AUDITION CC 2019: Edits to WAVE file suddenly vanished

[unauthorizedrob]

New problem. 

I am editing an audiobook.  I have good 32-bit FP stereo files, on which I just do some basic clean-up, replacing noises with silence, removing mouth clicks, etc.  I have been saving manually every five minutes, and also have preferences set to auto-save every 10 minutes.

Just now, as I was saving the chapter I was finishing up, got the beach ball, then the program popped way back to a very early point, and seems to have lost all the edits from that point on.

Customer support did some tweaking last night, in the remote share-screen mode, and I see where he re-directed my back-ups.   I'm keeping my files on a removable 2TB drive, and also uploading to Dropbox.

Weary.  Will try customer service again, and any help here, very welcome as always.

Thanks

r

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

I'm not quite clear - is this the session file that appears to be reverting to a previous version?

[unauthorizedrob]

Not in a Session per se -- this is a single Audio File.   I had to do the initial recording in Multitrack because Travis Baldree's Punch&Roll extension required that.  Once I completed the chapter, I then bounced it down to a new track and exported that into 32 bit FP Stereo, per your advice.  THAT is the file I am now editing.

The work is tedious -- removing mouth noises, bringing up quiet spots, some very minor eq to notch out whistles, etc.    I got to the end of the 15 minute file, and went to save -- as I had been doing every five minutes or so -- but this time it hung up, and when the beach ball went away, the play head had popped all the way back to 30 seconds, and all the work from there forward is gone.

I also have the program set to auto-save every 10 minutes to a separate location.   However.... checking that ... I do not see any back-ups of the WAVE file. And now I see that that function only applies to Multitrack sessions. 

Also -- weird thing -- everything I have done since I upgraded to Audition CC2019 is roughly twice as big as it was before.  Like -- this one 15 minute file is 323 mb.

[SteveG_AudioMasters_ · Accepted solution]

Well, the size of the file is correct. FYI, here's how it goes:

44.1kSamples/sec x2 (it's stereo) = 88.2kSamples. Each sample is 32 bits, so that's 88.2 x 32 = 2822.4 bits/second. Divide this by 8 gives you  352 KBytes per second. Multiply this by 60 gives you 21.168MBytes per minute. Multiply that by your 15 minutes gives you 317.52Mbytes for your file size - so you've gone around 15 or so seconds over 15 minutes! In a nutshell, the more bits, the bigger the file - and it's directly proportional to the number of them.

But I'm still not clear - are you editing this bounced-down file (I still don't see why you need that, incidentally) in Waveform or Multitrack? It would be perfectly possible to do most, if not all of that, in multitrack view using the automation system. But what exactly are you doing with the file once you've created it? This file, in it's unedited form, is effectively your new master, and that's the one you should be keeping at least two copies of, and editing only one of them. So initially do a Save, and a Save as, in another location, and don't touch it. If you open up the copy of this file in Waveform view, nothing actually gets altered, whatever you do, until you re-save the file. Until that point, it's stored in a series of temp file locations. Each time you make an edit, it's stored again - the whole thing. If you do a load of edits before saving, then the temp file will become enormous. And, with a big file, it's perfectly possible to run out of temp file space and crash the file... so, if anything at all goes wrong, then yes, I could see the file saving the previous (incorrect) temp location, which would certainly give you a file that's appeared to revert.

And it's that, with large files, that would incline me very much to do as much of that editing in Multitrack view as possible, as you'd only need to be saving changes to the session file - much less likely to have space problems.

[unauthorizedrob]

Fascinating, the way you calculated that.  Math not my bailiwick;  I'm mostly a story-teller.

SteveG(AudioMasters)  wrote

But I'm still not clear - are you editing this bounced-down file (I still don't see why you need that, incidentally) in Waveform or Multitrack?

Waveform.  I did all of the files that way initially, then managed to screw them up with bad processing.  The reason that I resorted to the bounced track was because -- and I think you intimated that this had something to do with the Punch&Roll extension -- once I had my assembly of recorded clips on Track One of the Multitrack session, as required by Baldree and presumably by Adobe to make his app work -- then I went to the Waveform view, to export -- and my exports only went as far as the first clip.  I could not get a complete, single Waveform file to edit.

Customer Support came up with the bounced file "solution," which worked fine for me.  That track was clean of segmentation, one long unsegmented clip.  I exported that to the 32-bit stereo files, and those are what I have been editing.  They are copied twice, so pretty safe there. I have been doing my editing in these files, without incident until that "Red Alert" came up that you helped me with earlier.  I purged the caches and deleted 16gb of miscellaneous back-ups, then moved on to this current edit.  Did fine for seven chapters, then this latest issue arose.

SteveG(AudioMasters)  wrote

It would be perfectly possible to do most, if not all of that, in multitrack view using the automation system.

Not sure what the "automation system" you mentioned is -- I have been doing most of my fixes and noise reduction "manually," adjusting levels phrase by phrase, fixing the bad audio, eliminating mouth clicks and whistles, etc.  But I am very very leery, at this stage, of applying any automatic efx, or overall eq, since I have not yet learned how to do that successfully.  My initial unschooled attempts destroyed the voice qualities that are essential to audiobooks.   I guess I could have done my work in the multitrack bumped version, but just thought I should export new high-quality 32 bit files and work on those.  I am beginning to see why that causes problems with size.

SteveG(AudioMasters)  wrote

But what exactly are you doing with the file once you've created it? This file, in it's unedited form, is effectively your new master, and that's the one you should be keeping at least two copies of, and editing only one of them. So initially do a Save, and a Save as, in another location, and don't touch it.

As you surmise, these (giant) WAVEform files ARE my 52 Master Chapter files for the eventual Audiobook.   I did make 2 backup copies of these original, unedited WAVE exports, and made another set today.   The process is to get them as clean as possible, to precisely match the text, then export to MP3 copies, set loudness to within the Audible/ACX RMS range of -18 to -23db, submit for review, and be done.

SteveG(AudioMasters)  wrote

If you open up the copy of this file in Waveform view, nothing actually gets altered, whatever you do, until you re-save the file. Until that point, it's stored in a series of temp file locations. Each time you make an edit, it's stored again - the whole thing. If you do a load of edits before saving, then the temp file will become enormous. And, with a big file, it's perfectly possible to run out of temp file space and crash the file... so, if anything at all goes wrong, then yes, I could see the file saving the previous (incorrect) temp location, which would certainly give you a file that's appeared to revert.

I THOUGHT I understood this.  I got through 5 chapters without incident, then hit that "Red Alert" you helped me with a few days ago.  I did NOT understand that every single edit meant the entire 300+mb file is being stored again "in a series of temp file locations."  That's insane. By Nature of a perfectionist, I DO make lots of little edits, cutting out every irksome noise, bringing up levels phrase by phrase, ad nauseam.

But I only thought my edits were being saved back onto the current working file when I did that manually, about every 5-10 minutes, and auto-saving every 10 minutes to my designated temp file locations.   I saw the media browser panel ripple, saw the time clock wheel run down -- so was assuming all was well. 

Obviously, it was not.    But I didn't just lose the last five minutes of work;  I appear to have lost almost ALL of my work.

SteveG(AudioMasters)  wrote

And, with a big file, it's perfectly possible to run out of temp file space and crash the file... so, if anything at all goes wrong, then yes, I could see the file saving the previous (incorrect) temp location, which would certainly give you a file that's appeared to revert.

That is almost certainly what happened.  But I see a sliver of hope where you say a file that's "appeared" to revert.  I would be thrilled to discover that this is only an appearance and that somewhere, the real work has been saved.  But where?

SteveG(AudioMasters)  wrote

And it's that, with large files, that would incline me very much to do as much of that editing in Multitrack view as possible, as you'd only need to be saving changes to the session file - much less likely to have space problems.

On this, I want to be very clear.  I DO have the original Multitrack sessions, which consist of one track of the string-out of assembled clips unprocessed, and the aforementioned incomplete WAVE view of that, which for some reason (Punch&Roll?) only went as far as the first clip.  But they all now also have a Bounced Track, which is a nice clean single file.  I viewed that in Waveform, exported, and then left those original .sesx files alone in their nice neat chapter folders with all the recorded bits, and they open very fast.    I never considered doing my editing on those tracks, until now.

SO:  Your advice is to work from those sessions, edit the Bounced Tracks in Multitrack View (if possible), and not export until they are completed.

Right?

Thank you, Steve.  I will look for your response, and try this when I have slept for a few hours.

rob

[ryclark]

It is not quite clear from the above whether you have all 52 chapters each saved as a separate .wav file or as one very long single file of the whole book. Also when you say 'giant' wav files what sort of size are these? Are they the 323Mb file you mentioned earlier as that isn't all that large for a longish uncompressed audio .wav file.

[unauthorized]

I have 52 separate files.  The largest so far is 323mb. 

  I am trying to figure out how to edit in Multitrack mode as Steve suggested, but at the moment unsure of the best approach.  I am able to convert my files to 32 bit MONO, which is all the clients require ... and would save space.   But I am very nervous about yesterday’s wipeout.

My  task at the moment is to figure out how to re-route my audio map so i can actually monitor this Bounced Track.  For some reason, I only hear it in Waveform view..... very new at this, obviously.  (And struggling through a recovery from back surgery, on some nasty steroid regimen, so a bit unsteady, not sleeping., etc.)

Question:  if I cut these back to 32bit Mono, Can I edit safely in Waveform view?

....and is there a correct recovery data file I can hunt down to restore the work i thought I lost yesterday?

Thanks. 

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

In multitrack mode you can easily bring up quiet spots using the volume envelope, and it's easy to add a little EQ to either a track or to a clip using the Effects Rack. 'Mouth noise' removal may be possible, but that rather depends upon how you're doing it. The good thing about doing these changes to either the clips or to the bounced-down tracks in Multitrack is that if you change your mind about any of them, then you can redo them, without any loss at all - all that happens is that the information is written to the session file. When you do a final mixdown or export of the track, those things you've told the session file to do at specific times will be done during the process, and will only be present on the mixed-down file.

One thing you might want to consider is doing most of the work in Multitrack, and just mouth noise removal in Waveform, because then you can use something like the AutoHeal process then, which isn't available in Multitrack.

As for working in mono - well you could, and it would indeed halve the file sizes. Whether it would fix any of your difficulties is another matter altogether though...

Oh, and if a temp file fails to write, then that's it - you've lost it, I'm afraid. It simply doesn't exist, and even if it did partially exist, it would inevitably be a right mess.

[unauthorizedrob]

Thanks.  I didn't "Like" this one, because I hate it when the error is fatal.  But I am going to try your stepped approach -- do many easy fixes in Multi-track, then export and finish up on the WAVE.  I am guessing that I should do any re-recording in Multi-track too, and edit those new, corrected clips onto a second track, then edit into the original track, THEN export to WAVE Master.

.  Makes sense, which I seldom do these days.

On the line with Tech support, and referred them to your comments.  He just said,

"Whatever Steve G said is correct, we also recommend our customer to save the file by going to save as first and then work on them or edit the file."

A ringing endorsement.

r