Hi everyone, I come back to this topic with new content.
I’ll try to add as much relevant information as possible as the issue is quite complex.
Let’s resume :
-
Automation Follows Events must be enabled in Preferences,
- The automation need to be for Toggle parameter (On/Off like Mute, Bypass, etc),
- There must not be any node placed between the start of the Event and the value change.
The first node should then be placed outside or the bug won’t occur.
Expand the parts below to show details and images.
Please read carefully, the issue is very serious, more than what has been discussed already.
Part 1
This first image depicts the initial setup, as indicated by the three points above.
I did the test with the Mute automation but you can reproduce it with any other on/off parameter.
As you can see, the first node is placed half a bar before the Event.
If we move the Event, a gap (different value) is created between the start of the Event and the second automation node.
It doesn’t matter the direction or distance of the Event displacement, here I have just moved it one beat to the right.
Now let’s try with the first node closer to the Event, like this :
The gap is now much smaller.
And now with the node much further :
Here’s the result, the gap is now bigger and the node shows the Off State.
Nevertheless, in the present case, it still behaves as if it was in the On state when reading the automation, so it will still play normally, but it is very important to take note of this, because it means that only the bottom “real Off” position actually acts as Off, I will explain that in Part 3.
Part 2
We saw that the location of the left node interacts with the gap height, but the second node also interacts the same way, except it’s the other way around, the closer it is to the left of the Event, the bigger the gap, and the further it is from it, the smaller the gap.
Of course the location of the two nodes combine and leads to various gap height.
It also occurs when the right node is outside the Event, as the gap keeps getting smaller :
Part 3
And now as a third and most important part, let’s try the same thing with the automation inverted.
The nodes are in the same place, only the On/Off states are inverted :
In this case, the gap is also inverted when moving the Event, and because of that the automation becomes broken, in the meaning that since the real Off state is at the very bottom of the automation lane, and because it now fills the gap instead of creating one, there’s no longer a real Off state, and all the automation will play as On state !!!
And last but not least, when re-placing the Cursor in front of the Event / broken automation during playback, the meters show a brief activity and we can hear a click, and it proves that this “in-between” value isn’t supposed to be there and causes the audio engine to do weird stuff internally.