Solved Song file bloat: 'Performances' Data?

[TonalDynamics]

Hey gang,

Inside a .song file of mine, I've got a 'Performances' folder for an N.I. NOIRE Felt piano MIDI track that is 42 MB in size, compared to an Infinite Brass Horn section MIDI track which is 200kb in size.

The felt piano's MIDI only plays for a couple of sections, approx. 2 mins total, while the horn MIDI plays for nearly 5 minutes on the whole track and has a LOT more CC automations.

You have to unRAR the song file to see this stuff, but having done what you see is the same .musicx file copied over and over and over on the felt piano, like this:


Meanwhile the horn MIDI looks like this:



Baffled by what could be causing the piano track to DUPE itself repeatedly like this.
Someone on the answers board mentioned layers, but there's only three layers with sparse MIDI on that track.

I used to have a lot of scratch pads derived from copying the main arrangement... I'm wondering if it duplicated all this data with each save and then didn't delete itself somehow when I removed the scratch pads?

Anyone ever encountered this .musicx duping issue in a song before?

Thanks,
JB

 

[TonalDynamics]

Answering my own question for the benefit of future gennies:

The problem boiled down to some kind of obscure layer corruption. Somehow each of the layers ended up getting sliced into 1,000 pieces so that there were innumerable duplicates of various takes all mashed into the space of a single phrase, like this:



^ You can see all the tiny little snippets being erased, as well as the fact that the note data is absurd, with overlapping parts ostensibly from whatever source those snippets are from.

It reminds me of a layer comp that you might see on a track, but not on individual layers; I certainly did nothing whatever in terms of workflow decisions to create all those cuts.

The issue occurred on approx. 5-6 tracks out of 100 or so, so nothing alarming -- and no track MIDI was harmed, only outdated layer info... curious.

Anyone witnessed layer corruption like this before?
If so, what was the culprit?

In any case, be advised this is a phenomenon that can quickly bring .song filesize bloat to your projects.
Something to be aware of!

 

[Sayat Nova]

So, what did you do to remedy this? Curious to know. Thank you.

 

[TonalDynamics]

So, what did you do to remedy this? Curious to know. Thank you.

For this specific problem simply deleting the corrupt layer tracks like I did with the eraser tool above was enough to remedy the problem; the duped .musicx all get deleted and space is restored.

 

[Sayat Nova]

Thank you for the reply.