Melodyne editing data gets horked when it hits a certain size

[Josh Wolfer]

I'm still trying to track this one down, but I've been able to reproduce it twice. I'm going to start a new project and see if I can always repro it. But I wanted to bring it up. 

The details around this:

Problem

After extensive multi-track editing in Melodyne 5 Studio, during an Audible bounce of the project, it stops half-way through playback with no errors and no drop outs. It just stops playing. The bounce file is written to disk and contains audio up to the point of where Cakewalk stops (as you'd expect if Cakewalk dropped out during  a bounce). 

Upon this point, nothing looks problematic. All tracks still have clips that show the waveforms and the clips all show melodyne is on them (RFX menu).

however, The audio no longer plays on all the tracks that had melodyne running. 

Details

Upon saving the project file, the project file size is MUCH smaller than before. IE: The project went from 9 MB with melodyne edits to now 1 MB. 

^^^ These are the first time and second time reproductions of the issue. I had to re do about 4 hours of work, unfortunately. I'm fully aware of how to backup projects and as you can see, I have pretty good structure in my process. I have enabled additional auto save iterations every 15 minutes in case this happens again, but what is done is done. 

I'm still working to reproduce this in a new project, but I'm pretty sure I have a good idea what is happening, since I reproduced the issue in the same project. 

I believe that Cakewalk is doing some kind of plugin data size check and once it sees X amount of data for a plugin, it's assuming there was a problem and it's deleting all the data. This is purely a guess. But I think it's very coincidental that this point seems to be about 8 MB. 

How I got melodyne data so large: 

Melodyne studio 5 is an incredible piece of software. With the latest version, you have manual controls over de-essing, per note / syllable gain adjustments and so forth, in additional to pitch correction (so yeah, no shnarky comments about how you wouldn't need this with a good singer). In multitrack mode, you can also manually adjust stretching and timing of each word. It's a dream come true for adjusting vocals. And yes, there are things like vocal sync, but manually doing this in melodyne yields amazing results. 

And more importantly, this is what melo 5 studio was designed to do. So it's not like I'm demanding an odd use-case on this one. 

After talking to a bunch of people, they kept saying things like "you're supposed to bounce melodyne on each track or it does weird things". This is an unacceptable response. Again, the point of melodyne "studio" is multi-track editing in context. But I believe that maybe this is why they bounce each track. They may also be hitting this unknown limitation (assuming I'm correct about the cause. )

I'll be providing better repro steps for this. But I wanted to get this feedback started. If anyone else wants to do a repro, that'd be great too. I had about 7 tracks. On my last reproduction, I just started nudging and making random adjustments, saving and adding more until I saw the project size grow by about 8 MB. Then I did an audible bounce and hit this issue a second time. 

❤️ bakers. Looking forward to resolving this. It was a rough weekend and I missed a deadline 😕

@msmcleod @Noel Borthwick

 

 

 

[Josh Wolfer]

Okay. Well I couldn't reproduce this today with the same file that I did twice before, so that's a bummer. 😕

If I get more, i'll write back, but as for now, I guess we can file this under "the universe hates josh". It doesn't appear to be size related. I created a new project and spammed melodyne on all the tracks and got it to 14MB, and couldn't repro again. /sigh. 

Thanks for listening