Hi Guys,

I changed kdenlive versions recently - been using 18.08.1 and went to 19.04. I am a Windows 10 user.

I like the new workflow and aside from a single issue with the Change speed textbox all works great. It seems to render slower but I might be wrong. Anyway, that is not the point.

I continued using my old projects as my work has episodic nature. I reuse same intro and outro sequences for each of my series' episodes and thus work on the same project file for the entire series (just loading new videos and cleaning the old ones). Thus I continued using my 18.08 project files with 19.04. However, I found out that the newly loaded audio thumbnails are too small. I remembered having the same issue in the old version and I found the video that helped me back then (a video suggesting that I uncheck the "use ffmpeg" box. I opened my options and found out that it is already unchecked. I cleared the cache, the proxys and pretty much everything and reloaded the videos numerous times. Things were not going better, audio thumbnails were still too small. I decided to try and enable the "use ffmpeg" option and it seems that it is either the same or worse now.
I could not find any custom options for tweaking the audio thumbnails inside kdenlive and I pretty much rely on the program to do them as I want. The only thing that I can come up with is to go on an manually adjust the audio thumbnail visual files after loading a video in kdenlive but...come on!
At this point I am not sure what the reason might be. I suspect that it might be my older version directories, files and profiles interfering with the new one. I had a similar issue when trying to render for the first time. Yet, I am reluctant to do a full reinstall and clear all the data for now as I will need to do a lot of manual setup before I can continue working. However, I cannot work without proper thumbnails as well as my videos are super narrative heavy.

Do you guys have any troubleshooting ideas?

kartacha wrote:loaded audio thumbnails are too small.

The image of the waveform is not displayed ? (only peaks of sound are displayed?) , the audio track has a small height?

do you have an image/screenshot of this bad thumbnail? ,and maybe a very small piece of video (to download) with the audio thumbnail issue? (just to try loading it to see..)

Video download Link: https://dox.abv.bg/download?id=d83332b9da# The big green button. There should be no commercials or spam of any kind.
This video I now provide is a rendered part of my whole video which is much longer. I recorded the original in .mov (about 8000 kbit/s) if that matters (I doubt that it is).

I can provide the raw thumbnails images that are found in the cache folder if you want me to as well.

the stereo audio track has a very LOW VOLUME... Kdenlive is rendering it correctly... the issue is from your microphone, increase GAIN db of microphone.

or i'm wrong?

I know that the track has low volume and this is kind of on purpose. I prefer to have my voice and sound mostly uncompressed for the raw files and then enhance the audio digitally. It saves me from dumb errors that damage the audio on the recording phase. Always aim for overall level of the voice between -15 and -10 and peaks at -5.

It may be that the program just generates thumbnails like these concentrating on the higher end and showing a more detailed picture. It was not always the case though, otherwise I would not have written at all. In my previous version the audio thumbnails worked much better for my recordings. Not sure if I did something back then or not. It was 18.08.1 and it was not installed but standalone. Now I use installed version for 19.04.1 and since yesterday 19.04.2-5. I deleted everything - cache, profiles, data, everything and reinstalled yesterday due to the program working super slowly and being unstable after the changes I made trying to fix the audio thumbnails. I cannot prove what I am saying now but I promise thumbnails were really bigger.
Is there a way to manually tweak the focus of the thumbnails? Even if it is something as dumb as setting the program to read only the bottom half of the thumbnail image generated. I am willing to take that as the thumbnail does not change dynamically when changes are applied (as in Audition for example) as changes are not applied directly to the sound but to the whole track. I remember a software I worked in the past (may have been kdenlive, may have been something else) having the progressive/linear option. Something like this might help.

Hello,
Which version were you previously using?
It's true that thumbnail generation formula changed in refactoring (19.04), I don't remember if it was dB before and now linear, maybe we could add such an option to cover more signal dynamic range...

Previously I used 18.08.1 standalone (if I recall correctly)
Now I am using 19.04.2-5 installed

It will be awesome, man! I will be so grateful!

P.S: Do you think there is some workaround for me in the meantime, aside from the obvious stretching the pictures manually?

Any way to manually switch the formula for generating audio thumbnails from my previously used version to the new one? What file contains this?

Addendum: Come to think of it a setting option "Scale audio thumbnails to [-x] dB" might be great addition in general.