Issue with dragging audio event to track with fewer lanes

Cubase
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I’m not sure if this is “by design” (and, if so, why that would be) or a bug:

In Cubase Pro 14.0.10 on Windows 10, I’ve been doing some background vocal takes (using cycle record for a section of a song) that accumulate a fair number of take lanes (mainly owing to trying and figure out the parts along the way and extremes of my range issues). So the track I’m using for tracking might accumulate 8-11 takes for a given section (e.g. chorus).

In an earlier session, I’d done the same sort of thing, but, between then and tracking a subsequent song section, I’d comped the first section, moving the selected clips to two different tracks, cleaning up lanes, then editing fades, doing tuning (and various other editing operations), and doing some consolidation on the first song section.

Starting to comp a subsequent section from the original track (i.e. with the raw takes), I was trying to do what I usually do after selecting clips – i.e. drag the selected clips to the tracks I’d configured earlier for the comp results (I’m creating doubles from the same set of takes, thus the two lanes; I’m also preserving what is left of the raw takes in case of future needs for these, be it to change my mind on some comp decision, triple a part, or whatever). However, Cubase wouldn’t allow me to drag the new clips to the tracks with the cleaned-up comp results from the early section. When I tried to drop it on one of the new tracks (above the track with the raw tracks), it would drop it on another lane of the source track.

I initially speculated maybe there was something weird with first clips of the second section, so I went on to the next set of clips. This time, one of the clips I selected did drag and another one didn’t. I tried to find a workaround, and I found that, if I cut and pasted the clip (using the clip info to align the play cursor to the start of the clip I’d be moving since I couldn’t just Ctrl-Drag it), that worked, and I could do that for both clips.

Next up, I tried a different pair of clips I’d chosen for the comp, and one did succeed in dragging, but the other didn’t. So what was the difference?

Looking more closely, the one that didn’t drag that second time had a higher lane number – (at least) one higher than the number of lanes in the destination track. Prior to the cut/paste operations, the destination tracks likely had only one lane (plus the blank additional lane that Cubase always creates). The cut/paste operation must have created enough additional lanes in the destination track to put the pasted clip on the same lane number as it had in the source track. But that operation hadn’t created enough additional lanes to cover all the lanes from the source track, and the clip that I couldn’t drag came from a higher-numbered lane.

Bottom line seems to be that drag and drop between tracks (at least in lane view, which is what I always use while comping) does not work if the lane the clip being dragged is on a higher numbered lane than the number of lanes in the destination track. (I don’t know if the results would have been different if the lane view were not active.) But cut/paste does work (so I’d guess copy/paste would as well, but I want the clips moved, not copied since I only want the unused pool of take clips to be available for potential future uses).

Personally, I’d prefer if the dragging and dropping of clips did not preserve lane numbers from the source tracks, but, rather, would only drop the clip on the first lane available without an overlap. The first thing I do once I finish comping a section is clean up the lanes on the destination track to make it easier to focus on editing clip boundaries, fades, crossfades, etc. However, if the lane numbers do need to be preserved, then it would be helpful if any extra lanes needed were created automatically on the drag and drop clip move, similarly to how they are on cut/paste. At the very least, from an intuitive user interface perspective, the not having the drag and drop work is confusing and frustrating.

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Hmm, an update: Maybe this isn’t totally about the number of lanes. In another case of this issue’s appearing after my post, using the same pair of destination tracks and the same source track, I found another case where I could drag a clip from the source track to one of the destination tracks, but not the other. I thought both destination tracks already had enough lanes in them from prior operations, and opening up the lane view of the destination track confirmed this. At this point, I have no clue why it wouldn’t drag in this specific case.

I also found that, with that same destination track’s lanes view open, I could drag the clip from the source track to a lane in the destination track. Unfortunately, due to vertical screen real estate, that won’t always be a useful workaround, though it was in this specific case (and was quicker to deal with then having to set the cursor position to the starting point of the clip needing to be dragged).

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I think this is a situation where a picture (or three) might be worth a few thousand words.

I got pretty lost mid-description. But one thought is are you dealing with different Audio files & does that impact your issue? If you are loop recording and do 5 takes those will all be part of a single Audio File. Then if you do another 3 takes they will be in a different Audio Files. Might that be a factor?

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Unfortunately, I don’t think I can get a picture during the course of a drag and drop since the cursor is in motion. I don’t have any video-grabbing stuff on my PC (as far as I know anyway), and I’m also trying to actually get a lot of comping work done, so don’t want to take time to deal with a video anyway at the moment.

The loop recording is for an entire song section for each part (i.e. the raw takes track). Thus, for the scenario I was describing, all the audio being dragged would be from a single audio file. And I’m dragging to tracks that don’t have audio in the positions where I’m dragging at that point. (They do have consolidated audio from the previous chorus earlier in the track. I can at least give a picture of that:

image
image1014×655 62.2 KB

To describe:

  • These are the tracks relating to one of five background vocal parts for the choruses of the song. Track 43 is the raw takes, all cut up into phrases (and sometimes a bit finer) prior to comping, but all takes were tracked in a single looped tracking session per chorus. I’ve expanded the lanes for the raw takes track to give an idea. As of the point of this picture, both choruses shown have been comped.

  • Tracks 41 and 42 are two comps from the same pool of takes, with the first chorus (on the left) being one I’d worked on a few days ago, including, after comping, having done fade editing, some click removal, tightening versus the lead vocal, and tuning, with the results merged into one clip per track (and I’d also done the lane cleanup shortly after the comps were finished and again after the editing was done so I could merge the entire chorus into a single clip per track).

  • The second chorus (on the right) is the one where I first noticed this problem (and I have a few more bits of information to add below from subsequent experience finishing that chorus and a third chorus). That one is now comped (thus you see the same clip lengths in both the raw takes track and the two comps, but not edited (or with any further work done on that chorus beyond cleaning up the lanes again after finishing comping that section).

  • The third chorus (not shown) was a similar setup, but tracked in a different looped recording session.

The additional thing I noticed subsequent to my previous messages on this thread is that, when I open up lanes on a destination track to make the Ctrl-Drag work to move the clip to the same location on the comp track that it had on the raw takes track, I can drag to almost any lane, but not to lane 1. The symptom on what the cursor does there is the same sort of thing I get when trying to drag to the comp track with the lanes closed.

I’ll also add that the problems seemed to occur more frequently with the third chorus than it had with the second chorus. However, that may be because I never ended up doing a cut/paste workaround again after cleaning up the lanes after finishing comping the second chorus.

(Side note: the muted clips in the raw takes track are sometimes for clips I’d ruled out as possibilities, for example due to wrong lyrics, but mostly just to mute the clips that had already been comped to the prior tracks since I wanted to hear the double without hearing yet another take from the raw takes track (and just muting/unmuting the track is less efficient as I sometimes want to hear more context while comping further parts of the section. Thus, once a section is fully comped, the raw takes clips at the summary level should always be completely muted.)

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One additional observation: After writing the previous message, I comped two more parts, two choruses each, and again comping two tracks from the same pool of raw takes. There were no more issues of this sort with those raw takes tracks and dragging and dropping to their respective comp tracks.

So what is different??? Obviously, they’d be different audio files for those tracks, but so were the second and third choruses for the first set of raw takes. And the general track setup was identical. I think I even set up all 15 tracks (1 raw takes track and 2 comp tracks each for 5 BGV parts) in the same go-round, just renaming them meaningfully later. And I recorded all the first chorus parts in the same session last week and all the second and third chorus parts in the same session yesterday.

Short of some weird corruption in some tracks of the project – perhaps the destination tracks for the first part I was comping, though that had worked fine when comping the first chorus a few days back (as had the equivalent section of the other 4 BGV parts) – the only thing that comes to mind is that the tracks I was comping earlier, where I had the problem, were the topmost tracks in the overall BGV (Choruses) folder. But, if there were some issue with being the topmost tracks in a folder, I’d be inclined to think it would only affect the topmost track, not the topmost two tracks (or the third from top track if the issue were the source track rather than the destination tracks). It’s also not like I closed my Cubase session in between the comping the part with the problems and the next two parts (i.e. which might have cleared some problem in the specific session if there were something like a memory leak).

Bizarre!!! But, on the bright side, comping those next two parts took WAY shorter than the first one did as working around the bug, or whatever it is, took a lot of extra time. I’ve still got two more parts to go when I resume work (possibly not until Thursday as I have a gig tomorrow), so it will be interesting to see if things go smoothly or the problem recurs.

The one thing this reminds me of is that, if I’m dragging multiple clips from different take lanes to a comp track, it only works if I drag a clip from the topmost lane in the source track. But that was not the issue here as I was generally only dragging one clip at a time, and I’ve been aware of the topmost lane dragging thing for a long time now anyway, so I make a point of doing that when I am dragging multiple clips.