Take lane handling still an issue in Cubase 12.0.70

[rickpaul]

Back at Cubase 12.0.20, I reported an issue with take lane handling:

Take lane handling/numbering bug in Cubase 12.0.20

In recording multiple passes of multiple looped takes for an audio track today, I encountered what appears to be a new bug in take lane numbering and handling. The good news is that no takes were lost, though that was not immediately apparent. This issue will only likely be seen when recording two or more passes of multiple takes (with looping enabled). Here is what I did and what I observed (including screen shots): With looping enabled, recorded three takes. These results were as expecte…

Unfortunately, that issue is still present in Cubase 12.0.70. To refresh, my process for recording lead vocals is to loop through the whole song (or at least enough of it to cover the start and end of the vocal), do exactly three takes, stop the transport after doing the third take in that pass, save the file, take a little break, then repeat the process as many times as needed (e.g. depending on how well I know the song, how many times I screwed up in the earlier takes, how warmed up my voice has gotten, etc.).

After the first round of takes, everything looks normal. However, with each successive round, the first take in that round appears to be missing. For example, today I did 4 rounds, for a total of 12 takes, and here is the result:

The takes actually do exist (thankfully – the first time I saw this I panicked, but I’m somewhat used to it now, though it doesn’t happen 100% of the time, and I’ve never figured out the logic for when it does and doesn’t).

After cleaning up lanes, the missing takes do appear, but the order is very strange:

In particular, the first take of each round after the first shows up near the top of the lanes, with the most recent first take in a round being at the top, the one after that being next, and so on. And the lanes with the missing takes still show up as being empty, only with new lane numbers.

While I can drag the lanes around to get the takes in the correct order (kind of important because of considerations of how warmed up I was, where I was in the song learning curve, etc.), the lane numbers stay messed up:

Also, after I save the project, close it, then reopen it, the take order goes back to being messed up (albeit without the extra blank lanes that it had after the cleanup lanes):

Very frustrating.

FWIW, this is on Windows 10 (fully updated).

[raino]

You’ll need to add a bunch of empty time at the start of your Project to do this (on a Save As… copy I’d suggest).

Each of those Lanes should be able to be extended to reveal the entire underlying Audio File by dragging the lower right & left corners all the way out. Does fully extending all the Lanes offer you any clues as to what’s going on?

@rickpaul

After cleaning up lanes, the missing takes do appear

What does “cleaning up” mean?

I wonder if it might be just a screen painting problem. When this problem happens what if you minimize & restore the Project Window to force a repaint.

[rickpaul]

@raino

You’ll need to add a bunch of empty time at the start of your Project to do this (on a Save As… copy I’d suggest).

Each of those Lanes should be able to be extended to reveal the entire underlying Audio File by dragging the lower right & left corners all the way out. Does fully extending all the Lanes offer you any clues as to what’s going on?

I’m not clear what this would be intended to show, but I can’t extend the clips all the way to the start of the project. They do seem to go a bit before where I started recording them (I think – I’m not positive because I’ve may have moved the markers since doing the tracking). But that just adds space on the front end of the clips. It doesn’t, as far as I can tell, add any more information on the files.

@raino

@rickpaul

After cleaning up lanes, the missing takes do appear

What does “cleaning up” mean?

It is the Cubase command to clean up the lanes (e.g. delete empty lanes, shift clips to higher lanes if there is space, etc.):

@raino

I wonder if it might be just a screen painting problem. When this problem happens what if you minimize & restore the Project Window to force a repaint.

No, I tried that, too, but it made no difference. And the saving and restoring of the project makes it clear that Cubase is numbering the lanes incorrectly for the first lane in each round of three takes.

[raino]

@rickpaul

I’m not clear what this would be intended to show, but I can’t extend the clips all the way to the start of the project. They do seem to go a bit before where I started recording them (I think – I’m not positive because I’ve may have moved the markers since doing the tracking). But that just adds space on the front end of the clips. It doesn’t, as far as I can tell, add any more information on the files.

It’s less about looking for something specific and instead seeing what might look odd or unexpected.

What I meant was that if you look at a bunch of Takes that were all recorded in one go by Looping - like this.

Each of those Takes is just a section of the underlying Audio File and you can expose the entire Audio File for each Take by pulling out the lower corners until there is no more. When you do that you can see how the Takes are staggered throughout the Audio File. I was wondering if anything looked weird with that.

[rickpaul]

@raino

What I meant was that if you look at a bunch of Takes that were all recorded in one go by Looping - like this.

Each of those Takes is just a section of the underlying Audio File and you can expose the entire Audio File for each Take by pulling out the lower corners until there is no more. When you do that you can see how the Takes are staggered throughout the Audio File. I was wondering if anything looked weird with that.

Ah, okay, thanks for clarifying. Here is what I’m seeing when I do this:

Note that I’ve dragged the lanes into the original order they were recorded, rather than in the lane order they get in Cubase. What this clearly shows is the first take in each batch of 3 (i.e. recorded in the same looping pass) starts in one place (probably where the start marker was at that point, though I can’t be sure at this point since that isn’t where the marker is now), while the other takes recorded in each pass go back to the start of the project (even though I definitely did NOT record from the start of the project), and there is some content at that point).

If I drag out on the other end, there is content after the first two takes in one looping pass, but not after the third one (i.e. the last take in that pass).

I have no clue what, if anything, that is telling me, though. There would obviously be some content “in the middle” (i.e. between takes 1 and 2 then again between 2 and 3) if that is just showing what is in the same audio file beyond the bounds of the clips, since all three takes are in the same file. (I didn’t realize Cubase would actually show that data. I don’t think Cakewalk/SONAR did, but, then again, even though I knew the takes were going to the same file, I never thought to pull them out beyond the bounds of what I was recording.)

[raino]

@rickpaul

I have no clue what, if anything, that is telling me, though.

Well it probably doesn’t have much to say, but you need to look to tell.

If I had this problem instead of trying to sort out what was happening on a real world Project I’d create a test Project for the problem and use it to explore what is going on in a more controlled context. As it is you’ve posted a lot of info, but it’s difficult to follow along because there are so many moving parts.

[rickpaul]

@raino

@rickpaul

I have no clue what, if anything, that is telling me, though.

Well it probably doesn’t have much to say, but you need to look to tell.

Just to clarify, I did look at what was before and after the parts in question when I dragged out the clips. It was what I’d expect – i.e. the before part was the end of the previous take, while the after part was the start of the next take, with the first take having no before part and the last take having no after part. This was the case for all four sets of takes. That would seem to be “as expected”.

What I meant about having no clue as to what it was telling me was regarding the messing up of take lane numbers versus takes. There’s nothing I can see there that gives information on the correspondence between clip names (which do have numbers in them) and lane numbers (which don’t match the take numbers after the second round of takes). It seems that Cubase is leaving an empty lane at the first lane in subsequent takes and (after doing a cleanup lanes to get the seemingly missing takes back) putting the first take from subsequent rounds in a lane prior to the first take from the round before.

@raino

If I had this problem instead of trying to sort out what was happening on a real world Project I’d create a test Project for the problem and use it to explore what is going on in a more controlled context. As it is you’ve posted a lot of info, but it’s difficult to follow along because there are so many moving parts.

Unfortunately, I really don’t have time for that, and it also doesn’t even happen on every real world project, though it’s happened enough now that it is annoying. (One response in the earlier thread on this top, where I first saw it in Cubase 12.0.20 indicated the issue had been around for a number of versions, but the first time I saw it was at that point, and I’ve been using every version of Cubase since 9.5.)

I had occasionally seen lane math get messed up in Cakewalk/SONAR in the past, too, though they fixed it fairly soon after it was identified. My best guesses here would be if there is something that gets messed up in the lane math when there are folder tracks, disabled tracks, folder tracks with disabled tracks, a track after the track being loop-recorded to, or some such thing. Or maybe if there is something with stopping the recording “prematurely” (i.e. before getting to the end marker) on the third take in each round). But that really is just guessing based on things I might think of as possible boundary conditions.

[ProEng]

I also just encountered this in Nuendo 13. Take 1 showed, then take 6 with blank 2-5 take lanes. Going to go back today and see if cleanup or other fiddling shows lane content.

[rickpaul]

If the behavior is consistent with Cubase (and I do think it can still happen in Cubase 13, though I don’t recall seeing it happen very recently – it was never a 100% of the time thing), the good news is that no information is lost, but the bad news is cleanup lanes didn’t magically restore the take order, and, from looking back at some of the screen shots I’d posted earlier in this thread, apparently left some blank lanes.

[ProEng]

Thank you sir, duping project and then trying cleanup to see if any missing take lanes appear.