CRASH. Where did my audio clips go!?!?!?

[artifice]

Hi,

I'm totally new to Tracktion. Today was my second session of using it, but I feel pretty comfortable in the environment already.

However, I just encountered a extremely serious problem.

After two hours of work, Tracktion froze up and crashed. I was also running ACID 2.0 and a couple Mozilla windows, on a WinXP machine with plenty o' RAM. I almost never have software crash on me under such light usage conditions. Is Tracktion always this unstable?

Then, when I restarted Tracktion and reloaded my project, all my audio was gone! The clips are there in the positions where I placed them, but there is nothing in them. I am having to re-associate each clip with its audio by using the "Search for missing material" command.

This is giving me an extremely bad feeling. I was sold on Tracktion as a great, easy-to-use, powerful, and STABLE application. If this kind of thing happens routinely, Tracktion is not going to work for me.

Can anyone shed any light? Much thanx in advance.

[IIRs]

Tracktion is always extremely stable for me.

The free version of Acid totally screwed my machine however..

[artifice]

A possibly relevant fact: Shortly before the crash, I had edited an audio clip that was in my Tracktion mix, using an external app (ACID). I re-rendered a WAV file from ACID, using the same name as before.

Could this have caused Tracktion to crash? Why would all the audio clip associations be lost?

Also, I see now that some of the work I'd done before the crash was also lost -- some tracks are missing completely. This sucks.

[artifice]

OK, I'm doing some testing.

I saved my edit, closed Tracktion, used ACID to re-render an audio clip that's part of the Tracktion edit, saved the clip with the same name as before, and re-opened the edit. Everything was fine -- no missing audio, and the mix sounded A-OK.

Test #2: I saved my edit, left Tracktion open this time, re-rendered the clip in ACID, and again saved it with the same name as before. Tracktion is still performing normally.

Hmm. I hope the incident earlier this evening was an extremely rare fluke. I've had crashes and lost work in other programs, but I've never had all my audio clip associations lost. That could cost days of work. Of course I'm saving copies of my edits as I go... but the audio clips were actually missing entirely from the project after the crash.

[Mr. Tingle]

that is weird, Tracktion has been stable in regard to totally random meaningless crashes for me.

[Beno]

Well there are actually two problems you are reporting. The crash itself, and why the clips went missing. Now I'm not sure why it crashed, and that is probably something that will be hard to figure out. But I have recreated the missing clips. Philip actually found this and reported it to me last week. Basically, saving an edit doesn't save the project so the edit knows there are clips there but the project doesn't know that new files were added. Here's a way to duplicate it. Make a new edit. Import a audio file to the edit somewhere. Save your edit and force quit tracktion (using the task manager on windows). Now if you relaunch tracktion those files will be missing as you described. So this part of it is a known issue and we will be fixing it. In the meanwhile, you can get your project to save by simply pressing F1, F3 to switch back and forth between the project screen and the edit every now and then as you add new files. Note that recording files in tracktion doesn't show this problem.
Ben

[artifice]

Beno: Thanks for the info. Being a total newbie, I am still getting up to speed on the "project vs. edit" thing. I will be sure to save my project AND my edit when I add new audio.

I wasn't too freaked out by the crashing... even the most stable programs crash occasionally. It was the loss of audio that had me worried.

A couple of questions:

1. Does Tracktion auto-save the current project when it auto-saves the current edit? If this is not default behavior, can I configure it to do so?

2. Is there any known reason that Tracktion would have problems playing an audio clip that has been altered and re-saved with the same name while the edit it's in is open?

I'm used to doing this in ACID: for example, doing lots of small timing and pitch adjustments on a vocal clip in Sound Forge, while an ACID mix containing that clip is open. There will typically be a small disruption to the clip in ACID (I'll have to reset its ACID looping parameters after resaving the clip in Sound Forge), but the overall mix is not affected.

I am hoping that this is not going to be too hard to do in Tracktion...

[Beno]

This type of thing should be no problem, and you shouldn't have the crash you experienced. Indeed many users do similar things all the time and I have not heard of any problems with this method of working. Unfortunately, it was because of the crash that you experienced the problem. Tracktion should save the project every time you save the edit, but you have stumbled accross a situation that this doesn't actually occur. We will get that fixed soon, but in the meanwhile, the easiest way to force Tracktion to save the Project is after you do a quick save of the edit, toggle back and forth to the project screen by pressing F1-F3. In most situations you will never have a problem because Tracktion shouldn't be crashing.
Ben

[djsubject]

artifice?

do you have "use realtime priority mode" disabled in the settings page?

the only time i have known T to crash is with this enabled!

Subz

[artifice]

artifice?

do you have "use realtime priority mode" disabled in the settings page?

Nope.