Grouped playlists problems...

[Drum]

We have been having a Pro Tools problem regarding grouped playlists.

This is PC based HD2 with XP SP2 or 3 (can't remember offhand but both should be fine) and PT 8.0.1

Choir recording onto 6 tracks, these were then grouped for tracking purposes. Each take was recorded to a new playlist which protools generated for each member of the group. All is well.
When comping the choir group from 5 playlist lanes problems start to occur. Fine for the first 2 minutes of the song.
When selecting the audition button of playlist whilst in the playlist track view protools re arranges the playlist lanes into a seemingly random order. Some go missing and the others no longer correlate to there related lanes within the group. ie playlist 1 now appears in lane 3 of one track and 5 in an other.
When I come out of playlist view and then back into it protools seems to have a problem redrawing the view. Regions are not horizontally lined up with the playlist lane and others are not there at all but just a black hole where it should be. At this point I go to restart protools but it won't close and comes up with a access violation error.
I have also tried to close playlist view and continue using the playlists in the old manner but I get the same access violation error.

The only way i have found to get around it is to create a new set of tracks and import the takes onto these and not use playlist view.

However we have wondered if we have found a reason for this (as this behaviour has also been reported a few times in the DUC).

When using playlist view on grouped tracks, if another playlist is added to just one track of the group with the group suspended, then that group is re-activated then the playlist view gets a bit funny. The more you use the playlist view the protools seems to struggle to keep everything in order, until an access violation error occurs and you have to restart protools. Upon restart the playlists in relation to the group are out of line and/or missing. The access violation error then occurs again. The only way round it is to manually create new playlists with the correct regions from the region list, which is a bit of a pain.

Does this make sense? Does anyone have anything to add... apart from don't add the one track!

Thanks for reading!
Drum

[BaileyBass]

Hey Drum, did you ever figure this out? I am having the same issue and posted your post in the Mac HD area. Good Luck.. SB

[Drum]

hi there, apologies for the late reply. I have only just noticed your message from November.
We never fully got to the bottom of this but we did find a workaround, and I have to say it was a really painful month or two until we did.
The problem, for us, went away when we stopped creating new playlists with the tracks showing all of the playlists (i.e. in playlist view).
The workaround that worked was that when we were tracking we now showed the waveform view all of the time but could happily add new playlists to that track (or group of tracks) in the usual way as we did each take. Once we had all the tracks, we could then go into playlist view and comp as usual. If we are careful about this then the problem goes away. The moment we get careless and add some tracks in playlist view, it all goes to hell.
I did send our findings to Digi, but I suspect that this is not happening to enough people to make it a priority. To be honest I can't fathom why it should do it to us and nobody else. It has happened now on two totally separate PCs but both those had the same HD cards installed which were bought, along with the relevant 192 I/O, when they were first introduced so maybe only a few people have cards this old. It's about the only thing I can think of but I don't know of any chipset updates since then.
Anyway, hope this helps.
Drum

[backroomstudios]

ive had many a problem with grouped playlists tranfers and such...it starts to get really messy and pro tools can even remove playlists that are not selected and i get access violations from moving them around. they should fix this hopefully by the end of 2020.

Kevin

[mrjohn]

DTS, do you know if this is being worked on? I had odd problems with playlist views on an early version of 8.
I am now working on my first major session since installing Snow Leopard and 8.03 and playlist view is now doing random things like only displaying 1 or 2 playlists when there are 6, for example. The problem seems to be aggravated (or maybe even caused) by having several tracks grouped whilst using playlist view.

I tried restarting/trashing prefs etc to no avail.

8.0.3 on 10.6.2 (i know this is the wndows forum but I assume it's the same bug)

Cheers,
John

[Neale Eckstein]

I've got the same problem on an 8 core Mac with Pt9.01 and OSX 10.6.6. Very troubling.

[Fullsound Recording]

The only way I have to work around this is to be sure to close / collapse the playlist as you are adding them or creating new ones. As well when editing be sure to always have the tracks grouped. when making comp track create a new play list then name it comp and start building from there.

The whole thing can go real bonkers fast if you are not carful.
If it does go bonkers just UN group and set the order straight again. It takes a while but it will go back.

Set backups for 50 and every 1min
Then at the very least you can go back a couple and so on