Merging Technologies

Hello everyone!
My first post here, and just adding Pyramix to my toolbox. Coming from ProTools and Steinberg.

I've come across a very strange playlist behavior. Now I understand that Pyramix doesn't have the very slim playlist functionality as ProTools but I think it should work in a very similar way, right?

So...

If I start a session with only one stereo track/strip and create two playlists for this stereo track, let's call them Playlist ONE and TWO. Switching between these two playlists work like you'd expect. No issues.

If I then add another stereo track below this first track visually in the edit window, everything still works as excpected. When I switch between playlists ONE and TWO on the first track at the top of the session, everything works as expected.

Now..... if I rearrange these two tracks so that the track with my playlists come below this stereo track with no playlists... and I switch to playlist TWO for instance. The contents of this playlist is MOVED to the stereo track above which contains no playlists and contents are thus removed from my playlist TWO on the below track. When I try and undo this, as expected the below track with the playlists switch back to playlist ONE, but the contents of playlist TWO is forever moved up onto the stereo track above.

Any one else notice this strange behavior?

Yes - I'm in the habit of never creating a track above any track that has a playlist already created as it wreaks havoc - all playlists are unusable after - rather inconvenient. Not sure if this was fixed in v11.x as I haven't tried it.

Wish I had a workaround but I don't.

-Silas

No, there's no workaround, it's fundamental to how Playlists are implemented in Pyramix, meaning that you should not expect this to be changed. The only way to work is to make sure that all your tracks are where you want them before you start creating any Playlists. If you find you have to add a track or two, make sure they come after all the existing Tracks. Sorry - them's the breaks...

A common scenario is to set up a Project for a recording session where you'll be recording many Takes of the same piece of music, which later you'll want to modify to become a Source-Destination Editing Project. Perhaps you've become used to the disposition of Track Groups as they are set in any of the Merging supplied Templates that come with Pyramix, where the Destination Track Group is at the top, with the Source(s) below it. If you attempt to insert tracks above your existing Tracks containing all the Playlists from your session, well, you know the rest - much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

The moral of the story is to make it a rule that whenever you have created Playlists for a Track or Track Group, any new Tracks you add must be located after/below the existing ones. To turn a Recording Session with many Takes in many Playlists, into a Source-Destination Editing Project, just go to the Track Groups Tab, select the existing Group and Duplicate it (then making the suitable adjustments as to Group Type - Source or Destination - and the options you need - Auto-Solo, Auto-Collapse, etc.). Editing from Playlists is much more pleasant than having to hunt through a great long chain of recorded Takes, and it has the benefit of making Pyramix much snappier to have fewer mounted Clips in the Timeline at any given moment.

Thank you for the very in-depth description and workflow layout!

As a Pyramix beginner, I think this would be very important to put in the manual since there's nothing to be found about this playlist behaviour anywhere. It seems not that thought out and illogical behavior of a seemingly straight ahead function. Even searching the forum here I found nothing related to this.