This issue is resolved for me, but I am posting it in case it helps others to diagnose these symptoms and avoid a lengthy troubleshooting process.
I was randomly experiencing extremely bizarre waveform display and playback behavior in Nuendo 5 and 6. It turned out to be due to my external USB hard drive being too slow, and/or because it has a sleep mode. The solution was to move projects to a faster hard drive. This seems obvious to me now, but when this issue first started to randomly occur, it had me stumped as to the cause.
When Nuendo cannot access project assets from the hard drive at adequate speeds, it does not provide any obvious warning or error messages stating this. Or at least it did not for me. It doesn’t seem able to detect and warn about this condition. Instead, I encountered the symptoms that follow:
-Region waveforms would appear to be drawn correctly and displayed correctly (they match what I know the source material to be), but then when I playback I get silence and occasional bursts of loud digital or white noise.
-If I zoom in horizontally on the waveform, at some point of magnification the waveform suddenly changes visually, to a completely different waveform that displays the “corrupted” version of the waveform. I can then see a bunch of silence, and a few certain points where the digital noise occurs. This waveform corresponds correctly to what I hear if I try to play the region.
-When zooming back out horizontally, the waveform suddenly snaps back visually to the other previous waveform (that matches the source material, but does not match what I hear if I press play). I thought I had a corrupted project file or something like that.
-If I closed and re-open the project, it was random whether certain regions would exhibit corrupted behavior.
-Upon moving projects to a faster hard drive, these problems disappeared.
I’ve had quite a few problems with waveform displays since Nuendo 5 - currently on 6.5. I occasionally have to process a 0db gain to the event to get the proper wave form back. This has happened on multiple systems, and regardless of the source drive (external, internal SSD, internal HDD) and regardless of processor, motherboard or operating system (OSX, Windows 7, Windows 8.1). I’m so used to it now, it’s one of the many weird things this software does that seem to be just part of the wonderful experience.
Then I suggest something is weird on your system. I have never had an issue like you described. The closest is when I try to use a project from our network storage which does not allow changes to be made to that drive. Could your issue be due to a drive or network that is restricting permissions ???
Like I said, 10 years with Nuendo, N3 and N6, XP or Win-7. No issues like you describe.
Can’t say I ever had that problem, either.
There very rarely were waveform probs in N3 and N4, but never since.
If this occurs on several systems, even with different OS, it might be worth to check on software or plugs that exist
on all those machines … I fear this can become a rather tedious task, though.
This is the second time I’ve currently encountered this exact same problem described by the original poster:
-Region waveforms would appear to be drawn correctly and displayed correctly (they match what I know the source material to be), but then when I playback I get silence and occasional bursts of loud digital or white noise.
-If I zoom in horizontally on the waveform, at some point of magnification the waveform suddenly changes visually, to a completely different waveform that displays the “corrupted” version of the waveform. I can then see a bunch of silence, and a few certain points where the digital noise occurs. This waveform corresponds correctly to what I hear if I try to play the region.
-When zooming back out horizontally, the waveform suddenly snaps back visually to the other previous waveform (that matches the source material, but does not match what I hear if I press play). I thought I had a corrupted project file or something like that.
Running a very simple session off of an external 4TB Western Digital USB hard drive with Win 7 Pro 64-bit, Nuendo 6.5.40 32bit, Core i7, 12GB RAM, nVidia GTX770, Asus motherboard, RME-Audio UFX via USB. I believe it’s a USB 2 port I have the hard drive connected to. If I copy this session onto my internal hard drive, the problem goes away. If I remember correctly, I don’t get the same issues playing the problem audio file in Nuendo’s Sample Editor, but don’t quote me. Sound Forge 10 and foobar2000 play the problem audio file fine off the external hard drive. The first time I encountered this problem, I was playing a different (and much more complicated) session off of the same hard drive but on a Win laptop with its internal sound. Seems like Nuendo might not like something specific to my external hard drive or maybe the way certain external hard drives are configured. I also have a large audio library on this same hard drive and I’ve noticed lots of corrupted waveforms when inspecting them in Media Bay, even though the audio auditions fine in Media Bay. I suspected something wrong with my external hard drive, but I believe I ran chkdsk on it which reported everything was fine. I would love to hear if you have had this issue, and what you’ve done since.