Insane bug, disappearing audio!

I've run into this before, but I never really figured out what was happening. Today I caught it in the act. I have an audio track that is pieced together from various takes, sounds good. I went to edit some effects on the track, I had a vocal tuner already on it but it was deactivated. I accidentally deleted it, reinstated it, and then tried to activate it, but it remained gray. So I deleted it and re-added it. At that point I hit play, and my audio was gone. I went back to the track, and many regions had disappeared, though not all. So I used the undo key and stepped back until I was at the original state, and there it was. The audio came back.

I'm not going to bother asking if anybody has a workaround for this, obviously I'm just going to have to write the start points of my audio chunks down occasionally so that I can reconstruct them if I get too far away from it. But what I really would like to know, really really really would like to know....

Is there an official place to report bugs in this system to Akai?

it seems that audio tracks are yet another afterthought functionality, they’re fundamentally broken in several places which made me abandon them.
as an extreme example try to do this:
record or import a exactly 4 bar loop into audio track and change the pitch of a sample to +12, what you will observe is that the actual audio plays at double speed (an octave higher over 2 bars as it should) but the audio clip that is placed on the audio track doesn’t change its length / won’t adjust its waveform which result in it being displayed over 4 bars. That is completely insane and makes arranging clips quite difficult without doing some advanced math in your head. It’s ok when you change pitch of a sample to double/half it’s length but good luck in making a small micro adjustments (+/- several cents) and aligning the clips seamlessly on the track. What i think is happening here is that every „audio region” within a clip is just a „pointer” to an original / „parent” sample and inherit all of its attributes, but at the same time the displayed clip or „container” is a completely unique instance of an object that doesn’t get the data needed to recalculate it’s properties (length, waveform etc.) from the main sample. Overall it’s messed up…

jamos wrote:Is there an official place to report bugs in this system to Akai?

Open a ticket at https://support.akaipro.com/en/support/home - they will apparently forward your bug to the relevant department.

You can also use the 'Provide Feedback' button the the MPC Software (smiley face, bottom on the right hand browser column). However you don't get any kind of confirmation with this (e.g. no ticket number etc), and to date I've never received any subsequent follow ups on the bugs submitted through that.

dustyslices wrote:it seems that audio tracks are yet another afterthought functionality, they’re fundamentally broken in several places which made me abandon them..........
Overall it’s messed up…

It seems fragile, for sure. I figured out what happened...I triggered its fragility I am in the habit of taking the tracks I record in the MPC into another editor for pop cleanup, noise reduction, etc. In this case, I had recorded a couple of takes as stereo instead of mono, so I converted them to mono. I think that, when the MPC opens them, it handles them well enough, but some of these pointers get a bit confused... the fix was to delete all of the regions and put them back in by hand. I will be more careful going forward.

ahhhh.... so you take the samples outside ? that would explain everything...
samples created in MPC have a lot of metadata written directly into a .wav file (slice points, loop markers, pulse position, crossfade length etc.), if you take it outside and resave it that metadata is gone for good

dustyslices wrote:ahhhh.... so you take the samples outside ? that would explain everything...
samples created in MPC have a lot of metadata written directly into a .wav file (slice points, loop markers, pulse position, crossfade length etc.), if you take it outside and resave it that metadata is gone for good

I found that with my particular editor, Adobe Audition, the metadata is preserved when I do simple edits. I don't know if it is when I convert from stereo to mono, however.

And aside, I wonder why they chose to put their metadata in proprietary format at the end of the file, rather than in standard Riff chunks like everybody else does.

jamos wrote:And aside, I wonder why they chose to put their metadata in proprietary format at the end of the file, rather than in standard Riff chunks like everybody else does.

actually they do it at the beginning of a file, you can check it with any hex editor, can't see anything of interest at the eof



EDIT:
btw. just remembered that @Tutor made a script that pulls out the atem chunk from a sample, maybe hit him up and you could modify it so it pulls the atem before your edits and paste it after you resave it with adobe.

Been lurking on this forum since I got my MPC Live 2 in February. Finally registered to confirm that I’ve encountered this same bug a couple of times as well. Drives me nuts.

And for the record: it’s all been recorded into the MPC and hasn’t been edited externally. We do have in common that I’ve also spliced the audio to different clips, some of which disappear randomly

I do not know If it is related to this thread, but same name on audio and midi track is a nono. Audio disappears. It has been a while since i used the mpc, maybe new uppdates fixed it.