Tracks Disappear

[AG]

I reopened a session that had 30 MIDI & Instrument tracks along with 8 audio tracks an Aux track and a Master fader track and only the audio tracks were there. All the other tracks were gone. Panic!
There were no MIDI tracks, but the MIDI files were in the region bin.
Luckily I was able to bring the session back from a backup restore. The revived session had all my playback settings changed, if that means anything.
I didn't have any tracks hidden and am sure I didn't delete any tracks.
What could cause this to happen? I've had corrupted sessions before, but never anything this severe.
I need to make sure this doesn't happen again!
Any help appreciated.

PT-HD v.7.2 Mac OS 10.4.11

[crizdee]

I reopened a session that had 30 MIDI & Instrument tracks along with 8 audio tracks an Aux track and a Master fader track and only the audio tracks were there. All the other tracks were gone. Panic!
There were no MIDI tracks, but the MIDI files were in the region bin.
Luckily I was able to bring the session back from a backup restore. The revived session had all my playback settings changed, if that means anything.
I didn't have any tracks hidden and am sure I didn't delete any tracks.
What could cause this to happen? I've had corrupted sessions before, but never anything this severe.
I need to make sure this doesn't happen again!
Any help appreciated.

PT-HD v.7.2 Mac OS 10.4.11

Hi,

Possible you had them selected? either in a group or seperately and un-knowingly pressed delete on your qwerty keyboard!! oops gone, do this just prior to save and Voila!!

10.4.11 is quite new for 7.2!! and not qualified, but unlikely to be the problem.

Chris

[AG]

Hi,

Possible you had them selected? either in a group or seperately and un-knowingly pressed delete on your qwerty keyboard!! oops gone, do this just prior to save and Voila!!

10.4.11 is quite new for 7.2!! and not qualified, but unlikely to be the problem.

Chris

Thanks Chris, no they weren't grouped and they weren't selected. Another thing, I forgot to mention, is that although the Audio tracks were there, there was no audio in any of the tracks or the region bin. Totally weird. Still working with the restored session and no more problems so far over the past three days. I'm pretty anal when it comes to organization, so I doubt this is operator error. Anything is possible, but I'm with you in thinking the OS isn't the problem. Has anyone ever even heard of this happening before?

[crizdee]

Hi,

Were the audio regions recorded into this session? or were they imported? I did mess up long ago when i imported audio files into a session and selected to play them from their original location instead of copying them into the sessions audio folder! when i at a later date re-loaded the session i had deleted the files from the original location, not realizing they wern't in the sessions audio folder. the tracks were their but empty!!

only other time i actually lost files and regions was a problem with a quicktime update that changed my audio files to the quicktime logo and PT just got confused with them.

Chris

[AG]

Hi,

Were the audio regions recorded into this session? or were they imported? I did mess up long ago when i imported audio files into a session and selected to play them from their original location instead of copying them into the sessions audio folder! when i at a later date re-loaded the session i had deleted the files from the original location, not realizing they wern't in the sessions audio folder. the tracks were their but empty!!

only other time i actually lost files and regions was a problem with a quicktime update that changed my audio files to the quicktime logo and PT just got confused with them.

Chris

Thanks again Chris, I've done that before too. Some of the files I recorded and some were imported into the session from a collaborator. All reside in the proper session audio folder. It's like someone broke in and stole the tracks and the audio, while I was sleeping
Seriously, I've been using ProTools for 15 years, for editing, mixing, recording and composing and of all the weird things that have happened along the way, they all pale in comparison to this.
Can anyone from Digi confirm that this has EVER been reported?

[crizdee]

Hi,

Can you upload the session? no audio just the session .ptf www.sendspace.com

Chris

[AG]

Hi,

Can you upload the session? no audio just the session .ptf www.sendspace.com

Chris

Done. The duplicate has my email.
Thanks,

[crizdee]

Done. The duplicate has my email.
Thanks,

Hi,

Can you put the sendspace link up here! copy paste from your e-mail.

Chris

[AG]

Hi,

Can you put the sendspace link up here! copy paste from your e-mail.

Chris

http://www.sendspace.com/file/y3vhfq

I can also send the session that was restored, if that will help.

[crizdee]

Hi,

Looking at the session it is as you say, everything is missing. no regions in the edit window or regions bin. the disk allocation and file paths didn't show anything either, absolutely no reference to any other files being in the session.

I personally haven't seen this kind of thing posted very often, so i suspect it is a one off anomoly! session corruption or something quite unusualy that may of caused it.

My suspicion was that maybe you imported these audio files and didn't have "automatically copy files on import" selected in the processing / prefs!! which would mean they would not be stored in the audio folder, but would have been read from say the desktop etc and would have been lost when the session was copied or backed-up. but there was no reference of them anywhere in the session. so a bit of a mystery.

You know this stuff anyway!! but to recap,I guess keep auto backup on and back up the session to another drive partion as often as you can. keep automatic updates switched off and don't update or upgrade anything till you have finished all current projects.

Chris