Track Edit Group not working reliably?

Cubase
1

Is anyone have problems with group track editing? It’s hard to explain but quite often when doing an edit on one track in a group folder track with group editing selected only some of the tracks will edit and some wont. It’s different each time though and there seems to no repeatable problem. THis is using Ver 6.02. In the 6.03 and 6.04 there is no mention of a fix for this.

I have seen this problem with 2 tracks and also with 12 tracks in groups.

Also several times when I turned on the group edit function i get a warning saying the tracks will not stay in sync. Weird.

Any suggestions?

THanks very much

2

Usually due to the tracks being of unequal length, quite often caused by cutting with snap to zero switched on.

3

Unfortunately I have had problems with previously untouched tracks that are grouped and of exact equal length.

4

Robert, I was just about to post on this same topic. I am having similar unpredictable problems with Group Edit. Fyi, I always keep Snap to Zero off when using Group Edit.

For example, one issue that comes up repeatedly when comping multitrack drums:

  1. On one track (for example, the Bass Drum), I click on a Lane 1 audio event to make it “active.”
  2. On some of the other tracks, an audio event at the same location becomes active, except on Lane 3 instead of Lane 1…

This usually doesn’t happen for every track in the Group Edit folder - in the above example, some of the other tracks correctly show their corresponding Lane 1 audio event as active. But not all of them.

Put another way: clicking a Lane 1 audio event on one track activates a Lane X audio event on different track(s), where Lane X might be Lane 2, 3, or some other Lane.

When I get some free time, I’ll make a video for this because it’s easiest to see rather than describe. But put simply, it seems like Group Edit becomes “confused” so that the various audio events at a particular moment in the song’s timeline are no longer grouped “lane-for-lane”. It’s strange because they are still somehow grouped, just not one-for-one.

I have discovered a workaround for this:

  1. Turn off Group Edit.
  2. Make active the “confused” audio event on the first track of your Group Edit folder by clicking on it.
  3. Repeat step 2 for ALL of the tracks in the Group Edit.
  4. Turn Group Edit back on.

(Also, I’m not getting the “Group edit is out of sync” error when I turn Group Edit off and on. This problem occurs with no warnings.)

I would love to know what’s causing this - is it user error? A bug? Are there other workarounds or things I can do to prevent this while tracking/comping? This problem happens regularly to me and at unpredictable times. Because of this, I don’t use Group Edit with clients in the room because it’s too time-consuming to do the above workaround - sometimes many of these “confused” grouped events appear at what seems like random places in the Group Edit folder and I can’t predict how long it will take me to sort it out. So instead, I do these sorts of comps on my own time and just eat the cost of fiddling with things to make it work.

Anyway, if I’m doing something wrong here, I’d be very grateful to find that out. My system config is in my sig below.

Best,
Aj

P.S. Edit to add… might be worth mentioning that I am probably a “power user” of the Group Edit feature. I routinely split multiple sections of audio events, copy them, move them onto new lanes, etc. and generally create a very different arrangement of the finished drum track. However, I am not doing anything (that I know of) that’s beyond the scope of what Group Edit and Lanes are designed to do. I just work it pretty hard over here. And other than the “confusion” issues here (which are, admittedly, very irritating), C6 seems to keep up just fine and “mirrors” all of my comps/edits across the various grouped tracks.

5

The way I do drum editing is to comp all the drum takes first into one good take, ie do all the editing without group edit enabled.

Then making sure the start and end are cut at exactly the same place, bounce audio 32bit float, so I have all drum tracks as single files then enable group editing and use the quantise panel cutting the various sections for quantising if needed.

It does seem to be overly touchy about size and lanes so I avoid that.

6

I think you’re losing synch because you’re moving stuff around between lanes. All sorts of funny things used to happen to me when I did this so I stopped doing it and discovered it wasn’t really necessary anyway. I think it’s to do with events’ priorities being taken into account when synching, not just start and end points. I seem to remember seeing this the manual or KB somewhere.

To cut a potential ramble off at birth, I would advise:

  • don’t muck about with lane order, unless you have to
  • don’t be tempted to drag events about just to improve the view, ditto
  • always work with Snap to Zero off
  • leave re-gluing, crossfading and trimming till you’re done (and even risked a Delete Overlaps)

It’s much less of a headache if you keep it simple and don’t try to make Cubase do too much - I think it’s maintaining a delicate internal balance that’s easy to upset.

There were some oddities when copy/moving events about in earlier 6.0.x upgrades but 6.0.3 sorted them out, as I remember.

Hope that helps,
C

7

Hey Crotchety, thanks for chiming in. Copying and dup’ing events onto new lanes - especially with grouped multitracks - is pretty much mandatory on some of the projects I work on (for example, loop-based arrangements created from live multitrack splits).

It’s tons of fun actually - right now I’m grabbing 4-bar loops from a wild “techno” sounding live multitrack drum session. The drummer was just in the zone, man - playing all sorts of fantastic things, but nothing consistent and certainly not an actual “finished drum part.” So afterwards, I spent the afternoon splitting choice 4-bar loops using Group Edit, and then drag-copying each one down to a new lane where the actual drum arrangement will reside. Grooves, choice fills, and so forth all get drag-copied down to the new bottom lane and - after a few hours of this - a completely new multitrack drum performance is built in that new lane.

If this isn’t the work flow Steinberg intended, they should be happy users like me have discovered it :slight_smile:. The fact that it’s still all multitrack, rather than just chopped up stereo loops, is what makes it so killer. I don’t know of any other DAW software that can do this kind of thing so well - with the possible exception of Ableton, which I’m not very familiar with and I know doesn’t do many of the other “traditional” DAW things as well as C6.

Anyway, as I mentioned earlier, the only real problem I have is how the lane-for-lane grouping sometimes gets confused between grouped tracks. That can’t be what the developers intended. Perhaps there’s a straightforward fix waiting in the wings…

Aj

8

Make sure you always have all tracks affected by the group editing set to show lanes if you delete, copy-paste or move events between lanes or delete lanes. Cubase handles some things, especially deletion, differently depending on lane state which can cause a lot of mess together with the group editing.

/A

9

@Aj. A couple of quick points before my connection times out on me again:

  • When you drag your choice bits to the new lane are you keeping them at the same point in time?
  • You may not really need that extra lane for the pristine track. Delete Overlaps does that for you.
  • To find out where you lose synch, you will have to do a test run and keep selecting to find out where you lose it.

What’s in my mind is that Group Editing works just fine so I suspect it’s something your doing that’s causing the synch to disappear. I had a lot of this happening but it doesn’t now. I know I changed the way I worked but as we are working slightly differently it may take a bit of hunting to pin it down for you.

Right, better get this posted…