Cloud Collaboration is a joke

[crimsonronin]

This has seriously been the most time wasting experience ever. I really wanted this product to work (since collaboration is something that is really needed!), but there are so many issues so far.

1. Freezing a number of tracks at the same time, ironically froze my computer instead, and hence I had to hard restart. After doing so I couldn't open my cloud project as the local cache had been corrupted. I had to remove cache and re-download the project....which was missing a bunch of stuff I had just done before the crash.
2. I restored all my project and now it's saying there's missing fades....which means when I unfreeze the tracks, half of the wav file is gone where the fade was.
3. I cannot remove tracks from the cloud storage, so I've alread yconsumed 7GB for 1 track. I tried:
** Deleting
** Unsharing
** Unsharing then deleting
But all the tracks still remain....I can't get rid of them!
4. And, as I write this, I tried to open the project again, and it failed. Stuck loading a wav file. I guess I'm going to have to clear local cache and re-download the whole project AGAIN!!

This is serious a joke. You cannot release a product that is this unstable. I think you should consider taking this off the market until it becomes more stable, because this has wasted a huge amount of my time. Luckily I haven't trusted it enough to record anything new...because losing files would of really pissed me off.

Im going back to regular PT sessions and dropbox, and unsubscribing from this worthless product.

I am very very unhappy. Almost to the point I would even consider switching DAWs.....

[junkgear]

Welcome to the forums and I'm sorry to hear about your troubles with cloud collaboration. If you feel inclined to do so, please open up a support case with Avid for this problem. I know it's very frustrating, but the only way the product is going to get better is if they have a clear understanding of the issue. Although detailed well here, there are certain logs that Avid can gather to help pinpoint the problem when working directly with you.

[Logichead]

Dropbox
Email and Skype
WeTransfer

In concert these are superior to Cloud Collaboration.

Free
Any version of PT works
Cross platform compatible, even across different OS, iOS
Easy

If you need more security (never been an issue for me but if you need to track what your users are doing) you can pay for upgraded versions of Dropbox and WeTransfer.

Avid needs to stop wasting money on this boondoggle.

Best...H

[YYR123]

Originally Posted by Logichead

Avid needs to stop wasting money on this boondoggle

Pretty Much. But hey at least they can say they have it......it might not work but at least they have it.


I tried to sign into my account via the Application Manager so I could authorize Media Composer First and it wasn't working.

They release a new product and don't verify that people can sign in and utilize the product? Prior to release that is....

I started a case......the answer was keep trying b/c support is aware of this issue.

Sad, they couldn't even grant me access to a free product.

[Barry Johns]

The fact that this section of the forum was started a year and a half ago and it has a total of a whopping 90 post.

That tells us, no one is using it, if they were there would be a lot more traffic, positive as well as negative.

[Darryl Ramm]

Of course almost nobody is using this. It does not take a genius to see why. My suspicion is this was largely top-down pushed ******** from people who really do not understand what most real end-users want or need. Likely in part just pushed because of the perception that all the cool software kids are doing cloud. It is beyond me why Avid did not start with proving out simple stuff like online session sharing (and backup/archive) and grow a user community and learn as they go. Way back with the Gobbler integration fiasco, Avid should have just started simple and grow and learnt. Including providing support for users on old Pro Tools versions. Instead we get overly complex stuff that does not work well.... I guess if you can lead software development or product management/strategy you don't work at Avid.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[BobK88]

I have to agree that PT collaboration is a joke in its current state. So is the support, unfortunately. I've spent about six hours troubleshooting in the past week or two, maybe more.

Today Pro Tools 12 deleted all three Projects in my local Cache, and I'm unable to download them from the cloud: When I click on a Project in the Dashboard, the Dashboard disappears and nothing happens. Task Manager remains empty.

If I had a hard deadline, I'd be in serious trouble.

I've been in touch with Avid support, but so far, nothing has been resolved.

Today they told me there are known collaboration bugs in 12.8 and to go back to 12.7. I did a clean manual uninstall of 12.8 (except for plugins) and installed a freshly-downloaded 12.7.1. Didn't help at all.

They also said there's a problem with the cloud servers. They had no details, no estimate of when it will be fixed, and no way to monitor the status of the cloud service.

Earlier today, I saw all three of my Projects in the local Project Cache. Later, they were all gone. PT deleted them.

The support agent asked me if I had a local copy in Session form that I could work on. Are you effing kidding?

The Reference Guide makes no mention of using Project-to-Session conversion as a backup option - only as something you do when you're done collaborating and want to free up some space on the cloud. It would be time-consuming and inefficient for backing up, though of course now I wish I'd done it.

The combination of the local Project cache and the "Backup to cloud" option are supposed to have you covered.

In addition to the issues mentioned above, others include:

- Inconsistency between online status shown in the Dashboard and under the File menu.

- PT saying I wasn't connected to the internet when I was. This happened mainly when I tried to Sign In from the Dashboard. (I'm connected via Ethernet, and have had no other internet connectivity problems.)

- Getting a blank window after selecting File > Sign In

- Slow upload and/or download, even of small changes not involving audio data

- Failed downloads with varying error messages in Task Manager

- PT not seeing the local cache and downloading everything from the cloud. This happened multiple times. I'm pretty sure that in some cases the local cache did exist, though I didn't check multiple times during a troubleshooting session until today, when I discovered that caches I'd seen a few minutes earlier were now gone.

- "First invite shares all tracks" Preference enabled by default on my colleague's and my systems, even though it shouldn't have been.

- Cloud storage meter was blank. This is a known issue, and it went away - maybe after I signed out and signed back in. I don't remember exactly because I was trying to resolve bigger issues.

When it has worked, it's been more convenient than Dropboxing audio files. But the time my colleague and I have spent troubleshooting has probably negated any benefit of PT collaboration.

Avid should be ashamed.

EDIT: The day after writing the above post, I was able to download the Projects and save them as Sessions. After multiple failed attempts in PT 12.7.1, I installed 12.8 from App Manager, and then was able to download the Projects. There were still problems, though:

- PT said there were 22 revisions of one of the Projects. I'm confident that half of those (or less) were real, actual revisions done by me and my colleague, and that the rest were likely due to the bug(s).

- One of the bugs they mentioned involved PT duplicating audio files and uploading/downloading them unnecessarily; my cloud storage went from around 43 percent a few days ago to 55 percent earlier today to 59 percent by late afternoon, all without any new files from me or my colleague.

- When I closed the Projects, PT said there were changes to be uploaded, even though I'd done nothing more than press "Play." When I selected "close", it started uploading anyway. When I canceled the task in Task Manager, in one case there was still disk activity in one of the Audio Files folders in the Project Cache bundle: files were being added and then deleted. This continued for several minutes until I quit PT.

There was more, but that's enough for now.

[Peter Cole]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

Of course almost nobody is using this. It does not take a genius to see why. My suspicion is this was largely top-down pushed ******** from people who really do not understand what most real end-users want or need. Likely in part just pushed because of the perception that all the cool software kids are doing cloud. It is beyond me why Avid did not start with proving out simple stuff like online session sharing (and backup/archive) and grow a user community and learn as they go. Way back with the Gobbler integration fiasco, Avid should have just started simple and grow and learnt. Including providing support for users on old Pro Tools versions. Instead we get overly complex stuff that does not work well.... I guess if you can lead software development or product management/strategy you don't work at Avid.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Those leading the project (technical) quit when it was announced at NAB I believe. That should tell ya something. Avid has bigger problems. I seriously doubt they will ever convince users they need to buy the next incarnation of HDX whenever that happens.

I plan on trying Cloud Colaboration on a project I start early next year but first I need to investigate the security aspects of it. I've been waiting quite some time for RocketNetwork functionality to come back from the ashes. So many hacks happening these days. SneakerNet may be the safest method of colaboration.

[BobK88]

Originally Posted by Peter Cole

Those leading the project (technical) quit when it was announced at NAB I believe.

Do you have a source for that?

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by BobK88

Do you have a source for that?

He may be referring to Lombardi et al. http://www.pro-tools-expert.com/home...o-gobbler.html

Gobbler didn't do so well, all those folks are elsewhere now. Avid sued Gobbler for unfair competition for hiring those folks.

Avid could have done better by not putting any effort into collaboration and just fixing issues with Pro Tools.