Copy Paste Problem. Don't Have A Work Around. Could Use One!

[Willard]

With some sessions copy and paste just doesn't work and gives me a spinning beach ball and a quit as soon as I press "Apple-C." Following are the details.

I'm concerned here with circumstances where I take every track in a session and move or copy it to a new position. Something I do daily, sometimes hourly. Although it doesn't sound as though anyone else has any problems with cutting and pasting in Pro Tools, but for that one lone person who's life is as miserable as mine when it comes to this area of non-productivity, here are some problems I have encountered in the past year to either rearrange material (like making tape edits), or move material from one time code position to another, and some marginally unuseful non-solutions. The material is generally to picture and contains meter and tempo changes. Selecting material between two points and either copying or cutting, will result in the spinning beach ball and a quit before reaching the paste command. This doesn't happen in every session. It was perhaps more prevalent in v6.x sessions opened in v7.0, but still seems to occur in fresh 7.x sessions too with some regularity.

Operations that may or may not help.

i) Delete track option: Delete one track at a time, copying and pasting all material after each delete. If you have 50 tracks this will result in 50 "quits" if the problem is at track 50. This has worked where I believe a midi part was the culprit. This doesn't mean that a "corrupt part" is always the reason. See ii). This option is too laborious to undertake regularly.

ii) Disable/deinstantiate RTAS/TDM VI plug-ins (Spectrasonics/Kontakt etc). On one occasion doing this meant I could then copy and paste without further incident. I could then "import session data" of plug-in settings and I was back to normal. I thought RTAS was the real culprit, but Indigo (TDM) has been a source of maleficent behaviour too. No guarantee of success here.

iii) Option-Drag: First copy and paste your rulers: meters, markers and tempos (as drag and copy does not support this function, yet!?). Then select your track material and press option and drag the selection to the new position. It has worked in the past, but it didn't work for me today. A relatively quick and painless route so worth a shot.

iv) New session and import session data. This has never worked for this problem, although it has cured plenty of others.

v) Duplicate. Set your "in" marker to your current in point and the "out" marker to the new position. Now duplicate. That didn't work today either but it was the first time I'd tried it.

vi) Best option so far! Copy and paste one track at a time. Copy and paste your ruler data, then, either one at a time, or in groups avoiding the auxes, copy and paste audio and midi tracks only to the new position. If you have set your three markers; in, out and new position, then this is fairly painless. Now how to get the automation data from the auxes to the new position? Hopefully you didn't use any. If you did and have any useful solutions as to how to move the volume and trims without copying and pasting, I'm all ears! Copy/Paste Special can also give you a spinning beach ball/quit.

At least now I have it all down in writing, I'll remember what doesn't work for me. What does work for me? A combination of all of the above. I usually waste on average 5-8 hours a week on this. I could be doing something more useful with my time, hence the letter to your goodselves.

For further fun reading, I did post on this subject back in October, 2006 (7.2cs1 copying timeline/tracks quits off screen).

Kevin

[crizdee]

Hello Kevin,

I see you've listen 2 systems at the bottom of your page!! are you getting this quitting problem on both rigs?

My first though was ram! maybe you have a faulty stick that only raises its ugly head when you copy paste many tracks and really have to use the ram storage space.

As many will testify, ram checkers don't always show faults in ram, but it might be worth trying to get it checked out.

Chris

[One Track Music]

I've had this problem recently & narrowed it down to corrupt Aux tracks in my sessions. I deleted & then recreated them & now everything works fine.

Joel

[Willard]

Hey Chris

Thanks for the response and what you say immediately makes complete sense! Hardware hadn't crossed my mind. I'm running Rember (can't deal with memtest and terminal on a Monday morning), but don't necessarily expect to see a problem and fully anticipate having to just swap ram and track it down by trial and error.

We use one rig (pci-x) specifically for copying and pasting, set up and output, and that is the one I have all these issues with. The machine zips along just as well as the pci-e rig in all other respects. I'll put the pci-e machine through the same paces over the next few days and report back.

Many thanks

Kevin

[Willard]

I've had this problem recently & narrowed it down to corrupt Aux tracks in my sessions. I deleted & then recreated them & now everything works fine.

Joel

Hey Joel

Yes, the deleting of the auxes was very strange. By mistake, in my monotony of copying and pasting numerous tracks, I selected a portion on a "corrupt" aux only, not within the boundaries of my original music, and copied that section. No quit!!! I then selected the area between my original markers and bang zoom, spinning ball and quit. So what is it about the auxes that gets corrupted? The volume changes? Strange. But at least, when I'm in a pinch now, I can get through by just avoiding the auxes and moving on. A pain, but workable.

Thanks

Kevin