Slow Mixdown?

I hope you guys don't mind another newbie question.
I've used take lanes to accumulate takes - keeping the best and deleting the rest. Yesterday I actually used the comping function to piece together a good vocal track from about 7 takes. It was pretty much exactly as described in the video. However, unlike the video, when I selected "flatten the comp" the mixdown was not instantaneous! It actually took about 45 minutes. The system monitors in Sonar and in Task Manager showed only moderate CPU and HD use. My computer isn't a hot rod by any stretch, but it's not a slug either. Is it normal for mixdowns to take this long?
 
Cindy

Hi. I think that sounded as a way to long time to have to wait. The times I have done it, it has taken seconds, and not minutes. I think it depends on the number of clips in the comp track. The more clips (splits), the longer it will take. Sorry to be of no more help.
All the best.

Hello again.
 
I think I remember the details of your thread (maybe post a link to it so folks can access it from here).
 
IIRC you were stretching the performance using the Slip Stretch method I described (or maybe you changed to another method).
 
Did you use the "Bounce to Clips" action to bounce the stretched clips BEFORE comping the takes together or did you leave the stretches "active" and then somehow do your comp and use "Flatten Comp"?
 
45 minutes is WAAAAAY too long for either action so maybe if you did not "bounce" each of your stretched clips before creating your comp and/or went straight to "Flatten Comp" (not bouncing the stretched clips beforehand) the action is confusing Sonar.
 
Short version...
 
All the takes you stretched should have remained isolated from each other as you did your stretching (so each take matched the desired tempo BY THEMSELVES).
 
After all the takes were stretched to your liking each one should have been bounced individually (as in you would select all the clips in that take whether they had been stretched or not) and done a Right Click > Bounce to Clips action. That would bounce the stretches and turn all those split up clips into one single clip (this can actually be done on multiple tracks/lanes as well at once and provide one clip per track in a bulk process but let's ignore that for now).
 
AFTER you have done all the required stretching to get all you takes/performances to the timeline THEN you would make your "comp" across the takes (that now do not have any stretching applied and started off as single clips).
 
After all that is done THEN you'd youse "Flatten Comp" on each track.
 
Not sure if that's the problem but I'd imagine using "Flatten Comp" on a pile of stretched clips might try to do multiple actions at once and bork out Sonar so do it in stages.
 
I've never tested it though but definitely 45 minutes is way too long.
 
I will say though that when I do multi track stretching that involves lots of splits across all tracks that when I do a bulk "Bounce to Clip" procedure the processing takes quite a while. Like let's say 9 tracks with a couple dozen splits all stretched takes maybe 5-10 minutes.
 
I am however using an i7 desktop with 16GB RAM and 7200rpm HDDs. A modest system these days but still pretty powerful and fast.
 
List your system specs and provide some extra info based on what I described but I think if you do it in stages you'll get better results.
 
 
Cheers.

The post with the slip-stretch was a different project. (which came out great BTW, thank you for your help!) I did Bounce to Clip and that took about 5 minutes which I thought was pretty reasonable. There was no stretching on this project - just a singer trying to figure out how to sing his part. (He just screams for emphasis on stage and I asked him to sing an actual backup part for the recording. I'm a dictatorial producer.)
 
I'll check out the system settings and see if I can find anything. Thanks for the suggestion.
 
Cindy

Could a hard drive problem cause this? Sometimes videos played from this drive stutter a bit. Is there a lot of fetching and writing with this process?

Wow... I typed "serious" quite a few times in that post. I'm usually more poetic... lol.
 
But HDD failure (without a backup) is about as serious as it gets for us audio freaks.
 
Loss of hours of cofig stuff (and having to reload/rereg/etc) and irreplaceable audio files... total worst nightmare.
 
So "seriously" do a back up to an external drive as soon as you can... if you can.