I'm really having problems comping. Always have had. Another session today, and another frustrating couple of hours getting on top of it. Little things always go wrong and it just never seems to work properly for me. So I would really like to know how other people go about this.
 
Firstly, I'm talking about multiple take lanes. Let's just pick vocals. I will usually record 2 or 3 takes of the entire song first with the singer, so three lanes of full audio. Then go back, have a listen, pick on some of the areas where I want more choice, says bridges and chorus's and outro, and add those by using looping. Maybe 12 take lanes all up, with 9 of those only parts of the song. Then, I go back, loop and listen to each segment, swiping what I want, from beginning to end, then back to the start, zoom in, turn snap off, and go forward to each clip selected, moving the fade points to the exact positions required, zoom back out, and flatten the comp. I will usually save this a number of times along the way.
 
But what I am often finding is, in the created comp, at some of the clip points, there may be more than one clip, with one hidden underneath, so two clips playing, not one. Go back and look at the lanes, only one clip unmuted. I assume it's to do with when I am actually swiping clips for selection, and it's when I change my mind and swipe something else instead, or make one longer, or shorter. I have no other ideas as to how it comes about, but it happens a lot, and other unexpected results too. I've had to at times, copy the audio from the take lanes, to fresh tracks, just to get control over them.
 
Does anyone else either have these problems, or know a way to stop it from happening. It's not destructive, always a fix, but can be frustrating and time consuming. What bugs me most is, I really don't know what, if anything, I do wrong to make this happen.
 
cheers. Dave.

What drives me nuts is the slivers that get left behind randomly when clips overlap and are moved apart again.

Agree, some of it's random. If you leave in snap to, and just do one pass selecting, there are no issues. But if you go back, even in snap to, and change anything, results are unpredictable, either leaving slivers, or entire clips buried 1 and 2 deep, or parts muted. I just can't seem to grasp a flawless procedure that will give me guaranteed results. Bar recording every take into a new track, I can't find an answer.
 
 
edit - just let me add, I'm not whining about this. I can work around it. I'm trying to find if someone has another way for me to try.

First off don't swipe while looping/playback is going. Make your splits/swipes around the desired ranges before engaging the "Speedcomp" looping/playback.
 
Second, once you've started looped playback use the Up/Down Arrow Keys to navigate up and down the current section's takes and the Left/Right keys to move to the next or previous section. Doing this will automagically unmute the current selection and mute everything else. Once you find the Take segment you want hit Enter to promote it to the Parent track.
 
That's the recommended method for "Speedcomping" IIRC.
 
However I stopped using that method ages ago because it's quirky as heck and gives me dropouts/engine stops. I don't think it's Speedcomping itself that's the problem but the "Looping/Preview" features that are the foundation of this method. Particularly "Preview". It has always been buggy for me even in X1/X2 (same dropouts and silliness). They are old features. I also like to really listen, THINK and contemplate about my selections which is kind of rushed and difficult with a loop going. It's also due to the Up/Down/Left/Right nature of how Speedcomping works it does not allow me to listen through to how my selections are flowing out of/into the next sections.
 
What I do now instead is manually engage playback normally with the spacebar and simply click in the lower half of the clip sections (which promotes the clip/mutes all others in the section). No dropouts, easier to manage, allows me to listen to things linearly AND by doing it manually gives me that little extra time/space/control to make my decisions. It's actually almost as fast the way I do it even if it didn't save me a bunch of time not having to worry about dropouts and bad/rushed decisions.
 
It also allows me to adjust my splits and fades as I go which again is problematic with the Looping method.
 
 
Cheers.

Also if you are more of a "mousecentric" type person and still want to use Speedcomping I'm pretty sure you can just click on the lower half of the clips while Speedcomp/Looping is engaged and get the same results.
 
It's the "Swiping" to promote that's giving you the slivers. That swiping should only be done once per section. Not every time you want to promote a take section.
 
Hopefully that makes sense/helps.
 
Cheers.
 

I guess I don't do true speed comping Beeps, because I basically do almost as you do. While I do loop to listen to phrases, I manually start/stop with the spacebar, clicking solo between tracks to listen to each, swiping, and moving on. I don't do exact splits at the time, just nearest timing, and go back to each split later, making sure everything is spot on, with no clicks etc. I think were things go haywire for me, is if I get a phrase ahead, and decide that a different phrase prior is now better, and go back and swipe the two phrases from one take lane. So changing my first selection, then extending the second selection to incorporate say two phrases, together. I do that a fair bit, and pretty sure, that's the root of my trouble. But I want to be able to change my mind easily on the fly, not have to go back and a do a second whole version with a second flattened comp. If all that makes sense !!  It's 1.15am here.....

If I'm understanding you correctly you mean you sometimes want to "heal" your previous splits/swipes (like you created two sections then realized that you'd rather keep both sections from the same take in place or choose new split points within the section).
 
You can "heal" comping splits by multi selecting the different clips (select one clip, hold Ctrl or Shift to select the next clip and/or just Shift to select the last clip in a series of clip). Once all the clips in the section you want "healed" are selected hold Ctrl and click in the lower half of one of the selected clips. All splits will be healed and the entire section promoted.
 
Of course you can just swipe over the section again but to avoid "slivers" you have to extend the swipe beyond it's original boundaries which of course means you have reset the start/end splits and readjust and X-Fades.
 
Cheers.

Yeh. I swipe over the same section again a lot, joining two, three, sometime more, clips, but I didn't know about what you just described to heal clips back together. I guess, part of this, is zooming in/out on occasion, and not healing clips precisely as a result. So, thanks Beeps, could be the answer and I'll give it a try. Shouldn't leave any remnants behind is what I'm thinking.

BTW... I think the reason "slivers" occur when reswiping even with Snap enabled is due to the Auto generated X-Fades incurred by the Comping tool.
 
Essentially when you make a split at a specific point (let's say at a measure) the middle of the X-Fade occurs at the Snap point (in this example at the measure point). So both clips extend very slightly beyond the measure/Snap point to create the X-Fade (the earlier clip goes past the Snap point and the following clip slightly ahead of it).
 
By reswiping at that exact point you are now creating a split at the very start/end of the two overlapping clips thus causing those tiny slivers.
 
At least logicially that's what would occur unless the Bakers had the foresight to program in a failsafe for such a maneuver. I don't think they did though.
 
Also when we start getting down to such tiny clips very strange things start happening in Sonar. I've had lots of problems with slivers in the past so they need to be avoided at ALL costs. Very annoying.
 
Cheers.

MacFurse
So, thanks Beeps, could be the answer and I'll give it a try.

Definitely. Maybe get some sleep and hack at it in the morning nice and fresh.
 
All the Comping stuff is great and super useful but it's also very complex once you start going beyond the basics/absolute "by the book" methodology. I do insane amounts of editing/comping on my stuff so have had to REALLY get a handle on exactly what it's all doing.
 
tl;dr...
 
Comping works great when you know it inside and out. If not... bad things happen.
 
Good luck.