Melodyne does not erase deleted clips.

[RexRed]

When I record over part of a Melodyne take, it grays out/mutes that part of the take and the new recording becomes active above it.

Then, when I delete the old Melodyne take below it and put Melodyne on the new take segment, when I open Melodyne it still shows the deleted take along with the new take.

The only way that I know how to get rid of the old take in Melodyne is to close Cakewalk and reopen the project and only then does the old take disappear from within Melodyne.

I want to thank you for the last edits you all did with Melodyne and recorded takes, you fixed a lot of issues.

It seems this last issue got left behind. I am wondering if there is a way to refresh Melodyne without having to reopen the project.

Maybe you can look into why Melodyne does not delete the old deleted clip.  

 

Edited September 9, 2023 by RexRed

[msmcleod]

Are you leaving the Melodyne region effect active?  If that's the case, then that's your issue.  When a region FX is active, Melodyne has ownership.

[RexRed]

I am not sure what you mean by "active".

When a part of a Melodyne clip gets erased its blobs should no longer be seen in Melodyne.  Currently, that is not the case.

If you record over a part of track take with a Melodyne instance applied to it, it will gray out the Melodyne section that your recording overlapped on it.

Then if you add Melodyne to the new recorded take and then delete the old grayed out Melodyne section, the blobs from it still remain in Melodyne even though the clip has been deleted.

If you close the Melodyne window and open it up again, the blobs from the deleted clip are still there. The only way to get rid of the deleted blobs is to close Cakewalk and reopen it.

Once Cakewalk is reopened and you double click on the Melodyne clip the deleted blobs are finally gone. 

Edited May 3, 2023 by RexRed

[RexRed]

It is too bad that the last update to Cakewalk did not address this rather blaring problem with Melodyne.

[mettelus]

On 4/25/2023 at 4:08 AM, msmcleod said:

Are you leaving the Melodyne region effect active?  If that's the case, then that's your issue.  When a region FX is active, Melodyne has ownership.

When a Region FX is active (clip not bounced nor Region FX removed), the FX has control of the clip you are working with. It's job is to modify that data and send it back to the DAW. If you are recording new takes, either remove/bounce those Region FX or work in Melodyne standalone. 

Modifying a clip in Cakewalk doesn't change the wav file in the audio folder, which is what Melodyne has control of with a Region FX active. Same holds true for external editors added to the Utilities menu.

Edited September 8, 2023 by mettelus

[RexRed]

2 hours ago, mettelus said:

When a Region FX is active (clip not bounced nor Region FX removed), the FX has control of the clip you are working with. It's job is to modify that data and send it back to the DAW. If you are recording new takes, either remove/bounce those Region FX or work in Melodyne standalone. 

Modifying a clip in Cakewalk doesn't change the wav file in the audio folder, which is what Melodyne has control of with a Region FX active. Same holds true for external editors added to the Utilities menu.

Are you talking about something that you have actually witnessed happening in Cakewalk?

   

[sjoens]

mettelus is 100% correct.  

Once you're done Melodyning a clip, Bounce to Clip(s) renders Melodyne no longer in control and removes any doubled clips.

Bouncing creates a new file in the Audio folder while removing the original one from the track.

If you don't like the results, simply hit Ctrl+Z and start over. 

Or you could retrieve the original wave and reinsert it into the project.

 

[RexRed]

I think I need to test this out more.

As for bouncing my Melodyne, I "never" freeze or bounce them.

I leave them right through the final render.

Having my tracks resampled to go into Melodyne is enough already I will not bounce them and thus resample them again.

And, I am always hearing a slight thing in the vocals that are off even a tiny bit, or a formant that sounds wrong and need to go back sometimes even after a song has gone to an album, I will go back and adjust a note or syllable just to fix it in my project. 

I mix and master simultaneously as well.

Edited September 9, 2023 by RexRed

[RexRed]

Looking forward to the new Cakewalk Sonar!

(I hope the new Sonar will not be inheriting  these old problems.)

Edited September 9, 2023 by RexRed

[RexRed]

On closer inspection it is not solved.

Melodyne still does not erase deleted clips after a take has been recorded over it. Even if I close and reopen Melodyne within Cakewalk.

I have to close Cakewalk and reopen it for the old deleted clip to go away within Melodyne.

I have been dealing with this problem for a number of years now, I would really like it to get fixed.  ?

When a Melodyne clip gets deleted because a better take has been recorded over it and Melodyne applied to the new take, Cakewalk needs to tell Melodyne the old Melodyne clip is gone.

If Cakewalk can tell Melodyne the new clip has been added and superimpose the new clip on top of the deleted clip in Melodyne, then Cakewalk should also be able to tell Melodyne when the old clip has been deleted. Cakewalk is failing to do so.

When I record a vocal track I add Melodyne to the entire vocal track.

At some point I may discover I do not like a certain line and I would like to try and re-sing that line.

So I comp record a take above that line, then that section of my Melodyne vocal clip gets grayed out in the track. I add Melodyne to the new recorded clip.

Since the Melodyne clip is grayed out it should not appear in Melodyne when I open Melodyne. But it does appear.

I would rather just leave the old take muted but because I cannot work in Melodyne with the new take because it is a hodge podge of confusing old take on top of a new take.

So I try and delete the old take ( which I would rather not do because I'm still trying to decide if I want to keep the new take)

Even when I delete the old Melodyne take from Cakewalk it sill shows up as a hodge podge of notes underneath the new take in Melodyne. Because the new take is over top of where the old take was Cakewalk does not tell Melodyne the old take is muted or deleted. 

The only way to get rid of it is to save my project with the old take gone ( which I would have liked to have saved but just kept it muted).

Then I have to close the project and reopen it for Cakewalk to finally tell Melodyne that the old take is gone.

Muted Melodyne clips should not show in Melodyne and deleted Melodyne clips should not show in Melodyne.

Now if I do not have a new melodyne take over top of the old melodyne clip and I just delete that melodyne clip segment and then I open melodyne it is gone.

It only happens where there are two Melodyne clips superimposed.

If clips are super imposed follow this routine sort of thing.  

When a clip is muted in Cakewalk it should be muted in Melodyne. It is not, it is still visible in Melodyne it just does not sound.

Melodyne has a clip mute feature and the notes have no color and a black outline when muted.

When a clip is muted in Cakewalk it should be displayed as such in Melodyne.

This is impossible to work with as is because Celemony refuses to give us colored blobs. Just orange and gray ones.

It would be better if the muted blob were even gray and can could not be selected or edited until they were unmuted in Cakewalk.

Not having colored blobs is a nightmare when editing overlapping tracks.

Such a simple thing as adding color to different takes and blobs should be a rudimentary feature.

But many requests for color has fallen on deaf ears at Celemony.

In my opinion the colored blobs do not necessarily have to correspond to the same color that each track in the DAW has.  

Just if you could color the blobs to differentiate one track or take from another.

Having the same colored blobs from all tracks overlaid is a total mess.

Edited September 9, 2023 by RexRed

[Glenn Stanton]

perhaps you're not rendering or removing the region FX before trying to do the new take, and Melodyne because it has created a whole bunch of "separations" (short audio snippets) it uses to perform its magic, those are getting overlaid because Melodyne is still an active region FX? if you create a new vocal track and mute the old one, do you still see the Melodyne issue?

i've been using Melodyne for (15 years?) and have not seen this issue. then again, i don't use it in comping take activities, i use on either a raw reference track (where i typically do the entire track at once, then render it), or on a completed comp track copy to do the final fixes, and usually only on sections that need it (and render once done). since the source track and comp track are still intact and muted or archived, the copy is where i do the region FX work - Melodyne primarily.

[RexRed]

1 hour ago, Glenn Stanton said:

perhaps you're not rendering or removing the region FX before trying to do the new take, and Melodyne because it has created a whole bunch of "separations" (short audio snippets) it uses to perform its magic, those are getting overlaid because Melodyne is still an active region FX? if you create a new vocal track and mute the old one, do you still see the Melodyne issue?

i've been using Melodyne for (15 years?) and have not seen this issue. then again, i don't use it in comping take activities, i use on either a raw reference track (where i typically do the entire track at once, then render it), or on a completed comp track copy to do the final fixes, and usually only on sections that need it (and render once done). since the source track and comp track are still intact and muted or archived, the copy is where i do the region FX work - Melodyne primarily.

This is because Cakewalk has not fully implemented comping abilities with Melodyne.

The communication between Melodyne and Cakewalk is (much better than it was but still ) incomplete.

Just put a take into a track with Melodyne on it. Record a second take in the same track over top of a section of it add Melodyne to it as well. Then go into Melodyne.

You will see both takes superimposed over one another. 

Then go into Cakewalk and delete the grayed out old take section.

Then go back into Melodyne.

The old take has been deleted from Cakewalk but it is still there in Melodyne.

Save your project and reopen it.

Then the old take is gone.

Now if you delete the section from Melodyne before you sing the new take in the same track it will be gone.

But how do you know if your new take is going to be better than the old take until you sing it?

The reason why I do not sing the new take into a new track is because I should not have to.

My track has effects racks and is linked to a complex network of parallel effects busses and side chaining.

I would have to copy all of that routing and busses just to replace a line, this should not be how it is done.

Yes and I have also been using Melodyne since about when it came out and V-Vocal for many years before that. I encounter this problem, with every song that I make.

And, Melodyne has been around for about 12 years.

Edited September 9, 2023 by RexRed

[Glenn Stanton]

ah. you have a very different workflow than me. i do all my recording in a much simpler recording template and only tweak the reference track to use as a performance guide for subsequent tracks. almost no effects in that template. those recorded tracks are exported and used in my mix template where the mixing is performed -- same way as if a client sent me their files -- so from a vocal recording process, i have no region FX active - on rare occasion i have used my Waves RT pitch correction on the monitoring buss FX for the vocal feed.

in this case, it sounds like the ARA bits are not working on the take level correctly. 

Edited September 9, 2023 by Glenn Stanton

[David Baay]

On 9/9/2023 at 12:44 PM, RexRed said:

When a Melodyne clip gets deleted because a better take has been recorded over it and Melodyne applied to the new take, Cakewalk needs to tell Melodyne the old Melodyne clip is gone.

I played around with this and can reproduce the basic issue, but that description isn't completely accurate

What's happening is that the punch/overwrite is just slip-editing the original clip to make space for the new audio. Melodyne normally honors manual slip-editing by hiding the blobs and muting the audio in the cropped-out part of the region, but it's not getting the message when the slip-edit is done automatically by punch/overwrite. I found you can fix this by manually making a small slip-edit to the original Melodyne clip and then immediately hitting Ctrl+Z to undo the edit.

But if you overwrite the entire clip, it will be effectively slip-edited out of existence, and there won't be anything left to manually edit. Also, I found a couple of related issues when punching into the middle of a Melodyne clip. First, the punch region isn't being muted by the 'Mute Previous Takes' option while recording. And second, the region ahead of the punch-in gets hidden and muted in Melodyne after you do the manual slip-edit of clip after the punch region, and it can't be easily recovered.

I'll pass my demo project on to the Bakers.

[Glenn Stanton]

also - the physical disk allocation is a single audio file (WAV) for all takes. this may also introduce some complexities if the IO pointer to the underlying file position vs the take virtual position data vs whatever Melodyne is doing via the ARA communications, its pointers, and its separation file allocations ? 

[RexRed]

On 9/11/2023 at 5:26 PM, David Baay said:

I played around with this and can reproduce the basic issue, but that description isn't completely accurate

What's happening is that the punch/overwrite is just slip-editing the original clip to make space for the new audio. Melodyne normally honors manual slip-editing by hiding the blobs and muting the audio in the cropped-out part of the region, but it's not getting the message when the slip-edit is done automatically by punch/overwrite. I found you can fix this by manually making a small slip-edit to the original Melodyne clip and then immediately hitting Ctrl+Z to undo the edit.

But if you overwrite the entire clip, it will be effectively slip-edited out of existence, and there won't be anything left to manually edit. Also, I found a couple of related issues when punching into the middle of a Melodyne clip. First, the punch region isn't being muted by the 'Mute Previous Takes' option while recording. And second, the region ahead of the punch-in gets hidden and muted in Melodyne after you do the manual slip-edit of clip after the punch region, and it can't be easily recovered.

I'll pass my demo project on to the Bakers.

Thank you very much David for your astute assessment and time troubleshooting this issue.

It is of great importance to me. Best to you!

The new update has come out, it will take me a week or so to see if this issue has been addressed.

 

 

Edited September 16, 2023 by RexRed

[David Baay]

20 hours ago, RexRed said:

The new update has come out, it will take me a week or so to see if this issue has been addressed.

It's not among the fixes listed for the latest EA update, and I verified it's still broken. Will likely have to wait for the new Sonar.

EDIT: Somewhat good news: I just found an easier - and completely effective -  workaround. Right click the track and Duplicate Track with all options enabled except Linking. All the sections of the clip will display in Melodyne and sound as expected in the new track. It should be a perfect copy of the original in every other respect so you can just delete the original.

EDIT 2: Correction: You have to take both actions to fix it: Slip-edit the clip, Undo, and then Duplicate. Duplication alone does not change anything.

Edited September 17, 2023 by David Baay

[RexRed]

On 9/17/2023 at 11:43 AM, David Baay said:

It's not among the fixes listed for the latest EA update, and I verified it's still broken. Will likely have to wait for the new Sonar.

EDIT: Somewhat good news: I just found an easier - and completely effective -  workaround. Right click the track and Duplicate Track with all options enabled except Linking. All the sections of the clip will display in Melodyne and sound as expected in the new track. It should be a perfect copy of the original in every other respect so you can just delete the original.

EDIT 2: Correction: You have to take both actions to fix it: Slip-edit the clip, Undo, and then Duplicate. Duplication alone does not change anything.

Yea, I thought for sure they fixed it but no.

I just close Cakewalk and reopen it and the old clip is gone from within Melodyne which is a grotesque fix for this. 

I brought up this issue many months ago as well.

I am not sure that buying Cakewalk Sonar is now on my agenda until I find this has been fixed.

I am not so big on new features as I am on old features working correctly.

Edited September 18, 2023 by RexRed

[RexRed]

A little background on why this problem has even shown its face.

One would think that with the right workflow that this entire problem could be avoided.

This is not the case.

I will lay out the process and why/how this problem occurs.

I might also say that this problem comes with complications due to "other" problems.

Complications meaning, one problem leads to another and then another and then another. Like being overweight, having heart disease and a brain tumor all at the same time.

I might also add that when I make a song, I spend almost as much time in Melodyne as I do in Cakewalk. Why? Because, in my opinion, the vocal(s) is the most important track in a song. The volume, duration, pitch and quality of each and every syllable must be highly and minutely scrutinized.  This goes also for, dub vocals, harmony vocals, ooohs and ahhs and any adlibs. Each syllable must be scrutinized.

This leads to problem one...

Melodyne is how you edit syllables and Melodyne seems to corrupt certain syllables. Why? I surmise that it is converting the wave file to a low bitrate, perhaps even 16 bit.

ARA needs a higher standard for file conversion and Melodyne needs to become  32 bit so the samples have smaller precision slices. (in my opinion)

So even the act of placing Melodyne on a sample in Cakewalk can degrade and distort a syllable without even editing it in any way. Furthermore, editing  a syllable can have good or disastrous results. 

So that is one complication that there seems to be no solution for until Melodyne is "improved".

So what is the work around?

Well you have to place Melodyne on a vocal and figure out which syllables Melodyne converts crappy and re-sing those with new vocal versions that Melodyne can interpret better with its myopic bitrate.

So there is no way to know which syllables Melodyne will get right or wrong until you place Melodyne on the take.

This leads to complication number 2

You comp the track but you may have other takes in the same track and it is problematic placing Melodyne on all takes in the track. So you can only put Melodyne on your comp track. Because Celemony refuses to give Melodyne different colored blobs, so you end up with an orange mess of blobs all stacked on top of each other. 

Now, when you encounter a syllable that Melodyne corrupts (and there are many) you need to replace each syllable.

You can't easily sing just that syllable, it is easier to re-sing the entire line and then extract the syllable (or word(s)) after.

This leads to another complication, Cakewalk has not properly implemented Melodyne integration into the track (though it is much better than it was.)

So when you sing a take over top of a Melodyne clip you end up with the old clip not erasing itself unless you close and reopen Cakewalk. (Otherwise you have an orange blob mess again)  

So, you need Melodyne on your take to figure out which syllables to replace and then you have to jump hoops for each and every syllable opening and closing Cakewalk for each syllable that you re-sing, then, place Melodyne on the syllable, listen to it and replace again if necessary until each one is right. Opening and closing Cakewalk like a door caught in the wind all day.

And this has been the case for as long as Melodyne has been integrated into Cakewalk track takes.

I just figured it was time to voice my thought about these issues.

Complications.

Melodyne is the only real game in town and it needs much better fidelity, it is ruining vocal tracks by its limited interpretation of sound waves and Cakewalk is missing functionality on top of that... Together it makes making music much harder than it should be. So is it a Cakewalk? In most regards it is a Cakewalk. In some aspects it is lacking still. Will the new Sonar simply carry on/inherit these issues. It seems likely. And, Melodyne is coming out with a new version soon.

Will we see 32 bit support for wave files? I seriously doubt it.

No one will ever need more than 56k of system ram anyway? (Some say erroneous quote from Bill Gates)

I need 32 bit Melodyne yesterday... This seem to be the root of most of this problem, the way Melodyne converts wave files. If I did not have to re-sing so many syllables then Cakewalk's lack of some Melodyne integration would be less blaring.

Edited September 18, 2023 by RexRed

[RexRed]

Since we are talking about Bill Gates and features that work properly.

One example is autohide the taskbar.

Never leave taskbar autohide enabled. It will autohide the taskbar every time until you really need it to, then the taskbar will stubbornly sit there hiding vital icons underneath it that you need to access. This has been broken for as long as I can remember.

The new print screen feature in Windows now opens up the snipping tool, that is until it doesn't and then the print screen key doesn't work either.

You have to restart Windows to get it back. In the meantime, forget about what you were trying to snip. How long will this stay that way? 

The autohide taskbar problem has been carried over from several versions of Windows and still exists.

Edited September 18, 2023 by RexRed