close the session, quit ProTools, copy the project to another drive for backup, and reopen the original session the next day. Then came the "missing files" dialog with empty waveform boxes--the files were not in the audio folder, nor anywhere else in the system. (Even the redundant backup had the same problem!!)

Tracking continued after we re-cut the missing guitar parts, and went on without event for the next few weeks. The next instance was on the same project during vocal tracking--same scenario, we get two killer cuts finished vocally and the next day the audio was just gone. By this point I was losing my mind and feeling like I was losing face with the client, having to apologize profusely and then recut the missing files. Got 'em recut, finished the ENTIRE RECORD, made sure EVERYTHING was in place, saved and backed up, even did a DVD backup. Reopened the files the next day, listened, did some cleanup preparing for the mix process, double checked everything, and burned a board mix. All files were present and accounted for, saved, and double backed-up at this point. Done, right?

Yesterday, my mix engineer opens the sessions to get started and guess what? Random vocal parts are missing from 7 of 9 songs on the record. We then spent the rest of the day searching the system to find out where the hell these files could be going. Disc allocation is correct, round robin is OFF,
yet these files just aren't there in the audio folder. Or anywhere. Not on the project drive, not on the backup drive, and not even on the DVD copies. I'm at a loss with what to do...I'm a Digi-certified engineer, my mix engineer has 28 years of engineering experience (he's been with Digi since SoundTools) and he can't explain it. I've spoken with other engineers and they've all shared similar stories. I'm running PT 6.4.1cs4 on a Mix3 system, G4 dual 1GHz machine. I've been pricing HD3 systems and considering the upgrade, but if I can't figure out where these files are going or why this keeps happening, it's about time to think about going to Logic or Nuendo. I just can't accept a platform that decides to randomly drop audio. Ever. Can someone, anyone (DIGI!!!) shed some light on what's going on? Am I overlooking something? I'm at wit's end with a four-month project that's now regressed into retracking lost audio for the THIRD TIME. On the SAME PROJECT. Sheesh. Any help would probably get ya a Christmas card and a fruitcake.

Sorry for the long post, just wanted to give as detailed a description as possible. Looking forward to some new input. Thanks in advance.

J

This is exactly the problem I'm having. What possible explanation could there be? Could it be a harddrive issue? This is crippling!!

[DigiTechSupt]

I open up a session that I have been working on for the past few weeks today and all of sudden I'm missing 42 audio files -all the guitar tracks are gone. The only thing I've done to the files since recording them is duplicate the entire project onto another internal hard drive. Automaticaly relink doesn't work. Has this happened to you? What can I do? It's like the files have been deleted, but I never deleted any files at any time during this project. I've only backed up a duplicate copy of the entire project onto the other internal harddrive every week. Any suggestions about what's going on here? Thanks!! Need to try and clear this up before tomorrow afternoon!!

Which version of Pro Tools are you running?

[brownj24]

I am running version 7.0.0.171 Pt le on 002 on windows XP.

[spkguitar]

Is there a specific reason why you haven't done the free update to 7.1 and 7.1cs10? I would definitely recommend it.

[brownj24]

I thought I had done it -guess not. Either way, does the update fix this misallocation/disappearing act of audio files problem I've been having? I'm still hoping to recover those audio files!!

[brownj24]

Ok, some progress...

I open up my session and up pops the missing files window telling me that 43 audio files are missing.

I click the manually find and relink option and press ok

in the Relink window, under "select files to relink", I have found the guitar files. So, thank god that means they're still there at least -somewhere. I can click in the relink window and audition and hear the guitar tracks.

I highlight each of the guitar tracks I want to relink and then click on "find links" in the Linking Options window I try all three options: find file by name, find file by ID, find by name and file ID.... nothing works.

Now, how the heck do I get these files back into my session?