I wanted to use Melodyne on a project. There was a 4 bar piano bit that needed some note correction. I sliced the problem area into a separate clip and added Melodyne as an extension. It got stuck for a while, then rebooted the computer (Win10).
After trying that twice with the same results, I decided to try the same thing with variaudio. It didn’t reboot, but it took about 20 minutes to get only about 25% through the analysis of those 4 bars, so I had to give up on that.
I had another place in the same project where the snare track had some nasty resonances. Again, I sliced off a small problem area and added Spectralayers as an extension. That did come up with the graphic, but the AL window was unusable. I do use several monitors. But whether I had SL in the lower window on the main screen or if I moved it to its own monitor, I couldn’t see the whole window, so I couldn’t access any of the tools. I couldn’t really go back to C13 for this project because I had already set a bunch of event gain ranges and didn’t want to lose that, so I just used EQ to make the resonances less obnoxious.
It seems like something is not working very well in C14 with extensions. Has anybody noticed problems in this area?
I did some further testing. I creates a new, empty Cubase project, and dragged in only the piano track. That track was about 100 minutes long. I used the split tool to leave only the 4 measures I needed to fix. I added Melodyne to that clip as an extension.
Melodyne started into the polyphonic recognition process. This ran for over 30 minutes, just to look at 4 measures?
It appears that with the ARA implementation, Melodyne must be analyzing the entire file, even when I have trimmed it.
The process did work without crashing, but this is impossible to use on large files. Is there any way to limit the work Melodyne does?
I have found ARA to be generally buggy in Cubase compared to e.g. Reaper (I’ve discussed elsewhere on the forum - I hope they give it some attention!). To avoid Melodyne analyzing the entire file, bounce audio before editing with Melodyne to make a new file and it should only scan that new file.
I tested the same process with Cubase 13 and got the same results, so evidently this is not a new issue with C14. But why is this happening? I thought the whole point of ARA was to access only the part of the file that is needed. I mean, the acronym stands for “Audio Random Access”.
I did a render in place for that clip, then applied the extension. In that case, Melodyne processes the clip in a few seconds. So I guess that is a work-around, but this really doesn’t seem like the way ARA ought to work.
I don’t think we can blame (or credit) Steinberg for ARA:
I’m still ARA sceptical myself and have avoided using it.
One of my big concerns is, that it can easily make the project files blow up to ridiculous sizes.
And that makes a Cubase/Nuendo project file more and more like a file system in itself. And file-systems need to be much more battle-hardened and performant and really should belong to the operating system kernel, not to an app in user-space.
ARA seems just nowhere near the elegance of Steinberg’s internal audio editing facilities, like VariAudio.
Yep, missed it, but that is the answer, not a workaround. Without bouncing or rendering, the short section is still part of the 100 minute track, which is going to take a long time to analyse and, given ARA’s flakiness, may not get to a successful result.
Evidently that is all we can expect from ARA. And that leaves me wondering what is “random access” about this protocol. It seems to me that random access – i.e. jumping to a section in the middle of the WAV – is the WHOLE POINT of ARA. I don’t get what the benefit is if it doesn’t allow efficient processing of short segments.
I realize my use of the DAW may not be most typical. I assume most people use the DAW to work on 3-minute songs, not hour-long programs. But it seems to me the DAW ought to work on longer material.
Sorry, I wasn’t being clear. When you clip a piece of audio from an event and drag it to another track, it is visually separate but, in background, is still a part of the original audio file. This is a Cubase thing, not ARA.
To detach the clip from the original file you have to bounce or render it to a new file. Then you can do what you want with it.
Yes, I understand that. My point is that when they call something “audio random access”, one would reasonably assume that protocol includes the ability to operate on parts of the file without having to read the whole thing. In computer science, that is exactly what “random access” (as opposed to sequential access" has meant since the first hard disk in 1956.
