Put stereo plugin on mono track - what happends?

[LarsF]

I know in Reaper and Cubase you have full control what to do with various channels on plugin, cut them, reroute them etc.

Before I knew about the routing options in Cubase I got really strange result, because one channels just bypass mono plugin.

In Cakewalk

a) do you just set interleave to stereo and plugins of stereo kind is handled from the mono clips there?

b) other way?

Thanks.

[bitflipper]

The interleave option will be overridden internally when necessary, as when mixing mono and stereo plugins in one track. 

Most of the time, it works fine. Other times, you get unexpected results.

It's totally legit to mix 'n match mono and stereo effects; you just have to think it through while you're doing it. For example, you have a great guitar solo going on with a mono amp sim and mono interleave, and decide to throw in some ping-pong echo at the end - only to discover that it neither pings nor pongs until you change the track interleave to stereo.

Even though Cakewalk does a heroic job of trying to make your Frankenstein FX chain work, sometimes it just can't. Whenever a vendor offers separate mono and stereo versions of their plugins, there's a good reason.

 

[LarsF]

Many thanks.

So if a stereo plugin last - one can count on that both those outs go to those two points directly out, instead of mono panner do some acrobatics either dropping one and panning the other or similar?

So changed to stereo panner, or something.

As I recall Reaper did same mono signal to both ins, if stereo plugin.

Just a simple matrix to show where audio went.

 

To be sure I put stereo plugin on a bus and use a prefader send from mono track to it(and show fader down) - so bus gets the same on both ins if panner is center.

Thought about what happends if just putting plugin on track directly simplifying things, but nice if  predictable.

EDIT: Putting plugin directly on mono track it seems you have to set interleave to Stereo for plugin to work correctly.

If in future Cakewalk get some visual showing how routings are done, preventing first getting strangeness that have to be fixed, would be great. How much strangeness will be from inserting maybe a couple of mono plugins+a stereo plugin - or going stereo plugins all the way due to how it works best - I'm not sure. And rather not spend hours finding out either.

Edited June 9, 2020 by LarsF