Found: Export To Audio Bug or Feature?

[DallasSteve]

I have been exporting my songs to audio in MP3.  Cakewalk has a new dialog box for setting the parameters of the export.  Most of the time it has worked correctly, but twice it did the export process including mixing down the audio for about 30 seconds.  Then when I played back the track it was 5 minutes of loud static.  So the second time it happened, just 10 minutes ago, I went back and I opened the dialog box again.  I was very careful to not change anything.  I wanted to see what would happen if I tried again with exactly the same settings, and the second time it exported correctly and clearly.  I'm sure someone will blame it on my computer, or my mouse, or sun spots.  It couldn't be a bug in Cakewalk.

[Starship Krupa]

On 3/18/2022 at 2:54 PM, DallasSteve said:

I'm sure someone will blame it on my computer, or my mouse, or sun spots.  It couldn't be a bug in Cakewalk.

Aw, c'mon. People often take that route because in most cases, it works fine for them. Therefore, if it works fine on their system with their projects, what remains? You tell me. Sure it's possible that a specific situation is exposing a bug/incompatibility in Cakewalk. For that to be useful, we have to figure out what that specific situation is. There are so many variables. Hardware, plug-ins, sunspot activity (as you point out).

Take this instance: if there were a consistent bug this nasty in the MP3 export process itself, it would have reared its head during beta testing and Early Access. You're not the only person exporting MP3's, and nobody else has said anything.

So. What remains? What's possibly different about your project from the thousands where MP3 export works fine? Definitely it could be that there's something unique that's exposing a bug in Cakewalk's export. There are so many options in MP3 export settings that it could be that nobody else is using precisely the ones that you are (bit depth, rate, dithering, on and on). There's also the matter of plug-ins that don't agree with Cakewalk, which may be down to Cakewalk or may be down to the plug-in. And so on.

I just had a weirdness in a project involving TAL-Elek7ro. It was working fine then started making a huge POP and going silent. Then I remembered I had left Cakewalk running overnight, which, amazingly considering how it was 4 years ago, I can now usually do with impunity. Restarted Cakewalk, no problem. Is it an issue with Cakewalk? Probably, but too obscure for me to chase down. Solution: exit Cakewalk before I go to bed.

Please post the exact settings you're using for your export so that others can try it. And if possible, put your system specs (esp. RAM and sound device) in your sig.

[DallasSteve]

Krupa

Thanks for the reply.  I'll try to add my system info in my signature as you suggested.  When I did the Export Audio (twice) that produced a file full of loud static I took all the default settings expect that I changed Wave to MP3 and I adjusted the range, if necessary.  Since then I've run the operation another dozen times and that hasn't happened.  It only happened twice.  If no one can think of something I could do by accident that would change 5 minutes of music to 5 minutes of static, I still think it's a bug.  Furthermore, I just did another export 10 minutes ago, then re-did it to adjust the start time and the second time it produced 5 seconds of silence at the beginning of the MP3 followed by the rest of the selected range.  So I selected All again and exported again and it worked correctly the next time.

[David Baay]

57 minutes ago, DallasSteve said:

If no one can think of something I could do by accident that would change 5 minutes of music to 5 minutes of static, I still think it's a bug. 

Only thing I know of that can definitely cause that is attempting export to MP3 in real time; real time streaming and encoding to MP3 have not been compatible in the past but I haven't re-tried it for a long time.  Related to that, I can imagine that having too low or high an ASIO buffer might also cause problems with MP3 encoding since that is used as the default 'chunk' size for processing. If you've made changes ASIO buffer,  that might explain variable results. If that's the case, setting an appropriate value for BounceBufSizeMsec could address it.

Some interoperability issue with a particular plugin is always a possibility as well. And in any case of distorted output I always try disabling the 64-bit Double Precision Engine.

[Starship Krupa]

5 hours ago, DallasSteve said:

If no one can think of something I could do by accident that would change 5 minutes of music to 5 minutes of static, I still think it's a bug.

You may very well be right, and it would be great to get this bug to the devs, but there is one hurdle: I used to be a pro software QA engineer, and a hard rule is that in order for the devs to do anything with a bug report, the bad behavior has to be reliably repeatable.

In other words, if you can do this 5 times and it's guaranteed that somewhere in there you'll see this behavior, then cool, they should be able to reproduce it reliably. If they can't reliably reproduce it, and it's not happening for anyone else (that they know of), then they're helpless to come up with a solution.

Since I see that your hardware outs are the Realtek onboard CODEC, this suggests that maybe you're using virtual instruments? If so, can you post a list of which ones you're using? As mentioned before, it's possible that a plug-in and Cakewalk are not getting along, and that includes soft synths. If so, this would explain why you're the only person we know of who is seeing the issue.

And then the challenge is to pinpoint which plug-in, so the devs can check it out and determine whether the issue can be fixed within Cakewalk or if it's something the plug-in maker needs to address.

(I watched a live stream this afternoon with Vojtech Meluzin of Meldaproduction fame, and the interviewer asked him if he had any plans to allow MSoundFactory, his KONTAKT-alike to host 3rd-party plug-ins. He said that hosting 3rd-party plug-ins is every developer's nightmare. And this is a guy who makes plug-ins for a living.)

[DallasSteve]

Krupa

Thanks for the reply.  As for the plug-ins I'm using, that sounds like a possible culprit, because I am using Waves Ovox and Kontakt Evolution Strawberry.  Besides those I'm just using the standard Cakewalk TTS-1, Cakewalk Drums, and sometimes Cakewalk Electric Piano.

On a (maybe) related note, 2 or 3 times today Cakewalk crashed and referred me to a dump file.  I submitted a report to Cakewalk support with the dump file.  Maybe they will learn something and tell me where the problem lies.

[John Vere]

They are still working the bugs out of the new export dialogue. It gets better with every new release. 
But that said I have been proofing 20 song by export as MP3 and uploading to listen on other systems. So I’ve used it over 100 times b now  

Only time they screwed up was when there was only one track selected so I’m back to remembering to use Select None first. 
But generally I’ve found no bugs other than the way it randomly sometimes keeps my settings and then mostly it doesn’t. The release notes says this has been fixed so I’ll soon find out. 
One thing comes to mind is to make sure your audio interface is the source of the export and not something weird which is a higher probability with on board audio that is not set up correctly 

Edited March 24, 2022 by John Vere

[bitflipper]

I've had exports where a 5-minute song wound up being 5 minutes of silence in the export. It took me awhile to figure out what I was doing wrong because like you, sometimes it was fine, sometimes it wasn't.

Turned out I was pressing CTL-A to select all tracks while focus was on the PRV, resulting in all the MIDI tracks being selected and nothing else. Now I make a point of clicking somewhere in the track view before starting an export. Not that this is your issue; I mention it only to show how easy it is to do something "wrong" and not notice.

[DallasSteve]

John

You raise an issue that has always bothered me about Export in Cakewalk, both before the new Export dialog and with the new dialog and it reflects on what bitflipper mentioned too.  When I export a song I have to Select All first.  I don't know if that's even the correct method as I haven't seen instructions about exporting the finished product.  The logical process should be you go to the Console View and set up you mix the way you want it and then that is saved to an audio file.  In fact, the default Source Category as shown in my screenshot above is "Entire Mix".  But if I don't do Select All first I get silence.  What is the logic of having a choice for Entire Mix and that does not give you what you hear when you press Play on the mixed song?  What's the point of mixing the song if it's not to produce the final audio?  Then you have choices like Speakers/Headphones.  It certainly doesn't qualify as 'intuitive' of 'idiot proof'. 

Is Select All the correct way of setting up an audio export of the finished mix?  That's what I've been doing.

[David Baay]

17 minutes ago, DallasSteve said:

But if I don't do Select All first I get silence.  What is the logic of having a choice for Entire Mix and that does not give you what you hear when you press Play on the mixed song?

Selection determines what is included in the mixdown, and Source determines where in the signal chain the mix is captured for writing to file. If you want everything in the mixdown, you should select nothing, and CW will include everything by default. If you're getting silence, you must have a partial selection of the project (either tracks or time range) that does not contain any audio content.

'Entire Mix' is All hardware audio ports combined. This can be problematic if you have a headphone mix or something going to a second output pair. I recommend always choosing Buses as the source, and selecting just the Master bus.

Edited March 24, 2022 by David Baay

[DallasSteve]

24 minutes ago, David Baay said:

Selection determines what is included in the mixdown, and Source determines where in the signal chain the mix is captured for writing to file. If you want everything in the mixdown, you should select nothing, and CW will include everything by default. If you're getting silence, you must have a partial selection of the project (either tracks or time range) that does not contain any audio content.

'Entire Mix' is All hardware audio ports combined. This can be problematic if you have a headphone mix or something going to a second output pair. I recommend always choosing Buses as the source, and selecting just the Master bus.

Thanks.  I went back and did as you said.  I Selected None (which sounds wrong to me) and I set the output to Buses - Master and it worked fine.  I'll use that work process unless I learn something different.

[David Baay]

Another 'trick' I recommend is to bounce the Master bus to a track (I name mine 'Master Bounce' that routes directly to Main Outs and group its Mute button in opposition with the Mute on the Master bus. This allows you to A/B the bounce with the 'live' mix on the Master bus to verify the mix is a complete and accurate representation of what you've been hearing. Then you can just export that track to different WAV or MP3 formats and not have to wait for Cakewalk to render all the instruments and FX every time when the mix is unchanged.

This also automatically embeds a copy of the Master in the project for future reference and you can bounce different mixes to different lanes of the Master Bounce track, and use the lane solo buttons to A/B them and determine which version gets exported when you export the track.

You can also invert the phase of the Master Bounce track and undo the mute grouping to check how the bounce 'nulls' against the live mix. But keep in mind that some instruments and FX don't render the same way from one playback to the next or in real time vs. offline (a.k.a. Fast Bounce), so nulling may be imperfect if the tracks aren't frozen.

[John Vere]

It's weird because the "Selct None " or CTRL/SHIFT/A   was what was commonly recommended on the forum here for years. For most of us it always worked and was more reliable than CTRL/A  and became a habit. 

When the new export dialogue was introduced I stopped doing that and I must of exported 100's of song or stems that way without any issues. Just about a month ago, after they did some small changes to the export dialogue, I started getting the silent treatment again. I have returned to using CTRL/SHIFT/A and so far so good.