Audio Track-shows 'error'? [SOLVED]

[goddi]

Greetings,

I happened to open a project that I had created a few years ago. In the Timeline, I notice there were 'Error' notations added to the beginning of almost all of my added music files. I had several versions of the same show and all of them had these 'Error' notations in the music files shown in the Timeline. Just before finishing this post, I double checked and took a look at the same projects and then the Error notations were not there anymore. The music in these projects played just find with and without these Error notations.

Can someone explain what caused these Error notations to be added to my music titles in the Timeline, and then disappear? Here is an example:

Gary

[Igor]

Gary,

This error occurs when the program cannot generate a waveform from an audio file. It might happen if an audio file was locked for reading (opened in an audio editor, for example). 

Even if you restart PTE AV Studio, these wrong waveforms stay cached and will be used again.

There are 2 solutions:

A. Rename affected audio files in Windows Explorer and replace audio files in the Project Options. It will force PTE to re-generate new audio waveforms.

B. Only for advanced users. Browse the folder:
C:\Users\YourProfileName\AppData\Local\WnSoft-WaveCache\
Delete all folders inside this folder.

 

[goddi]

Igor,

After closing and re-opening the files a bit later, the Error notation disappeared and all is back to normal. I've never seen this happen before. But I just had a thought. When I opened the PTE shows, I was also in the process of using Handbrake to encode a .TS file to MP4. My CPU was up to about 98%. Perhaps this had something to do with the generation of the waveforms with the Error notation.

Seems to be back too normal and was only temporary.

Thanks for the quick reply.

Gary

[Igor]

Gary,

Glad that you resolved this problem.

Video encoding utilizes all power of your computer. But normally it should not case such problems.

[David White]

Hi Igor,

If possible I should like to get the the clips visible so that I can adjust the volume levels if needed. However there are rather a lot of them and it would take a long time to rename them all.

Therefore I should like to try the method you describe above (C:\Users\YourProfileName\AppData\Local\WnSoft-WaveCache\
Delete all folders inside this folder). but two things stop me first I can't follow the instructions as I don't know what \YourProfileName\ means or how I find it. Secondly, if I make an error in the deletion process can I possibly destroy the AV even if I make a back-up before trying it.

Lastly I am using Audacity to record and process the sound files and then exporting them as MP3 to PTE. It seems to work well, even when I open the file again and re-edit it. It is only later that I notice some of the files are not displaying.

Can you say if there is something I can avoid doing during this process to prevent the problem occurring in the future please?

[Igor]

David,

The most likely this problem appeared when a MP3 file was opened in another program (Audacity?) and then opened in PTE same time. So the Timeline view couldn't generate audio waveforms and cached wrong empty waveforms.

I think that we should add a special button to clear a cache of audio waveforms. It should help in such situation.

Let me think more. I'll reply tomorrow.

[David White]

Thanks Igor.

Yes, I was modifying the commentaries and had the Audio files opened and was going back and forth between them.

Being able to clear the cache easily would be a great help as I am doing a major revision to a long sequence of a holiday we took in New Zealand back in 2007 to enable it to be shown on my HD 4K TV. I'm not only redoing all the photos but adding a significant amount of commentary.

Well I've got to do something during  lock-down, but It's a steep learning curve for me!

 

Regards

David