I understand that a thread exists on this topic, and will understand if this post gets folded in with the others. But that thread is now ancient, and this serious, long-standing issue really needs to be dealt with. I’d like to make sure I’m doing my part in promoting action towards a real solution.
It happened again today, even after re-starting both Nuendo with VST Connect Pro and Connect Performer (both the latest versions) after every chapter. Situation as follows:
Initiate VST Connect session, recording a single narrator. Local file appears in the inspector; all’s fine… Event monitors indicate’s all’s well. No red lights-- everything stays green.
Stop recording and immediately go to download HD file. All’s good.
Restart Nuendo on my side and Performer Connect on the client side. Re-establish connection and record next chapter. Finish it, Download HD file. Good again.
Restart Nuendo on my side and performer Connect on the client side. Reestablish connection and record next chapter. Finish it, and go to download HD file. It is not available, and does not exist on the client’s computer.
I can’t list this as a bug, because I can’t predictably repeat it. But it’s happened, apparently randomly, three times on this project alone.
As I mentioned in the other thread, I’m doing my lo-res files at 24 bit, and with Tonal Match and some clip gain I’m able to get acceptable results compared to the HD versions, and we’re running a redundant system on the client end but…
Obviously, this is NOT optimal.
I’m going to keep recording this project (which is going to be a pretty high-profile audiobook) for the next two days, and then will be completing recording in a couple of weeks. I’m very much enthusiastic and willing to work with those of you who are involved in solving VST Connect issues to get to the bottom of this problem. Clearly I’m not the only individual experiencing it.
Please, let’s figure it out! This is such a great way to work, but this little glitch is maddening (and potentially catastrophic, from a production standpoint)!
First thing to try is to ask the Performer to apply the “Export for Local” function (in settings). This will create a zip file that you ask him or her to send to you.
Then load the npr project, unpack and apply “Load Local HD” from the VST Connect plugin.
If this does not reveal lost files, they don’t exsist, have not been recorded successfully, or are unknown to VST Connect for other reasons, like user deleted them, they have some “forbidden” characters (although that is not a known issue anymore), or the system fails to load for other reasons.
I’ve done all of that, and the files do not exist.
The files were not deleted by the user, they apparently simply did. not get recorded on the Performer side.
I want to stress that there is no identifiable difference (for now, anyway-- the whole point of this exercise is to find out what might be going wrong!), between the four steps identified in my first post, other than the files not getting recorded on the Performer side.
Subsequent recordings DO get recorded by Performer., without any apparent change in the process. Internet speeds are good (200mb down, 100 up on my side, 1G up and down on the other side). Events indicators all consistently green and bars full. As I mentioned before, this has happened three times so far in my now six-day project. Starting on day 7 in an hour and a half, and will report back at the end of the day.
As an experiment, I started recording several seconds into the timeline to see if starting at 0:00:00 might be affecting remote HD files’ recording.
We didn’t have as many chapters today, as those we recorded were much longer than yesterday’s, but there were no issues. Will continue to monitor through the session tomorrow, where we’ll likely have more individual files recorded.
Unrelated, but maybe worthy of a feature request:
Internet on the remote side went down once during a long chapter. When back online, we found that the HD file had been recorded up to the point the internet failure. GREAT! And I was able to grab it from the client side HD folder and drop it in., with metadata intact. Also great.
But here’s the question in a case like that: would it be in the realm of possible future features to “reconnect” files to VST Connect once their connection in the manager has been lost?
Clearly, I know nothing of coding or the inner workings of VST Connect, so… just asking.
Will report on session progress at the end of the day tomorrow.
And… today there were no issues with HD files not being recorded on the Connect Performer computer.
To recap from yesterday, the only thing I changed was to give the project plenty of preroll when hitting record. There are a few more sessions in store for this project, and I’ll. continue to report back.
But spending so much time with VST Connect over the past couple of months, this being my second long project in a row using it (they’re not sending us out on location as much as they used to!), I’m going to report whatever issues have been consistently coming up.
One particularly troubling situation we’ve been running into with this project is the degradation of sync over time. For instance, starting with an event monitor with solid green bars and no red “leds”, after an hour or more of recording the sync indicators (on the Studio side) show markedly lower levels., and ultimately dropouts start to occur. Stopping recording and starting again typically resets things to an acceptable level, but we had to shut down and restart a couple of times today.
Internet connection tests for both sides were at full capacity, at speeds reported in previous posts.
I also had a very strange situation where , after downloading an HD file, it could not be moved in the timeline. It was not locked in place by me. Apparently, somehow the track got corrupted; creating a new audio track and dragging the event to it solved the problem.
And that’s today’s situation in a nutshell.
Whatever issues there may be, working with VST Connect is vastly superior to what alternatives I’d have to contend with (Zoom, FTP, etc). Thanks to everybody who’s making this stuff work. It’s super, and my comments here are not complaints-- I want to participate in it’s being the best it can be.
I just wrapped recording this long audiobook project-- 9 days total., conducted between California and Tennessee. All of the specs, internet and software-wise, just as described earlier in the thread.
For the most part, recording worked really well, BUT:
Today, again there were two instances of recordings not appearing on the Connect Performer computer. By that I mean two non-consecutive instances out of five attempted downloads of individual files, where internet connection (the event monitor) was indicating well (no red leds and meter full or close to full on both the Studio and Performer sides).
I was recording at full res (24 bit/44.1) and nothing was lost; the local files, as @musicullum said, are absolutely workable.
Yesterday’s internet situation was a little more fraught; though we didn’t have any issues with HD files not being recorded on the Performer side, and I was able to download every file, we were having some internet problems, and internet-related audio glitches on MY (the studio) side also appeared in the Performer side in the downloaded HD files. That’s not supposed to happen, is it?
The bottom line: I’m very happy with VST Connect as a rule, and won’t hesitate to keep using it, but this issue of HD files not being recorded on the Performer side is troubling. I’ve experienced it on multiple projects in multiple scenarios on different computers.
Again, as someone who finds the software very useful and full of promise, I’d be highly motivated to participate in practical work to identify the source of these issues and/or help get the bugs out! Please, let’s do it.
No. Recordings on the Performer end are entirely independent from any connection issues.
These are recorded straight from the source to file. If there are glitches in those recordings, they are caused by internal problems such as too low a buffersize or running other audio (or other) software at the same time etc on the Performer computer.
That’s what I thought, but how then do we explain why the same glitches appear identically in both the local and downloaded HD files? That’s absolutely what has happened. Examples can be provided. And those anomalies occurred on both sides during what appeared to be an internet glitch. I would have expected the local file to have the glitch, but not the Performer side.
sure, if the glitches are produced by audio engine/interface problems on the Performer end, they will be present in both local recordings, and transmitted audio. I would expect the Performer to complain about glitches in playback too, though, because even though the signal gets through clean, those internal audio problems should cause glitches when playing back the received signal as well.
But they weren’t produced by the interface. The files from our redundant system tapped out of the same interface do NOT present the glitches, and were the saving grace for these files.
My understanding was that Performer records directly from source->interface->Performer ->Performer computer, and then sent to Nuendo (in my case). Am I mistaken?
I guess I’m not comprehending why the glitches would show up on both the Performer and Nuendo files-- HD and otherwise, but not in the direct stream from the interface.
I’m in the process of batch-processing my files for this project in RX.
It appears that all of the HD files from one of the recording days (about 3 gigs’ worth), although they play in Nuendo, are unable to be processed in RX— it won’t accept them. Further investigation shows that they can’t be previewed in the Finder, either.
My workaround was to bounce them to disk in Nuendo, rename and replace them in the project, and the bounced files are fine. But whatever happened… if it’s a header issue, or whatever, was unique to that day— and the VST Connect process, by all indications.
Ultimately no harm done, but maybe worth looking into?
That is highly unusual, then there must be yet another issue on the Performer machine.
The local recording function literally takes raw data right from the input, and writes to file after conversion to file format. From there, it splits it to the input channel from where it is beeing sent to network (possibly after applying local fx). It is almost impossible that those recordings are corrupted when there is no issue with the interface. Are you absolutely sure?
However, what I’m not sure about is some potentially relevant variables in this case-- primarily how long the Performer Mac had been running without a restart/reboot. As a rule, we had been at least restarting Performer after every chapter, but I do not have notes documenting that in this case, for which I apologize. We’d been finding that a fresh start of Performer could lead to a more robust internet connection, for whatever reason, as sometimes the connection seemed to degrade over time, especially over the course of 2hr+ chapters, and did not recover without a restart/reboot/ sometimes modem reset. I’m not qualified to even conjecture why this would be the case; only that it did happen and that these restarts seemed to make a difference. I’ve had this experience with previous projects as well. My predisposition is to blame it on the consistency of the studio side’s connection, but again… what do I know? Not much about that.
Chewy
PS I’d like to add that these issues did not dominate our VST Connect experience. This was a pretty long project, and we put machines on both sides through their paces getting it done. And we did get it done, without too much issue. But anomalies did appear; the most troubling being:
The local files not being recorded by Performer from time to time
The glitches that occurred when connection started getting spotty (whenever that happened, we’d reboot on both sides and that seemed to bring connection and sync back to usable).
Occasional loss of connection to files on the Performer computer (yes, we were able to get those from “get local files”, but wouldn’t it be great if the software could scan and detect HD files that have haven’t been downloaded and make them available? I think so).