[See Pic] Question: what does this symbol mean?

Cubase
1

Hey guys, I grew up working on SX2. Then I quit the production game for a while, and now I’m back rocking Cubase Artist 6. Getting great results and excellent feedback, but I’m by no means a guru just yet…

One thing I’ve noticed doing collabs with other artists (that have other DAW’s) is that when I load their WAV tracks into my project, is that Cubase will almost refuse to play anymore, like it is too overloaded… And then I notice one small difference: their tracks have this little “wave symbol” in the upper right corner (see pic below). :open_mouth:

:arrow_right: So my questions are:

  1. What does it mean? And is it in fact relevant to the problem?
  2. If so: how do I fix it, so I can get back to work?

Pic:

2

That means that Musical Mode is enabled on the clip. If the files are a different BPM, you will want to keep Musical Mode enabled. If they’re the same BPM, you can go into the Pool and uncheck the Musical Mode box.

3

Thanks for your answer! Although… are you sure that’s the problem? Because, as I went into the pool, I noticed that the “musical mode” was already off on all the tracks. And when I switched it on, all those tracks got a little musicnote icon next to the wave thingy (and the lines also shrunk). I’ve made another pic of this:

4

You’re right. That note symbol represents Musical Mode. The wave symbol represents that the event has been time stretched in some way. Try Audio → Realtime Processing → Unstretch Audio.

5

Aha! A clue!
:laughing: Seriously, I think you’re on to something. I guess the name “real-time-processing” means that it was never actually time-stretched, but rather in a sort of limbo where the computer was constantly processing a sort of “fake” timestretch in. It would explain why it looked so overly busy on playing back a few simple tracks. Now all I need is to figure out where I went wrong… Thanks for the info!