I had posted part of this in the Issues forum, but I do not have time to wait for the approval.
Here is part one of my problem:
"I have spent some time EQing two guitar tracks, they are soloed.
Once I unsoloed each one to hear them in the mix, one of the channels went dead. The only way to get it going again was to stop and start playback. Sometimes doing it just once can do it, other times it takes a few goes.
Bypassing and deactivating the inserts on the problematic channel when it was dead did not make a difference, so the 3rd party plugin was not at fault."
Part 2 of the problem is why I am posting this here.
The guitar track which died cuts out at a regular spot now, there is no automation causing this, it just dies. I have also noticed that the vocal track is jumbled up, some words being sung way out of time of where they should be. I also have the odd low frequency “blip” sound coming from somewhere.
Depending on where I click the timeline in order to start playback, I get a series of errors from dead tracks which were working elsewhere in the project to audio blips and short dropouts. A number of tracks can also be quite out of time with the song.
Now, my inclination and what I will have to do is reload the project, but this tends to be alarmingly frequent.
How does the waveform look when you open the sample editor from the pool? Does it play in another program like Wavelab or simply Windows media player?
I remember corrupted files that looked good in the project (probably a previous image file in use) but were faulty for some reason. Select, bounce and replace to see what you get (if it still looks good then the problem is at least not the audio file).
Thanks for the reply. All files are good. The errors in Cubase, in terms of their placement on the time line, are a mix of regular and random, with more of the latter.
After a restart of Cubase, the project is fine, but this has happened a few times in the recent past with a variety of projects. Not the most professional thing to happen with clients around!
Are you by any chance switching in and out of Musical mode.
I had a track that after editing simply would not follow the other tracks on the timeline after switching to Musical mode. My only solution after trying for hours to find what made that one track unique, was to perform a Render In Place, and delete the original track.
The issue seems to be a fundamental clusterf**k with Cubase. For no reason at all, a random set of tracks would lose temporal coherence with the song, snares and vocals being the most obvious examples. Other tracks would either randomly cut out or cut out at a seemingly similar or regular spot.
Of the dead tracks, manipulating their insert on/off and bypass switches did nothing. Sometimes a stop and start of playback would resolve the issue. Ultimately a restart of Cubase fixed it, but it has happened a number of times.
How about deleting your image files from the project’s Images folder and making Cubase recreate them on restart… Not sure what CSH files do exactly but I believe they get recreated too.
I have a couple of video examples of the problem. This is on a new project which I have only started mixing around an hour ago.
In Video One, you can hear two electric guitars. One is out of time with the other and extremely jumbled up. I move to the project window to confirm that the wave form shows both guitars should be playing the same thing, and that the plugins have been bypassed on the problem GTR.
Video Two shows just the drum tracks in the mix (GTRs muted) but one of the GTR tracks is somehow getting into the kick track, jumbled up as before.
I have just deleted the Image and CSH files to see how that goes. If it happens again, I will see how the trial of C8.5 gets on and hope that it is a C8 bug.
Sounds like it could be a dodgy plugin… at what point in your process did this start to happen?
Can you go through your ‘bak’ files in order and see if they all have the same issue…
Myself an others have had all kinds of weirdness with the newer Plugin Alliance stuff and some people have had issues with Waves too, even if they’re not on the track/s affected, so by back tracking and finding out WHEN the problem started to occur by process of elimination is the smart thing to do… some people have had/are still having issues with VCAs and channel linking so try removing your links…
What type drive are you running your audio from? if it’s an HD how’s its fragmentation status?.. all kinds of things could cause this type of problem.