Unfreezing a track deletes the waveform....

[Mark Bastable]

Here's a worrying one....

If I unfreeze a frozen track, the wave form disappears entirely. If I undo the unfreeze, it reappears.

When unfrozen, I've checked the take lanes and they are all empty - so unfrozen, nothing to be seen. Re-frozen, everything's fine, except of course it's frozen.

Video here...
 

 

[David Baay]

I'm curious that the waveform is displaying its color and showing selected when you have the track filter set to Volume automation. Normally that would cause the clip to be grayed out and unselectable. Also, what's that white line at the leading edge of the clip? It looks like a clip fade, but it starts slightly outside the clip, and a clip fade would disappear on freezing. Maybe it's just a video artifact...?

I can't repro anything like it in any case. Is it just this project? Does the issue survive a re-open/re-launch/re-boot?

[reginaldStjohn]

Are the tracks Instruments/Midi or Audio?  

[sjoens]

"Freezing" is like a temporary hold.  If it was frozen from a MIDI track and you want it to remain, you can "Bounce to clips..." or record it in real time.

Edited September 21, 2023 by sjoens

[gustabo]

11 minutes ago, sjoens said:

"Freezing" is like a temporary hold.  If you want wave form & audio to remain you have to "Bounce to clips..." or record it in real time.

Freeze is a reversible bounce, temporary or permanent based on if you unfreeze it or not.

[sjoens]

Check out my edited post.

Unfreezing a track may cause the wave to disappear if there's no wav file in the Audio folder for it to refer to.  "Undo" (Ctrl+Z) can bring it back because it's still in memory.

[Mark Bastable]

Yes,  it happens when the project is close and re-loaded. 

 

8 hours ago, sjoens said:

Check out my edited post.

Unfreezing a track may cause the wave to disappear if there's no wav file in the Audio folder for it to refer to.  "Undo" (Ctrl+Z) can bring it back because it's still in memory.

I'd understand that if the freeze had been applied during this session, but it wasn't. The track was frozen three weeks ago. Since then the project has been closed and the computer turned off for a fortnight.  So when the project's re-opened, the frozen track is coming from somewhere - but not from memory.

The implication would be that a frozen track is kept fully-formed in a separate audio file derived from the original, and that when you unfreeze, it tries to revert to the original - so my problem would be caused by losing the original while the freeze was in place. Which is possible, I suppose. 

Though that would raise all sorts of problems for versioning of frozen tracks, if you were to unfreeze, change something and re-freeze.

[Mark Bastable]

Oh, and the tracks are audio.

 

[gustabo]

Did you try emptying the picture cache? It may be full.

[David Baay]

11 hours ago, Mark Bastable said:

The implication would be that a frozen track is kept fully-formed in a separate audio file derived from the original, and that when you unfreeze, it tries to revert to the original - so my problem would be caused by losing the original while the freeze was in place. Which is possible, I suppose. 

Though that would raise all sorts of problems for versioning of frozen tracks, if you were to unfreeze, change something and re-freeze.

Yes, Freezing bounces processed audio to a new file, and the frozen clip references that file. Unfreeze will change back to referencing the original file, but won't delete the frozen/bounced file until you close the session. A Quick Unfreeze will set a flag so that when you re-freeze, it will just reference the previously rendered file instead of rendering a new one.  Any file rendered in that session that's not referenced when the project is saved will be deleted when you close the session. The original file remains referenced internally so if you were to delete it while the track is frozen  (and CbB is closed), you'd get a "missing audio" error on attempting to open the project. You should be able to look in the audio folder for the project and confirm the original file is still there, but if something has become corrupted with the file references in te project, you'd have to import it back into the unfrozen track to restore it.

Edited September 21, 2023 by David Baay

[sjoens]

6 hours ago, David Baay said:

if something has become corrupted with the file references in te project, you'd have to import it back into the unfrozen track to restore it.

I mentioned this originally but must have deleted it when editing my post. 🙄

You can check for the audio files by going to Project > Audio Files...   or open the Audio folder.

When this happened to me, the audio files were missing.

[Mark Bastable]

13 hours ago, David Baay said:

Yes, Freezing bounces processed audio to a new file, and the frozen clip references that file. Unfreeze will change back to referencing the original file, but won't delete the frozen/bounced file until you close the session. A Quick Unfreeze will set a flag so that when you re-freeze, it will just reference the previously rendered file instead of rendering a new one.  Any file rendered in that session that's not referenced when the project is saved will be deleted when you close the session. The original file remains referenced internally so if you were to delete it while the track is frozen  (and CbB is closed), you'd get a "missing audio" error on attempting to open the project. You should be able to look in the audio folder for the project and confirm the original file is still there, but if something has become corrupted with the file references in te project, you'd have to import it back into the unfrozen track to restore it.

Aha.

Okay, thank you. Very clear. 

Yes the files are still there, so there's been some kind of corruption of the references.

In fact I have earlier saves of the project (with slightly different project names)  in which the  original files show up. So maybe it's something to do with having saved the project under different version names too many times, and CW has lost track, as it were.

The thing about freezing is interesting because it implies that if I were to freeze a track, save the project, close CW and then re-open it, unfreeze the track, save the project under a different name and then change the clip and re-freeze it. then the 'first' freeze file would be stored because it would be needed if I ever opened the project under its first name. 

I'm not sure what good that is, but something tells me that it's worth knowing.

[Jacques Boileau]

On 9/20/2023 at 1:42 PM, Mark Bastable said:

Here's a worrying one....

If I unfreeze a frozen track, the wave form disappears entirely. If I undo the unfreeze, it reappears.

When unfrozen, I've checked the take lanes and they are all empty - so unfrozen, nothing to be seen. Re-frozen, everything's fine, except of course it's frozen.

 

I am late in the game here, but a few things (if they have not been stated before):

1. when unfrozen, do the audio of the track plays?

2. if you right click an area where there should be audio on that track, do you get the full popup menu with the last entry in the menu as 'associated audio files'?

2. If it does, it might mean that it is a simple graphics problem. You may want to try selecting everything on the empty track then right click, select 'associated audio files' and then 'recompute picture(s)'

[David Baay]

5 hours ago, Mark Bastable said:

In fact I have earlier saves of the project (with slightly different project names)  in which the  original files show up. So maybe it's something to do with having saved the project under different version names too many times, and CW has lost track, as it were.

Yes, I do exactly the same, and have never encountered a problem. CW always generates a unique file name and, as you surmised, keeps track of which files are referenced by earlier versions of the project. Even files for clips that are no longer referenced by any project will remain in the project's audio folder indefinitely so long as some version of the project was saved during the session in which the audio file was written.  This is why you might want to peridocally run Clean Audio Folder on an  individual project or use the Cakewalk Audio Finder (CWAF) Tool to clean all audio folders at once to discard unused audio.

Your situation is pretty unique; I don't recall seeinganything quite like it being reported in the history of the forums, and can't really imagine  a mechanism by which this would happen to even one track much less multiple tracks or a whole project!

[David Baay]

1 hour ago, Jacques Boileau said:

1. when unfrozen, do the audio of the track plays?

2. if you right click an area where there should be audio on that track, do you get the full popup menu with the last entry in the menu as 'associated audio files'?

2. If it does, it might mean that it is a simple graphics problem. You may want to try selecting everything on the empty track then right click, select 'associated audio files' and then 'recompute picture(s)'

The video makes clear that the clip is entirely gone, not just its waveform display, and the track goes silent when unfrozen. I suppose it would worth selecting the whole track by the track number and going into Clip Properties in the Inspector to see if anything shows up even if no sign of a clip can be seen in the track.