dlinderyd,
For vocals, I usually record 3-5 takes on different tracks. I sample each take with the listen tool. (speaker icon) If I need to listen to them along with the music track, I just mute all the vocal tracks and then unmute one at a time for listening.
When there are segments to each take that I like, I just scissor them out and drag them to an empty track for the finished take that I like. I then employ Melodyne if needed. It all moves pretty quickly for me because I’ve been using that technique forever. Using lanes may be a bit quicker because you can select a part with the hand in one motion while it would take me 2 snips to select/remove a part.
I tend to think I can be more accurate with the scissor tool than with the hand tool selector. (at least for me) I can cut in the middle of a performance if need be instead of between words.
@Suprawill1, that is old school comping. 
I came over from Sonar several years ago, where we’ve had a similar workflow to Cubase’s for ages, so this way of working with lanes just makes most sense to me. But the best workflow is what gets the job done for you the quickest.
I think I just have to use VariAudio for all the comping and then do the real pitch and timing correction with Melodyne on a flattened final track, until Steinberg has worked this out.
I contacted Melodyne and Steinberg support on this issue. Melodyne replied within a couple of hours. I still haven’t heard anything from Steinberg.
What is really irritating is that we were working on a project which got corrupted, because of the massive ARA-folder, with loads of missing plugins and error messages opening Melodyne edits. It took ages to save the project and even just stopping playback or opening a folder track. And that was on an 18 core i9, 64GB RAM, 4TB M.2-disks workstation, so serious hardware. That was a weekend’s work down the drain. Thanks!
dlinderyd,
Yes, I guess I’m old school. 
I will have to look into lanes in the near future. Just kind of busy to reroute at this juncture.
It must be a humongous maze to restructure the engineering of 2 massive products to have them cooperate. I’m sure it will all get ironed out, it just will be trial and error and I’m confident the best minds are at it right now.
Nice rig by the way! Those M.2 drives are no joke and at 4TB must have been a pretty penny. What speed is the i9 running at?
yes, to do all the comping and then to clean the unused takes and use Melodyne at the very end is the way to go. It is probably obvious to you, but before cleaning the unused takes you can duplicate the track and disable it, just in case you want to change a take later. The disabled tracks disturb visually, but doesn’t use CPU. I do understand in complex project it’s a mess. What did Melodyne reply to you, I use Melodyne too and would be interesting to know, thanks
I would do a Render In Place or a bounce before using any ARA, then it’s only one file that needs to be ehh ARA’d .
But not always practical, when say using Melodyne to tune certain parts of a vocal, just to realize that it is to far off and another “comp” is needed instead.
Comping before doing any pitch and timing correction with Melodyne reduces the symptoms of the problem, but that doesn’t solve the underlying issue, that the ARA implementation in Cubase has to make a new copy of the whole wav-file as soon as you want to edit a small piece of one take and then makes a new copy of the same file when you want to edit a small piece of another take.
You shouldn’t have to do it this way. You should be able to comp and correct at the same time, just as you can with VA. This is also how they sold it already in 2019. The workflow you see in the video below cannot be done with “render in place” to a new track. This is the major recent improvement to Cubase’ ARA implementation and Melodyne. The only problem is that it doesn’t work as advertised.
With the “render in place” workflow, you might as well use the old workflow of “transferring” the audio to Melodyne by recording it in real time. And then the whole development of the ARA technology is pointless. It’s not a workflow that I think many would expect in 2020.
We use disabled track extensively, to keep an archive of things as we move forward in a production, to make the project a bit more manageable and move these tracks to an Archive folder track. But this is to keep the project tidy (and save some CPU), not to make up for flaws in technology implementation.
Melodyne’s support “sort of” acknowledged the issue and claims it is a Cubase issue and that Steinberg should fix it.
Steinberg has yet to reply to my support ticket, 4 days later.
I’d very much like to have the workflow they promise below, so that I can put my €700 Melodyne Studio 5 plugin to use, but currently that isn’t possible in any real-life projects. So, Melodyne will probably continue to sit mostly idle in my plugin folder, as it has for a good few years now. VA is often good enough and currently provides a better workflow that actually works.
thank you to share the Melodyne answer, I do agree with your points and I hope the issue will be resolved in the near future by Cubase developers 
. By the way I didn’t know that using the “transferring” option of Melodyne can be another option, rather than render or bounce, good to know
It is always an option, but then ARA is pointless, as it is with the other two alternatives, which makes the Melodyne workflow a bridge too far in my view.
I still haven’t had any response from Cubase support. It would be nice if they chimed in in this thread.
Has anyone found a solution or explanation to this issue? I haven’t found any solution other than to render and disable the Melodyne tracks, but that erases some of the workflow advantages with ARA2. Also, it doesn’t seem to be all that stable, as ARA/Melodyne edits often seems lost, when disabling Melodyne tracks.
I have also discovered that doing a backup of a project with Melodyne edits, erases all Melodyne edits, as I have reported here, which at least in my book doesn’t qualify as a backup.
What is worse is that I have yet, after över a month, to receive even an acknowledgement from Steinberg support of the issue. This makes me question if we can actually continue to label this as a “Pro” product. The least you can expect from support is at least a reply that they are looking into the issue or dismiss it as WAD (working as designed). But I haven’t even got that. Not a single reply. Is this common with Steinberg?
I´ll jump in just to get notified of some updates on this .
I recently started using Cubase 11 Pro and have been having some serious issues trying to use melodyne in my mixing stage.
I´ve noticed that a good option is to not edit the audio track before doing melodyne tuning (vocals). All events get a bit laggy and the all session gets a bit messed up, from my short period of using cubase. I prefer the melodyne algorithm to the variaudio , sorry Steinberg.
Would be great to have a better user experience in Cubase using melodyne.
I´m not going to mention other daws because all have issues, not appropriate here , but in Reaper this was an issue and is no longer.
Like i said, im new to Cubase so i might be missing some workflow that smooths out the all process.
Thanks all and stay safe.
I just want to thank OP for highlighting this issue. My latest project was slowing to a crawl and my CPU usage was at about 25%. I was pulling my hair out trying to figure out what was going on. I had done 12 or so vocal takes and a few bass guitar and had done some generous comping before going into pitch correction, etc… My ARA folder was 24 GB!
I understand that there’s no official solution, but now I know how to avoid it.
EDIT: Oh man. I went through my project and the de-selected the extension for every clip associated with melodyne. Saved the project, exited, then deleted the contents of ARA folder. After relaunching the project and waiting minutes for it to load, I discovered that Cubase had repopulated that folder and the project continues to move like molasses. Does anyone have any suggestions?
Hi again,
I have now received a reply from Steinberg support after a quick 2-month turnaround from my initial request to first reply. They just asked me to test with the latest 11.0.10 version of Cubase Pro and didn’t acknowledge the issue.
So, I have now tested with all software and Windows updated, and the issue is exactly the same. Whenever I edit a clip in a track with multiple takes it creates a new ARA-file of the same size as all the audio on that track. So, if you have 5 takes of 12 bars it’ll create a new ARA file of 60 bars every time I edit a comped clip as you can see from this image.
.
If I make edits to 2 clips I will have 2 ARA files of 120 bars in total, 3 edits gives me 3 ARA files with 180 bars, you get the picture. This is regardless of how large the clips are that I edit.
In the image above I have edited the first 4 comped clips on the track and as you can see, I have 4 ARA files in the ARA folder, all individually of the same size as all of the audio on the track,
This image just shows the ARA folder after 2 edits but here you see the file size. Compare to the file size of the Audio folder below,
I guess we have to wait another 2 months for a reply from Steinberg. I just hope we won’t have Cubase 11.5 by then, as I can guess what their reply will be
/Donald
We’ve had that issue to. So, we just bounce to save our edits and then disable all Melodyne tracks as standard. That seems to solve it for us. We also save to a completely new project when we’ve done all Melodyne editing and try not to use Melodyne or any other ARA-extension after that.
I’ll double check to make sure all melodyne’d tracks are set to standard. But I think they are. I also rendered everything in place. In any event, yes, I was thinking it might be wise to start a fresh project with the rendered files. It’s just truly bizarre that this is even a thing. Thank you very much for your reply.
I meant that we use the “disable track” feature. Right click on the track with Melodyne extension and select “disable track”. You can always enable it again later if you need to. But bouncing edited tracks to a new project is the safest way to get a clean project to work with.
The CPU issue is very weird, when it shows 25% usage, and it takes 2 minutes just to start or stop playback or even just close a window. We had that too. That’s how we discovered the problem and started fault finding.
That’s interesting. I have disabled the track, but the audio events are still selectable and showed melodyne as the extension. I’ll spend some more time with it to make sure I’ve properly handled things. Regardless, I’m thankful this is a very small project, so moving things shouldn’t be too heavy a lift.
And yes, those time frames are familiar. Minutes to execute simple actions like saving.
Edit: for anyone who sees this and may find it helpful - I was able to deactivate the melodyne extension for all audio events by choosing “select all,” then finding “extensions” in the right click menu. After quite a wait, I received an error message, but it looks like it worked. My ARA folder is now a negligible size and Cubase is relatively snappy again.
Doesn’t that mean that all your Melodyne edits are lost?
Yes, great question. I failed to mention that I did all of that after making sure to render in place. So I had what I needed before removing the data. Of course, that meant I could no longer make changes, but in this case, I was done and content with what I had. I wouldn’t recommend this workflow, but it got me out of a pickle. It works better to do the comping first, then render that to a new track before using melodyne.
Then I think we came up with the similar solutions. We use Melodyne to edit until you think you’re done - render in place - remove the Melodyne tracks. This way it becomes a destructive workflow, unless you keep the old tracks and are very organised. We’ve also found that we often need to go back and edit again or reverse some edits. It becomes very messy and hard to keep track of after a while.
First look at the 11.0.20 update doesn’t seem to solve this problem either, despite Steinberg support saying a couple of months back that 11.0.20 would address this issue.
Hi,
sorry that we were so silently to this thread. Let me try to explain. Every ARA (Audio Random Access) Plug-In needs full access to its audio-source it was applied to. You are talking about comping. Let’s imagine you have a loop recording from 2 - 5 seconds. 3 Times. Then we will have one recording file with a length of 9 seconds. The comping will be presented with 3 lanes and 3 audio events. Now you split the events at position 4. The result will have 6 audio-events. Lane 1 with Event_A (2-4 seconds) Event_B (4-5 seconds). Lane 2 with Event_C (2-4 seconds) and so on. You take the comp-tool and select Event_C (2-4) on Lane_2 and Event_F (4-5) on Lane 3. You apply a transpose of +3 to Event_C and a transpose of -2 to Event_F. Now you load an ARA Extension to Event_C. You are doing your ARA editing. Everything’s fine. Now you decide to resize your split from 4 to 4.5 seconds. Event_A, Event_C and Event_E are resized then from 2 - 4.5 and the rest is resized to 4.5 - 5 seconds. And what do you expect of Event_C and Event_F? The Transpose of +3 and -2 should still be there. And your ARA Plug must give you now access to the audio source from 2 - 4.5. And you expect that the ARA-Plug has the transposed material. Still with me? And to fully give you that experience of Event_C in combination with your ARA Plug an audio temp file will be created in the project_dir/ARA folder - with all the current settings of Event_C. And the audio-file has the same length like the original one. Because you could resize Event_C to it full length (0 - 9). And what about Event_F? Imagine you apply your ARA Plug now to that one, too. Remember, it has a transpose of -2. The ARA Plug needs now full access to that Event, too. Not only the representation of 4.5 to 5, it needs it from 0 - 9 seonds, too. That’s why you will find two ARA files inside your project_dir/ARA folder. “Transpose” was only an example. There are so many possibilities. Musical Mode, DOP, …
But : You pointed out, dlinderyd, that the temp-ARA file is bigger then the original file. 25%. Yes, the temporary ARA file will be saved with a bit-depth of 32 bit. That could be changed, you are right about that one!
And finally. If you are done with your ARA Plug editing - the ARA Plug has been removed - all the ARA temp files will be removed, too. But only when the project has been closed. Not while run-time, because of Undo/Redo. And here in this thread were some reports that the ARA state is lost (Track-Versions, Undo and Redo). Yes, Sorry. It has been fixed with the next service-update.
I hope I could give you some lights to that topic here. If you have questions or critics, please leave them here or write to me.
And if I am not returning to that topic here, please catch me (m.spork (at) steinberg (.) de). In modern times there are so many places we have to be …
Have a nice time,
Michael.