I recorded a band while in arrangement mode. All tracks were armed and appeared to be writing to the session. I even monitored from the DAW occasionally as they were recording and everything sounded fine.
When it came time to wrap up, I went to play back what had been recorded after 2-3 hours and the files were totally blank. Waveforms flatlined. I noticed this while recording, but I figured it was just taking time to load the waveform image onto the timeline.
Needless to say, this was a huge bummer. This was also a customer situation so huge damage control, etc. Need to get to the bottom of this.
I've done this hundreds of times and never even heard of this problem, let alone experienced it. Anybody else?
There are two things I did slightly differently than usual, but didn't suspect they would have this effect...
- I created this project/session by using a previously recorded session as a template. I opened the old session, deleted the existing samples from the timeline and "save as" to a new location on a different external hard drive.
- Recorded directly onto external hard drive (regular hard disk, not solid state). I have done this before without a problem, but not for a long time. I normally save the project initially on the desktop to record, then later copy to hard drive.
Tried "collect all and save" but that only imported sample files from the original project into the current one. I also looked to try and salvage any usable files in the ableton temp folder. No audio files found there.
I'm at a loss as to how this happened, as well as how to prevent it from happening in the future, apart from just being super paranoid and double/triple checking that the recording is working throughout the sessions. Any thoughts?