Audio Tracks

[UCanDream]

Okay...I need to try this again.

First, thank you Ultimate Dj for your suggestion. However, in my case it did not work.

So here is my problem.....STILL!!!...... I record audio tracks. Then when I go to various spots in the song to edit or simply audition either the MIDI tracks or the Audio Tracks one of the channels in an audio track will be suddenly missing or way quiet. The track is still there....I can see it's data in Edit. Or an audio track will be totally gone- audibly. The data is there but the audio does not sound at all. For God's sake what the hell is UP WITH THIS THING! If I call Korg will I be told that they don't support the Oasys anymore? Anyway, does this audio anomaly happen to ANYONE here besides Dj and myself?

Any response would be great. Seems like more and more looky loos and "I don't give a sh!t" attitude happens across these posts and less help these days....which sucks, honestly.

Sorry if I seem eff'ing bitchy but this audio problem is killing my project. Thanks for any help- in advance.


Kind regards,
UCanDream

[UCanDream]

Just got off the phone with Korg USA. They've "never heard of this problem." (Weird! Maybe my Oasys is just one of the very few retarded red-headed stepchildren that squirted out of Korg's womb as they were hastening to rid themselves of their "O" stock.) He did have 2 suggestions that I will try: 1) Go to my other songs on the hard drive and clean out any unused tracks on Audio Tracks that may be sitting there just causing trouble to the hard drive.....(hmmmm) 2) Make adjustments in the Insert Effects so that they are set to 1/2 as opposed to L/R (again, hmmmmm....not sure about this stuff but I will try ANYthing. I will also post my results.


Talk to you all soon.
UCanDream

[Mike Conway]

Any response would be great. Seems like more and more looky loos and "I don't give a sh!t" attitude happens across these posts and less help these days....which sucks, honestly.

I don't think it is only your OASYS, as I've heard some others comment on some tracking problems with the audio. I've used the audio tracks, but I don't think nearly as much as you do. I haven't had this problem, yet. If I do, I'll report back.

How many tracks are you using? SOLO might not be working right. What happens when you reload the song or copy to another Song slot? I use multiple slots for a single song, so I can go back to an earlier version of it.

Hopefully, someone else witll chime in. If you solve the problem, write about it. Good luck!

[Charlie]

Here are some ideas I'd check out if I were in your unhappy situation:

Is this happening to all your songs containing audio? Or just to some songs?
Are you able to reproduce the failure? (That's an important part of Q-management: errors you cannot produce on command you haven't understood yet - therefor it's very hard to solve them or at least improve)
Have you tried copying the whole defective song into a new slot? If so: do you have the same problem in the new song-slot?
If you mute all working tracks and let play only the defective ones and start the song from the very beginning: is there still no sound?
Have you tried importing track by track into a new song? Does it work then?

My feeling is that some of your audio-files are corrupt - but that's just a guess. There are many reasons why one doesn't hear what he expects to. For me it is one of the "studio-classics" and I come across it all the time (most of time it's a routing issue - a button not pressed - or pressed to often etc.).

I remember I ran into some issues on the Oasys when using several audio-tracks at once (let's say more than 10). Quite often these problems could be solved by copying into new song slots, or storing in different locations etc. Didn't happen very often, though.

Hope this was of some help ...

[UCanDream]

Hey Mike and Charlie!

Thanks you guys. I appreciate the process of elimination suggestions. I believe I am onto something here! One more day of doing everything here that has been suggested and trying to get the problem to resurface and I think I will have some very clear answers. I did talk to "Ian" at Korg (he was actually helpful) and he sent the problem to the R & D guys there at Korg. But when we talked again I mentioned something that struck a bell with him. By tomorrow I will be sure of what I am experimenting with here. Before I commit to an answer I just wanna be SURE I am on the right track!

I'll check back in by the end of the day. Thanks again guys.


Regards,
UCanDream

[UCanDream]

Okay!! I think I got it. No-- I KNOW I got it.

After attacking this problem feverishly and repeating many processes over and over again here is my conclusion: When MIDI and audio tracks are being processed together it seems that the audio relies heavily on SOMEthing in the MIDI track or possibly the Master Track to keep its place. I'm not entirely clear on this-- but it seems that it follows some kind of marker. Here is where I was going awry. WhenEVER you use the jog shuttle (data wheel) OR even maually input location data to move forward or backward in a song WHILE the song is playing the audio data loses its place!! And it may only lose its place in one channel...or both. And sometimes it wont or CAN'T find its way back!! In fact, I had my audio vanish for good and not come back at all dusring this session. I found that even reloading the song will not help! (Isn't that ridiculous?) That is what was throwing me off course! Reloading SHOULD have fixed the problem I described. But it simply does not! ONLY rebooting the Oasys takes care of the problem. I tested this out over and over on every song I have recorded with MIDI and Audio and the results were consistent with no exceptions! As long as I do NOT move the song forward or backward DURING playback the problem does not reoccur! Of course, I am able to stop the song and then move to any location and resume playback without any issues at all!

Whew! That felt long-winded! And just to be sure- I did talk to Korg about this and Ian had the Research and Development team looking into this (he said). The first time I talked to him I failed to provide every detail about what I was doing when the Audio Tracks would do their little disappearing act. So after we talked a couple times it became apparent that I was actually causing the problem by expecting the Oasys to do something besides just sitting there and looking pretty, lol. Yeah, she may be a sexy beast looking all hot and cozy in my studio but I do expect her to sing AND hit all the notes!! Heh.

So here it is in brief: If you have audio playing in your sequencer do NOT use the dial to move thru the song WHILE the song is playing. And do NOT punch in a location manually WHILE the song is playing because the result will be the same. First, stop the song... then advance or rewind it. And if everybody but me already knew all this then I will do what I do best most often....just sit here and feel a little stupider.

Hopefully, I was clear on all this. If not please ask for clarification. And thanks again to Mike and Charlie for some very helpful suggestions.


Regards,
UCanDream

[Charlie]

Hm - I've never used the jog-dial for this purpose. But I remember I used the "enter bar number" and the locator very often and I am pretty sure I didn't always stop the sequencer before jumping to another location. However, this was done most of the time when creating the playback = before recording audio-tracks from singers etc. So your observation might still be correct and I might run into this problem once I do this while handling audio-tracks. But to be honest: I don't want to try it out - I haven't lost any audio-data until now.

[UCanDream]

But to be honest: I don't want to try it out - I haven't lost any audio-data until now.

Hey Charlie...

Just to be clear on the matter, my audio was never actually blown off the drive. (If that had been happening you would have already seen my Oasys on eBay! lol) Whenever my audio tracks finally got derailed to the point where they could not find their location again the whole thing was "fixed upon rebooting. The audio tracks were always restored and there was NEVER an exception to this. Interestingly, one of the things that was suspicious was that the more I used the wheel or keypad to input FF or Rewind action the more the whole system would start slowing down (before the recorded audio did her disappearing act). The audio was simply trying to "reconnect" to it's position marker. I am paraphrasing Ian's (from Korg) explanation--- I'm not just sitting here trying to sound smart....impossible! Heh!

Laterzz....
UCanDream

[Mike Conway]

This is very good to know! Thankyou, for posting your findings, UCanDream!

[Arend Groot]

Thanks for this detailled reporting, I will try this out later

[Arend Groot]

I could not reproduce this.

I recorded a combi in the sequencer. Then I recorded the midi tracks into 2 audio tracks. Cleared the midi tracks and recorded a new midi track.

Now I got 1 midi track and 2 audio tracks. I scrolled through the song with the data wheel while the song was playing. Nothing happened with my audio tracks....doing it wrong?

[Charlie]

Well, I'd simply be glad I didn't run into UCanDream's problems!

But as I said above: if one cannot reproduce an error "on demand" it is not fully understood yet.

[UCanDream]

Hey guys,

Sorry for the delay, I am out of town and have little access to a computer.

Just to add a more complete picture to this; My problems arise when I have a fully loaded MIDI sequence scenario along with audio tracks. The other thing is: That the problem did not always present itself right away. In my experience as I was 'plugging along' (perhaps after an hour or 2, or even as soon as 15 minutes into my work) the problem was kinda of creeping up on me. I would notice the Oasys lagging a little...then a little more...then audio would take a notably long time to play after MIDI tracks were already playing. Remember, one of the symptoms I pointed out earlier was that this was all reminiscent of a Windows PC that get more and more loaded down with multi-tasking...that is how the Oasys seemed to behave. And once I got to the point where audio would disappear- be it from one channel or both- (I'm referring here to any given stereo audio track) it would not come back until I rebooted.

I can reproduce this problem all day long if I use the shuttle wheel or data entry to move fast forward or rewind while the song is playing. So, even though Ian at Korg suggested that the audio is following something encoded related to MIDI tracks, my experience has been that the problem has some relationship to CPU load as well...that's just my observation.

By the way, I have not tried this with audio only! If I can make this happen w/o MIDI tracks then it is going to derail Ian's suggestion that the audio is synced to a code in the MIDI tracks. This should be interesting. I wont be back home until later next week though.


Later all.
UCanDream