BUG: Automation detaches from track, corrupts session

Cubase
1

Seems my knocking on wood in another thread didn’t help. This happened well into a feature film project, so it looks like gradual session corruption and therefore I won’t even try to find the steps to reproduce it right now… But posting this so that people can be on the lookout for this, as this is a serious session-corrupting bug.

Here’s what it looks like after it has occured:

Note that those lines are not opened automation lanes for the tracks, but separate “tracks”. I can drag them anywhere. In fact they appeared elsewhere in the session, and at first I didn’t have any idea what they were. But then I realized four MIDI tracks were missing an automation lane, so I dragged them next to each one. Still, the original tracks (the ones with names) refuse to open any automation lanes whatsoever, so clearly they’re broken basically.

The session opened with these separate tracks still having automation a second ago. I tried deleting one of them and now they show up empty and Cubase just freezes after a few seconds.

Had this happen on Windows 7 x64, Cubase 6.0.1 32-bit.

Again, no idea of the steps to reproduce this yet, but I’ll post more if I figure it out. Now just need to get going from a backup quickly and hope this doesn’t happen too often… Keep hitting that “Save New Version” shortcut everyone.

2

Just to update, even an older version of the session does the same thing now. It plays just fine (including the detached automation), but e.g. dragging tracks to different order doesn’t work if I try to move the detached automation first. The numbers on the tracks change though when dragged…

Not sure any of this is useful though, it’s just standard corruption weirdness I suppose. At this stage I suppose the best thing to do is to just export the tracks and import to a new session.

EDIT: Exporting the tracks to a track archive and importing to a new session STILL won’t allow showing volume automation for the affected tracks. They default to Pan and selecting Volume from the list does nothing. Interesting.

3

Maybe you’re experiencing this?:

/A

4

Thanks for the suggestion. I’m not using the track divider though, so that’s why I initially didn’t think of that bug. But certainly the behavior is the same with regards to the automation.

I’m not able to reproduce the bug without using the track divider as described in that link (following the steps otherwise), so there may be something more to it when it occurs without the divider. I’ll keep looking…