Hi, I tried playing back a saved session today that played back fine when I saved it, but now most of the vocal tracks are not playing. (I'm using pt hd)
In the edit windo, I can see the waveforms are there and the volume and mute automation appears to still be set up right. The output is to the main stereo bus. When I play back the song, the green level meters do not even show signal, but I can see the recorded audio in the edit window. I'm new to pt, but this is a first for me and it has me stumped.
Anyone got any ideas for me to troubleshoot??

Thanks,
Steve

Weird. Have you tried selecting the region and doing a "Recalculate waveform" to see if your audio really is there? I've seen restores SHOW audio in the edit page, and spit out static bursts on playback (which shows up on the meter). This is just a guess, I haven't taken the HD plundge yet but I've seen it on mix plus' a couple times.

I've seen this behavior, too, especially when the project is made up of snippets of heavily edited or massively punched tracks. If the project is far enough along to do so, you might try consolidating some of the tracks so that the hard drive isn't searching as hard to find each piece of audio. That's worked for me, at least.

These may be too obvious, but it's all I can come up with:

1) Try restarting your computer. Sometimes that's all it takes!

2) Check your voice assignments. If more than one track is assigned to , say Voice 1, only one will play. Safest thing is to set all the voices to "auto". Then it won't happen. (Select one track and set voice assignement to "auto" while holding down the option key - that will assign all the tracks to auto. At least on a Mac.)

3) You said you checked your voice automation, but are there any plug-ins on the tracks? Maybe one of them is muting the signal. Check the output meters on each plug-in, and see if they are showing signal. If one of them seems to be blocking the audio, try taking it off the track and then reinstantiating it. Make sure there's no volume automation within the plug-in too.

4) Are the waveforms a dark color, or kind of washed out? Regions can be muted (on a Mac, Command-M) or unmuted (with same command) which is different from mute automation.

5) Call digidesign tech support.

Check your output assignment, you might have changed it inadvertently.
or...
Copy the track on a new track and see if it will play back there.
or...
Open a new session and use track transfer to bring in the problem tracks... do they play back in the new session?
or...
Digi Tech support are usually very helpful and don't forget the DUC search engine too!

Thanks guys. I'll try your tips. I would use the digi tech support, but I bought my hd set up used.

Thanks,
Steve

Good tip on the output assignments, C.G. I forgot that one!

One other problem (probably not in your case) that happens a lot is when you are loading a session from one hard drive to another. If the original drive is firewire or a slower drive, even though you copy all the session and audio files to your fast recording drive, sometimes when you open the session Pro Tools will try to read the files off the original (slower) drive, resulting in an error message.

The solution is to dismount your drive (drag hard drive icon into trash on a Mac) and then your session will play just fine.

With some of the older Bombfactory plugins, you have to go in and click to open the plugin window on each plugin before they will pass audio.

I don't use Bombfactory myself, but this was the case with a couple studios I freelanced at (on Mix systems btw).

check the disc allocation, perhaps all the audio is being sent to another disc pt is notorius for finding space when your main drive is at its limits, try looking in the edit section at the i/o section does it read dyn or off? if it is off that is the problem click on it and select DYN that puts the waveform active if not select the whole track and open it in another audio program such as itunes and or peak

Hi,
This was a hideous bug in PT version 7.2.
It was around for about 6 months and almost forced our studio to change platforms.
If I remember correctly, what solved it for us was updating to 7.3.

If you are on 7.2, that's what I would do.
If you are on version 8, that scares me as I am about to go to 8.

Good luck

You do realize this was a 6 year old thread... right?

hehhehheh

Yeah, I was reading the whole thing too thinking "Is this another version 8 bug??"

Maybe he was a beta beta beta tester?

Tony you don't have the skinny on everything! heh

R.

Yesterday while bouncing a mix to disc in PT8, the first audio track (kick in) would become silent during the bounce for some reason. There was no reason this should have occurred, and it happened every time I tried to bounce the mix. I ended up routing everything to a new audio track and just recording the mix into the same session (which worked fine). Never had to do that before.

I haven't applied any of the cs updates to PT8. My system is basically stable, and I have projects in progress. I've read posts about various cs updates completely hosing peoples' systems.

Does anyone know if this problem is addressed in any of the cs updates?

-Ben B