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Trying to get a screenshot of this but as is typical it's not doing it currently!

Has anyone experienced the issue whereby an audio track appears to have content at point but it's silent? Often this will look like a single spike.
When I've encountered this it's been a UI thing and there isn't legitimately content there - I most often see it when importing audio tracks and on one track the vocalist will have recorded the first verse for example and then it's visible in a section that's unrelated (e.g. much later in the song).
It does lead to some confusion though because you've sometimes got to go digging to check, and/or risk deleting something that might be relevant.

I've seen this a load of times over the years in Cakewalk/Sonar in different projects but don't believe I've raised it before (others might have).

Edited by Matthew Simon Fletcher
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Posted (edited)

I've raised a case as my bandmate has just confirmed he's seen this before.
If anyone else has seen it can confirm and add a screenshot that would also be super useful evidence as I still haven't been able to reproduce today.

I'm not sure what the mechanism is behind the waveform being generated. I know there's the cache that you can delete files in to re-generate but in this case they're getting corrupted when they're first made rather than it being a gradual issue over time.

Edited by Matthew Simon Fletcher
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I see this all the time, though I've not got any screen shots. I'll try to remember to come back to this thread next time it happens.

I find that these glitches disappear and re-appear at different zoom levels, which might be a clue as to the cause.

Edited by John T
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@Matthew Simon Fletcher and @John T, are the glitches visible, audible, or both visible and audible? 

The reason I ask is because if it is only a visible glitch I would suspect either your computer graphic driver, monitor driver or how the graphic chip handles specific zoom percentages.  That would also explain why you have such difficulty capturing a screenshot since a screenshot is a redraw of the screen.

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Posted (edited)

Evening Jim - thanks for the reply.

100% visible not audible.

I think zooming is a factor in it , however I've also seen it on occasions at any zoom level.
I've been able to screenshot if previously, I've just simply been doing other things and unfortunately misplaced the files!

Graphics / monitor drivers are very likely to be relevant in general though. I'd say I'm using a modern / reasonable spec / supported system and hence I'd expect that if it's not working for me then it's going to have reasonably wide impact!

Edited by Matthew Simon Fletcher
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10 minutes ago, John T said:

Got a video clip here. Observe the spike appearing and disappearing as I zoom in and out. Though there's not much consistency as to what levels it appears and disappears at.

Looks to my like it's the waveform outline algorithm doing it's thing.   The spike is just some waveform detail that is being highlighted at a particular zoom level, and is then "smoothed away" at different zoom levels.

Personally, while the waveform outline makes things look a bit prettier, I prefer working with it off for exactly this reason.  It's not exactly wrong per se, but it's distracting.

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It is a bit strange, considering, what's really there when you zoom in a bit. I get it at times as well. If anything, it's irritating, because you need to check such a thing.

Has to be a slight hitch in the outline/waveform rendering algo, which gets things wrong at a certain zoom level. Certainly there shouldn't be a full-height spike in any scenario for that little blob the audio waveform, if there really isn't any audible issue for that?

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14 hours ago, msmcleod said:

Looks to my like it's the waveform outline algorithm doing it's thing.   The spike is just some waveform detail that is being highlighted at a particular zoom level, and is then "smoothed away" at different zoom levels.

Personally, while the waveform outline makes things look a bit prettier, I prefer working with it off for exactly this reason.  It's not exactly wrong per se, but it's distracting.

In the situation I'm describing there is no legitimate waveform detail to be highlighted as there is nothing on the audio track. It should be flat in the section at any zoom level, but spikes are visible. I'm fairly sure I've seen this both upon initial import of an audio track and after having done a bounce to clip.

Edited by Matthew Simon Fletcher
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59 minutes ago, Matthew Simon Fletcher said:

In the situation I'm describing there is no legitimate waveform detail to be highlighted as there is nothing on the audio track. It should be flat in the section at any zoom level, but spikes are visible. I'm fairly sure I've seen this both upon initial import of an audio track and after having done a bounce to clip.

Can you confirm that this doesn't happen with waveform outlining disabled?

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It's been happening since at least X1 and before wave outlines were added.  I believe it's just a graphical issue where Sonar is confused at certain zoom levels and misinterprets how or what to draw what is or isn't there.

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Zoomed all the way out.

image.png.c96ddef0a5f4b799b13176a4f645f87f.png

I was able to get it to disappear eventually by zooming right in, but that took five zooms until it happened.

image.thumb.png.cb87f425abd5908ab524459fa9a58cfc.png

I could understand certain things appearing more/less obvious depending on zoom level but the key point here is that there is literally nothing on the audio meter.

@msmcleod how do I change the waveform setting you mentioned? I thought that was only for bus/synth tracks, whereas this is the audio track itself.

Edited by Matthew Simon Fletcher
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It might also be worth recomputing the waveform picture... maybe it's gone stale somehow....

Right click on the clip, and pick "Associated Audio Files",  then on the dialog select all the files and click "Recompute Pictures"

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Here's an image with waveform disabled (still visible issue):

image.png.0dfa429b41e3aa02a63ee66c645e3972.png

I can confirm if the files are regenerated the spikes do disappear entirely at any zoom level.
I guess the question is how could this data be getting corrupted? This a fairly old file, but not a complex one and I've seen the issue in a lot of different projects over the years.

Also another observation - this is the same clip (now with the waveform image regenerated).
You'll see that the line thickness remains thicker up until about the center of the image. Why is that? I checked the meters and the audio fades off almost immediately after the second line. There is no change that occurs when the line goes from thick to thin. That to me looks like another example of the waveform not generating accurately. Again I can confirm that happens with the waveform enabled/disabled.

image.png.749a316ebb3ef5fc4f2bfc2cd8d9de78.png

Edited by Matthew Simon Fletcher
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