'Copy External Files'; Do the references get moved?

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Some time ago I wrote on this forum that timestretching/tempo mapping is a deep subject. There are some very nice tools in Studio One for manipulating timing, but without understanding exactly what goes on under the hood it is a fragile mechanism, especially when you make changes 'out of order' like changing the sample rate at a late stage.

An option which would make at least my life easier is to let Studio One update file headers of raw/imported tracks. When you import a track without (correct) tempo data into a song you can add/edit the tempo data then and there, but currently that new info is only available inside the song. If you want the audio files to have the corect(ed) tempo info too then you have to bounce the track, which creates a new file, often in a different location as well. It would be so much easier if Studio One could optionally update the header of the original file, at least for WAVs.

This could also prevent some of those issues you encountered when changing file sample rates. Studio One would get a file's tempo data from the file itself rather than having to remember it from the .song file. That, and flushing the cache files, would probably make the whole process more robust.

Speaking of process: What exactly is your process for converting the sample rate of a song and its original audio files? What are the steps you go through?

 

[TonalDynamics]

An option which would make at least my life easier is to let Studio One update file headers of raw/imported tracks. When you import a track without (correct) tempo data into a song you can add/edit the tempo data then and there, but currently that new info is only available inside the song. If you want the audio files to have the corect(ed) tempo info too then you have to bounce the track, which creates a new file, often in a different location as well. It would be so much easier if Studio One could optionally update the header of the original file, at least for WAVs.

My thoughts exactly.

Speaking of process: What exactly is your process for converting the sample rate of a song and its original audio files? What are the steps you go through?

Well I sort of hashed that out with the help of the other heroes in this thread. I simply:

1. As referenced in the title, right-clicked in the pool and 'Copy External Files' to get all of the referenced audio in a new single folder
2. Expanded every single folder in the pool (this incidentally ended up being the most tedious aspect of the process, as surprisingly there is no 'expand all' function for the folders in the pool, and CMND+A (Select All) only works on visible files!)
3. CTRL+A to select all files
4. Right-Click, Convert Files, Selected 48kHz (Up from 44.1)
5. Waited the 20 minutes and 24 GB later to have all the newly converted samples in the 'Media' folder
6. Changed the .song project SR to 48k and resaved the resulting project under a DIFFERENT name (this is very important, because you'll want the old sample-rate version to help troubleshoot or to go back to if something goes wrong as it did in my case!

And there ya have it. Like I said everything went off without a hitch apart from the loss/overwriting of the damn file tempos.
(Confessed serial-timestretcher here, with both audio and MIDI)

 

[SwitchBack]

OK, thanks. Yeah, that's tedious. Have you tried changing the sample rate of the song as the first step? I vaguely remember doing that and the song would automatically resample all files in use. The Cache Activity meter would run for a while and once it stopped all files would be converted. I could be wrong though...

 

[TonalDynamics]

OK, thanks. Yeah, that's tedious. Have you tried changing the sample rate of the song as the first step? I vaguely remember doing that and the song would automatically resample all files in use. The Cache Activity meter would run for a while and once it stopped all files would be converted. I could be wrong though...

That does work and it was my first step actually, it just simply fills up the cache with the resampled audio instead of putting it in the media folder...

...but you may have just hit on something. I doubt that the file inspector tempi will be overwritten if I just let the cache handle it... my thinking was that this would prevent me from using the 'clean up cache' command and would delete those 24GB worth of resampled files, but I'm not even sure of that either right now.

Will do this again and let it run while I'm AFK to see if it works out better -- more at eleven.