Subject:lots of bugs

Posted by: shakey

Date:8/16/2009 5:03:36 AM

This is the email I just sent to tech support. It is a list of all the bugs which I have encountered since upgrading to acid pro 7 when it came out. I just thought I would post it on here to see if anyone had any similar experiences.

These are from three seperate pc's all running xp pro, and most are common on all three. There are also a few suggestions in there for things to make acid more powerful and easier to use.

ok, here is a long list of the bugs which I have to deal with on a daily basis.

1. Acid randomly inserts midi controller envelopes at will

2. In some projects the mouse wheel becomes inoperable

3. In some cases notes can't be lengthened in inline midi editor

4. Drag and drop often clips ceases to work

5. Acid can crash when trying to delete buses

6. It is not possible to solo audio tracks when you have rewire audio coming into the mixer, you have to mute all the rewire tracks first

7. You can individually hide envelopes on bus tracks, but not on audio tracks

8. Bugs are contained within a project, not the host program, and if you open a clean project without first closing the buggy one, the bugs will be transferred to the new project.

9. Joining clips together is useless, because it doesn't take into account any silence you have in between them, or any edits you have made, it simply extends the first clip to fill the gaps

10. The sliced loop function in clip properties is handy, but it doesn't update the waveform on the arrange page, so hits still appear to be in the wrong place, even though you have quantised them

11. The space bar should start and stop playback no matter which window is currently selected. This is extremely frustrating if working with plugins, you have to click on the arrange page whenever you want to initiate playback.

12. when using reason rewired into acid, acid ignores the transport commands from reason and you have to go into acid to start or stop playback

13. Audio buses disappear from bus track window and don't reappear until they are moved before the fx sends on the mixer window

14. multi core support does not work properly with reason rewired

15. fx plugins stay active when track is bypassed, you have to physically bypass each one to free up cpu

16. you cant select and copy multiple envelopes with the envelope tool, you have to copy them one at a time

17. sometimes when you try to preview a sample with realtime midi turned off, playback stutters or crashes

18. amplitude modulation plug goes out of time if there is a gap in the region on audio track, but works fine on a bus.

19. Acid's graphical interface is very slow and inefficient at rendering waveforms

20. random blue squiggles appear on arrange page occaisionally, at certain zoom settings

21. when copying multiple clips duplicates are created behind them, and then if you copy the same section again these will be duplicated. These then intefere with the clips at the front by putting clicks at the start and end of each edit. I have had to go through an entire project, deleting 3 duplicate clips behind every clip because there was a click at every edit. It took me 2 hours. This is similar to a bug which was in version 2.

22. Playback stops while saving sometimes, and sometimes it doesnt

23. It should be possible to copy clips and sections of data from one project to another, like on logic

24. chop to new clip should apply to all selected clips, and render them to one easy to manage clip, containing any silence, fades, edits or pitch changes

25. If you click on a soft synth or bus track on the mixer, and then click on an audio track on the side of the arrange page, the soft synth or bus track will not be deselected, and any changes you make to one will be repeated on the other. This means that you can quickly mess up all the levels on the mixer if you don't realise they are both selected.

26. Acid will crash when you edit midi information near a tempo change


There you go, anyone had any of those? More next week! (Probably)

Subject:RE: lots of bugs

Reply by: Cheye

Date:8/16/2009 11:15:57 AM

Firstly, thank you Shakey for keeping track of these issues / bugs and I feel this is very useful information for Sony and Peter to check out and see if they can be reproduced. I really feel that all of these need to be looked at by the technical crew. Acid Pro is excellent and I love it! It can only get better if we continue to work at it.

I have personally experienced quite a few of the issues / bugs listed below...

3. In some cases notes can't be lengthened in inline midi editor

5. Acid can crash when trying to delete buses also when you click bypass effects from the menu

6. It is not possible to solo audio tracks when you have rewire audio coming into the mixer, you have to mute all the rewire tracks first

8. Bugs are contained within a project, not the host program, and if you open a clean project without first closing the buggy one, the bugs will be transferred to the new project.

9. Joining clips together is useless, because it doesn't take into account any silence you have in between them, or any edits you have made, it simply extends the first clip to fill the gaps

11. The space bar should start and stop playback no matter which window is currently selected. This is extremely frustrating if working with plugins, you have to click on the arrange page whenever you want to initiate playback.

12. when using reason rewired into acid, acid ignores the transport commands from reason and you have to go into acid to start or stop playback

13. Audio buses disappear from bus track window and don't reappear until they are moved before the fx sends on the mixer window

14. multi core support does not work properly with reason rewired

15. fx plugins stay active when track is bypassed, you have to physically bypass each one to free up cpu

19. Acid's graphical interface is very slow and inefficient at rendering waveforms

21. when copying multiple clips duplicates are created behind them, and then if you copy the same section again these will be duplicated. These then intefere with the clips at the front by putting clicks at the start and end of each edit. I have had to go through an entire project, deleting 3 duplicate clips behind every clip because there was a click at every edit. It took me 2 hours. This is similar to a bug which was in version 2.

22. Playback stops while saving sometimes, and sometimes it doesnt

25. If you click on a soft synth or bus track on the mixer, and then click on an audio track on the side of the arrange page, the soft synth or bus track will not be deselected, and any changes you make to one will be repeated on the other. This means that you can quickly mess up all the levels on the mixer if you don't realise they are both selected.

26. Acid will crash when you edit midi information near a tempo change

PLease look into these issues / bugs and report back to see if they are reproduceable. Get the ones that are repos.

Many thanks

cheye

Subject:RE: lots of bugs

Reply by: shakey

Date:8/16/2009 1:57:20 PM

I'm so glad that someone else has these, especially the reason rewire ones, the transport thing is really annoying!

I have a brand new one!

This is a project which I started yesterday. It has no wave or midi info in it at all, it is all running in reason through the acid mixer. There are a few plugs on the mixer using about 20 - 25% cpu. The problem is that when using reason and then switching back to acid, acid hangs and does it's pure white screen thing, using a full core to do nothing (something acid is particularly good at). If I wait for about 20 seconds it comes back. Bear in mind that this is with realtime midi switched off, so acid should be using 0% cpu. I think it is to do with the rewire implementation in acid.

Oh yeah, and another one which slipped the list. If using rewire acid will not render audio unless there is a clip drawn in the project. This means that you have to draw a clip in and then turn the gain down on it before you can render any audio from reason or any other rewire client, this is pretty silly

Subject:RE: lots of bugs

Reply by: Cheye

Date:8/19/2009 9:26:42 AM

Did not really here any feedback from the Sony people about any of these possible bugs / issues being looked at or investigated? It would be a shame to drop some of these, since I'm pretty sure that some of these items can be corrected or improved. I'm sure this is what Sony would want for their product and loyal customers?

Thanks

Cheye

Subject:RE: lots of bugs

Reply by: shakey

Date:8/19/2009 12:36:23 PM

yes, i'm working through the list with them at the moment, the first email didn't go through for some reason, so I was left thinking it was bad customer service, but now i've got through to them they have been very helpful

Subject:RE: lots of bugs

Reply by: Bremen Cole

Date:8/19/2009 4:07:37 PM

This is good news. I have ran into many of these bugs myself, and look forward to fixes. I really like Acid, and want to support it any way that I can. But I have to admit, it is probably the buggiest of the major players (cubase, Logic, Sonar....etc)

But even with the bugs, I like it better than any of them.

Subject:RE: lots of bugs

Reply by: shakey

Date:8/21/2009 6:38:12 AM

I whole heartedly agree with that statement!

Subject:RE: lots of bugs

Reply by: Cheye

Date:8/22/2009 4:21:02 PM

Well, how do we go about getting these bugs / improvements fixed? Most of us here really like Acid and want to make it better, so shall we begin?

Cheye

Subject:RE: lots of bugs

Reply by: pwppch

Date:8/22/2009 7:44:39 PM

Well, how do we go about getting these bugs / improvements fixed? Most of us here really like Acid and want to make it better, so shall we begin?

The best thing you can do to help us is to provide as many details about each of these issues.

- Be as specific as you can.
-The simpler the steps to reproduce the better.
- Assume we don't know all of your settings, hardware, the VST/VSTi you are using, driver model, etc.

Peter

Subject:RE: lots of bugs

Reply by: Geoff_Wood

Date:8/23/2009 2:25:08 AM

(Not you shakey - I know you already did !)

... and as well as here - report them to the proper place :

http://www.custcenter.com/cgi-bin/sonypictures.cfg/php/enduser/ask.php

geoff

Subject:RE: lots of bugs

Reply by: Cheye

Date:8/23/2009 8:25:00 AM

Thank You very much for this info. Perhaps we could take the lead with Shakey's list and information. He has done an amazing job documenting these issues and has a great deal of information and knowledge. Thank you Sony for taking the reins. Well done!

cheye

Subject:RE: lots of bugs

Reply by: shakey

Date:8/23/2009 10:46:41 AM

You're welcome everyone, I have been meaning to get on this for a while.

Firstly, I have tracked down issue 2, where the mouse wheel would cease to work. This was caused by the spin audio plug "spindelay". It appears they have now gone out of business, so thats the end of that one, I will just have to avoid that plug. As for other spin audio plugs I have yet to try them. It is very odd that a plug would be able to do that to acid, but I know little of it's internal make up, so I can't really comment on that.

So, Issue 2 is solved.. sort of

I am having trouble convincing tech support that issue 25 is a bug. This is where you click on a soft synth, bus or fx send on the mixer (it doesn't do it with audio tracks, they appear to be in a world of their own!) and then click on an audio or midi track on the mixer down the left of the screen, both will become highlighted. If you then change the volume of one of the tracks on the main mixer they will both be changed, which is what you would expect given that they are both now highlighted. This is extremely frustrating when you have complicated mixer setups and dont notice the double selection has happened, because you can end up accidentally changing the levels in your mix.

The correspondent said that he could recreate the double selection, but not the simultaneous volume changes. I'm sure that this is because he was trying to change the volume using the left hand fader rather than the one one the main mixer, because the volume change does not occur that way. However, I said that even if that was the case, the double selection should not be happening anyway, there is no purpose for it.

Subject:RE: lots of bugs

Reply by: shakey

Date:8/23/2009 10:56:21 AM

apparently no 6 is not a bug either, but a feature, because audio tracks are different from buses. My question was why? All audio sources should have the same signal path as audio tracks, including rewire and softsynths. If you look at the signal flow of the program, there is no mention of soft synths. Correct me if I am wrong but it appears that they are simply buses with a different label, and therefore come in later on in the signal chain, meaning if you press solo on an audio track the rewire audio will still come through.

If I take a real mixer as an example. Whether I bring audio into it via the mic input or the line input, the routing will be the same, the solo button will not cease to work as soon as the audio comes from a different source.

The audio routing of acid is unnecessarily convoluted and needs to be simplified, with all audio sources at the beginning.

Subject:RE: lots of bugs

Reply by: shakey

Date:8/23/2009 11:01:45 AM

I am pretty sure that no 3 is not a bug now. It happens when you take a clip and copy it, then extend the right wall of the copied clip and try to extend the midi note inside it beyond the right wall of the first clip. This is apparently because the clip duration is set by the original and you cant stretch notes beyond that, you have to copy to new clip. However, you can draw a new note in the copied clip which will extend the border of the original, which strikes me a bit inconsistent, but it is not a big issue.

Subject:RE: lots of bugs

Reply by: Mathieu

Date:8/26/2009 4:10:24 PM

Others I've noticed that I don't think have been mentioned:

1) If I insert a time signature change and untick the tempo change (which is ticked by default), most of the time ACID will lose it completely: it will fail to play the song and display huge figures in the time field.

2) When I zoom in to a certain area and play the song, sometimes the track will be shifted when the cursor reaches the right side of the screen, sometimes not.

Subject:RE: lots of bugs

Reply by: shakey

Date:9/9/2009 4:40:11 AM

"1) If I insert a time signature change and untick the tempo change (which is ticked by default), most of the time ACID will lose it completely: it will fail to play the song and display huge figures in the time field."

I think they are working on this one, there are a couple of threads to do with this problem.

"2) When I zoom in to a certain area and play the song, sometimes the track will be shifted when the cursor reaches the right side of the screen, sometimes not"

If I understand you correctly, I don't think that this is a bug, and is actually quite a useful feature. The way it works is that if you click on the arrange page and zoom in, it will scroll when the cursor reaches the edge. However, if you click on the page after playback has commenced the scrolling will stop and the page will stay at the cursor until you stop and restart playback. This is useful for making quick edits while the track is still playing. For example, if you notice something out of place while auditioning the tune and want to quickly correct it without stopping the tune. It is roughly equivalent to the scroll lock in sonar, or the follow song options in logic or reason.