Can An Audio Track Become Corrupt?

[Sailor55]

Today I was recording a vocal track. Nothing special.  Just some typical clips in an ordinary audio track. When I tried to create a Melodyne region effect on one of the clips, Cakewalk (2020.11) crashed in an odd way. Suddenly, it froze and the entire Cakewalk window greyed out. Usually, at this point Win 10 recognizes a non-responding application and offers to close it (and send a report to Microsoft etc.). But that didn't happen. Instead, Cakewalk began stitching between a greyed-out window and a normal window every few seconds while still remaining completely frozen. The only thing I could do was terminate Cakewalk with the task manager.

Naturally, I assumed it was some Cakewalk + Melodyne issue. I re-opened the project and this time I didn't try creating a Melodyne region effect. I just tried to bounce to clips into one single clip. Same problem. I was able to repeat th crash scenario consistently that way. And, I could also do it by making a Melodyne region effect on that track. I'm running the very latest Melodyne version 5.1.1.003.

Here's how I fixed it: I created a fresh audio track, dragged the clips into it, then deleted the original one. All problems gone. Melodyne works fine. Bouncing to clips works fine. So, can a track become corrupt such that it's simply broken and needs to be deleted? Seems like this has happened to me before in the distant past.