Long-standing-many-year fishy PLE Bug: Deleting targets with parenthesis breaks script

Cubase
,
1

It’s going to be fairly hard for me to come up with an reproduction list as I’m still sussing out exactly what the cause is, and if it’s maybe even my own user error.

I’ve been aware of something fishy going on with PLE for many years (pre-new-PLE), that has to do with deleting targets and PLE parathesis breaking the script even though it should still function in some capacity.

  • create multi-parenthesis PLE script
    • ( target 1a
    • target 1b)
    • ( target 2a
    • target 2b)
    • ( Target 3a
    • target 3b)
  • Test your script make sure it works, then delete the top target (target 1a/b)
  • It’s possible all or some of your script will not execute properly.

Video Evidence

Initial working script:

Modification:

PLEfishDelete
PLEfishDelete900×907 35.6 KB

Partially functioning script post-delete modification

Recreated modified script from scratch exactly the same:

Pretty certain this bug has existed since PLE existed, I’ve known something was up for at least 10 years but never came to a clear understanding of what, when, where, how until now.

It’s actually a horrendous bug for PLE users, especially those new to it starting out, because it can lead someone to believe they are scripting incorrectly when in reality there is a bug in the background operation that they are stuck in… sending their head in circles… The confusion compounds even more when trying to get multi-parenthesis algebraic scripts functioning properly.

I am super glad to finally understand this one, get it off my chest and reported @Martin.Jirsak @Matthias_Quellmann

2

I could recreate the issue exactly as described on my end with Cubase 12.
I believe this has been an issue for a long time. I know I’ve come across unexplainable behavior after editing existing PLEs myself so I just made a mental note to never edit the Event Target Filters once entered.

Since the PLE presets are saved as XML, we can even see the issue first hand if we save the “modified” and “recreated” versions of the PLE, open and compare them in a text editor.

Here’s the problem area in your example.

The edited PLE:

      <list name="Filter" type="obj">
         <obj class="leToken" ID="937894752">
            <int name="Digit" value="103"/>
         </obj>
         <obj class="leToken" ID="937895520">
            <int name="Digit" value="101"/>
         </obj>

The recreated PLE:

      <list name="Filter" type="obj">
         <obj class="leToken" ID="1278783440">
            <int name="Digit" value="101"/>
         </obj>

If anyone is interested in trying it out for themselves, here is the edited and recreated versions of the PLE presets:
TEST Edited.xml (8.1 KB)
TEST Recreated.xml (8.0 KB)

Note that these two PLE presets look identical in the editor.

Feel free to edit the Name parameters as it won’t affect the broken behavior.

3

Thanks for taking the time to tweeze it apart and for confirming!

I believe it only happens with targets that are at the start or middle of a script.

ie, if you are deleting backwards from the bottom of the script it might not occur.

edit

There might even be a variation of the bug when it comes to changing parenthesis levels within the script, though, I’m not 100% sure on that.