Issue with multi processing and thread sync

[Terry Kelley]

I agree. It could be anything and unless I can figure it out, it hampers its usefulness. No doubt TONS of great clean tracks are made on Cakewalk. Overall, I like Cakewalk over the others.

I’ve been up and down the preferences, VSTs, FX, levels, interfaces, etc. trying stuff but I have  to export each time to test it. There are times when turning off dithering appeared to clear it up.  But with the new Sonar pricing limits I have been testing other DAWs and haven’t run into but it could certainly rear its head. 

Again, since it’s difficult to nail I was wondering if anyone else notices it (and it sounds like the OP did if we are talking the same thing. ) Then we can compare notes. 

Maybe I am suffering from Harrison Mixbus syndrome. LOL. People say it has a better sound but my listening and null tests don’t show it. 
 

I think some of the OPs other comments aren’t justified.

Edited April 30 by Terry Kelley

[David Baay]

I suggest freezing tracks one at a time and listening for changes on playback after each freeze. If you haven't heard anything significant by the time you get everything frozen, bounce the Master bus to a track that goes direct to  Main Outs, solo it and group the solo button in opposition with the Master bus solo. A/B and listen for issues. Then invert the phase, cancel the grouping, un-solo and see if it nulls (which it should if all tracks are frozen and there isn't something random going on with live FX on the Master bus).

[Max Arwood]

…..”appears in the mixdown of highly layered tracks. “

Why are they highly layered? How highly are we talking here?
 

You know if you accidentally shift a layered track a tiny bit on the time line, even a few samples, it can make the artifacts like you’re talking about. If you scoot it a little more and you can get a nice double track effect.  +3 -3 cents pitch shift can also sound nice, and usually does not cause problems. 

[David Baay]

8 hours ago, Max Arwood said:

Why are they highly layered? How highly are we talking here?

I think he just means many tracks.

[Terry Kelley]

Yeah, many tracks. 

I’m looking to see if anyone else has experienced this so we can compare notes. I’m not looking to rehash the causes since pretty much every suggestion has been tried. 

Certainly if anyone knows of a changes applied during mixdown I would be interested (like dithering.) I record at 44.1/24 and mix down to 44.1/16 so dithering is applied.

And as suggested, maybe it’s my imagination.

Edited May 1 by Terry Kelley

[OutrageProductions]

@Terry Kelley

I have orchestration templates with up to 120 VST instances (each an individual articulation) [of NI, E/W, & Spitfire for example] running, usually, at ~10ms latency. After about a dozen 'live' tracks I will start to get some "popcorn" snits, and will either start freezing instruments that are (near) complete, or increase my buffers to about 20ms. I never have to go above 33ms,  but have just developed a workflow that will freeze/thaw quite often as the composition progresses. Seems to work for me, as my machine has some pretty serious horsepower under the bonnet. I've never really had an issue with that process.

[Terry Kelley]

Thanks Outrage, I sent you a PM.

[Starship Krupa]

5 hours ago, Terry Kelley said:

I’m looking to see if anyone else has experienced this so we can compare notes.

Not so long ago I spent a lot of time trying to chase down a difference in sound I thought I heard between CbB and Mixcraft.

It was weird, like chasing a phantom, but I trust my hearing. Initially, I wasn't testing side by side trying to find a difference, quite the opposite. Ultimately, after trying to set up an objective test, using VSTi's, in REAPER Mixcraft, Studio One, and CbB, my conclusion was....that it's really difficult to come up with an objective test, even if, like me, you use software that double-blinds the files.

It's sometimes said that you hear a difference because you want to hear a difference, but for me the opposite is true: I want there to be no difference. Cakewalk feels more comfortable to me than Mixcraft. If any difference I hear is all in my mind, why would listening on the less comfortable program sound slightly better?

I know that it's possible for audio playback engines to sound different from each other because I can hear differences between various music players. My favorite so far is JRiver, followed by AIMP and Music Bee. They all claim to provide bit-perfect playback (which means that they feed your ASIO or WASAPI driver the exact ones and zeroes that they read from the file, bypassing Windows' mixer), but they all sound different as far as detail, soundstage, and transients.

in all of my many years of participating on music software forums, nobody has ever taken my suggestion to just try one of these bit-perfect music player programs (AIMP and Music Bee are free, Jriver has a trial period), and I don't expect that to change now, but if you do, set them up to use your ASIO driver or WASAPI Exclusive.

If you try this, and A-B it vs. Windows Media Player, you may get a sense of what the differences are between playback engines. Listen closely for "masked" elements of the sound, like when an artist mixes in sound effects or brief little ear candy samples. Also reverb tails. Some players reveal those, others bury them.

I'm not knowledgeable enough to know why this is, but I can hear it. Whether the player is better at suppressing jitter, or what, it's there.

[Starship Krupa]

On 4/30/2024 at 11:23 AM, Terry Kelley said:

Maybe I am suffering from Harrison Mixbus syndrome. LOL. People say it has a better sound

Well, they claim that.

There are people on this forum whose knowledge and opinions I respect highly who don't agree with me in regard to the possibility of DAW's sounding different.

They cite the theory behind it, but that theory was conceived decades before there was such a thing as a DAW.

Theory is one thing, actual real world implementation via algorithm, code, talking to drivers, that's another thing entirely.

I can name three DAW's that in the past 10 years or so claimed that they improved their sound (Samplitude/Sequoia/Music Maker, Ableton Live, and Mixcraft). If it's not possible for DAW's to sound different, how did they pull that off?

I know that jitter in a digital audio stream results in audible degradation (avoid most interfaces made before 2010 when JetPLL was introduced), and I don't think Fletcher, Munson, Linkwitz, Riley and company accounted for it.