No waveform displayed in this .sng

n-Track Studio Discussion Forum
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No waveform displayed in this .sng

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In a particular .sng I have a number of .wav tracks but the waveform does not appear. I see the file title, e.g., “new_song_16.wav” and it plays, but no waveform.

Any idea how to fix this?

TIA,
Leo

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When you say it plays, are you meaning that you actually hear audio?

When you say, no wave form, is there NOTHING there at all, or is there a straight horizontal line, or could it be a wav form, but so flat that maybe zooming it you might see it better.

If it’s the latter, I would say that your signal input signal isnt strong enough.

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It’s gotta be fairly strong to show up in the waveform, around -30db iirc.

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Yes, I hear the audio when I play it. Everything seems to work ok, except the display. I’ve widened the track display verticall and horizontally and still nothing.

At one time these tracks on this .sng displayed properly. It’s just begun to behave this way yesterday.

Leo

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Might be the zoom, or soemthign.

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Instead of opening the sng file, Try importing or opening just the wav files just to see what you get. I don’t think this will change anything, but i am curious as to what you might see after doing this. !!???!!

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Quote (leotohill @ July 14 2005,04:59)
Yes, I hear the audio when I play it. Everything seems to work ok, except the display. I've widened the track display verticall and horizontally and still nothing.

At one time these tracks on this .sng displayed properly. It's just begun to behave this way yesterday.

Leo

Not sure if you knew this, but the .npk files created by n-Track store the waveform data for the display...SO...The only way I could get what you have described to happen so far was to (a) delete my .npk files AND (2) put the .sng project and its wave files in a folder to which I didn't have write access. When n-Track started up, it couldn't recreate the .npk files, so it didn't show the waveforms, but I could play the song (though the display was sluggish).

Could something like this be what has happened to you?

Tony
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And, just to make sure: have you tried View > Refresh View > Recalculate Waveforms?

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Gotta admit, Tony (scantee) must be really experimenting with this thihgie! Luv your reply.
Cool.
Sorry Leo, I immediately thought of zoom, but that does not seem to be a fix…weird, have not run into this display bug ever…sorry.
Leo, is it only doing for one song group of tracks, or all your saved stuff tracks?

Can you load just one track( not song) and see the display of a track? is it only one song (.sng) that does this?


chill

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Ok, here’s some more info that helps narrow it down.

The problem is in the .sng file, not the wave file. I have at least two of these bad sng files. If I create a new .sng while a bad one is open, the new one is bad too. If I create new .sng while a good one is open, the new one is good.

In each of the two new .sng files, I imported the same .wav. In the good .sng, the waveform shows, in the other it doesn’t.

I wanted to compare the content of the two .sngs, but it’s binary so I can’t (in any meaningful way.) Has the file format been published? I did inspect the content of all the pages on File/Properties for each of the .sngs, and all appeared to be identical.

Another point: I recently upgraded to 4.0.5#1846. The problem occurred after the upgrade. I don’t recall what version I was at: 4.something, and less than 1 year old.

So now I can workaround this problem, but if someone wants I can send the .sng files for inspection.

thanks all,

leo

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<!–QuoteBegin>

Quote
The problem is in the .sng file, not the wave file. I have at least two of these bad sng files. If I create a new .sng while a bad one is open, the new one is bad too. If I create new .sng while a good one is open, the new one is good.

In each of the two new .sng files, I imported the same .wav. In the good .sng, the waveform shows, in the other it doesn’t.

This is kind of interesting since the data that is displayed is not contained in the .sng file but in the .npk files. The .npk files are references by the .sng file…maybe…but the .sng file references the wave files for sure. n-Tracks creates thes using the names of the wave files. I don’t know if the .npk filenames are strored in the .sng as well. I suspect not, but they may be to speed up loading performance.

As an experiment, delete all the .npk files in the directory the waves are in. Then open a bad song. n-Tracks will recreate the .npk files by scanning the waves again. Since the .npk files are missing they should be replaced. If they aren’t that might be telling us something, such as the .sng file is referencing files somewhere else.

Make sure there is write access to the folder with the waves or those files can’t be created. Also, if they exist and are read only there might be problems too, but I don’t know what the symptom might be.

If deleting the .npk files and having them recreated from scratch doesn’t fix the problem then I suggest emailing both the good and the bad songs files (just the .sng files, zipped up of course to make them A LOT smaller) to Flavio. Maybe he can determine the differences. If deleting the .npk files doesn’t cause the problem to go away then there’s probablyh a bug in n-Tracks.