Midi bass becomes delayed when exporting

[AndyLeF]

Strange problem here - I have a music project consisting of midi tracks and wav recordings....

...when I play the project within Cakewalk everything is fine and on the correct beat...

...but when I export the project, the bass becomes delayed and 'hesitant' relative to the rest of the tracks...

Am I going mad?!

Thanks for any thoughts,

Andy

[David Baay]

Is the bass MIDI or audio?

If MIDI, any chance it's being generate by a 32-bit synth plugin using Bitbridge?

If audio, is Transient Shaper or other Plugin Delay-inducing plugin on the track? Automatic PDC should take care of it, but possibly you have something going on with PDC override being enabled. Are you exporitng in real time (a.k.a Online rendering) or with Fast Bounce (a.k.a. Offline rendering)?

[AndyLeF]

Many thanks for your help David.

The midi bass is an old midi Cakewalk Sound Center synth with the Acoustic bass which I've used on many projects.  It's a 32 bit synth.

There are no (intentional) delay FX on the midi synth track.  This is so weird - I've used similar project setups 100s of times in the past - maybe one of the CW updates has disturbed something. This problem is only affecting the Sound Centre synth and not a SI Strings synth I also have set-up.

I'm using the Export off-line.

I've just found a work around - I have to Freeze the synth with the "Freeze in real time" option selected - takes a while but at least when it completes I can export my project now!

Andy

 

[Byron Dickens]

It is time to move on from 32 bit; as time goes on they will only become more and more problematic.

[AndyLeF]

32 minutes ago, bdickens said:

It is time to move on from 32 bit; as time goes on they will only become more and more problematic.

Yeah it sure is!

But the luddite in me hangs on grimily to old systems  that I've used for a long time and am familiar with...

[Lord Tim]

Put a tick in Render in Real Time in the MIX AND RENDER section in the export options and see if that helps, if not, freeze the track first - if it's just audio when it's exported, it should bounce down correctly.

[David Baay]

More specifically regarding 32-bit synths, there is a bug in Bitbridge that adds an empty buffer of audio to the start of rendered audio, causing it to play back delayed. This can be mitigated by running a very small buffer when rendering offline. Or, knowing that rendered audio is exactly one buffer late, you can slip-edit the buffer off the clip and slide it earlier by that amount. Beyond that, the relatively inexpensive 3rd-party Jbridge add-in does not have this issue, but may not be worth it unless you have a favorite go-to sound in a synth that has never been updated to 64-bit.

Edited September 7, 2022 by David Baay

[msmcleod]

Check your timing master settings are set correctly:



And check your clock source for MIDI:



The clock source for MIDI should always be audio, unless you've only got MIDI tracks and all of them are routed to hardware MIDI devices.

[David Baay]

I guarantee this is due to the Bitbridge issue described above - acknowledged by the Bakers long ago but never committed to be fixed due to the increasing 'un-necessity' of using 32-bit plugins and the availability of work-arounds.

[scook]

7 hours ago, AndyLeF said:

The midi bass is an old midi Cakewalk Sound Center synth with the Acoustic bass which I've used on many projects.  It's a 32 bit synth.

SONAR Home Studio (later versions), Artist, Professional or Platinum all included a 64bit version of Rapture Session which can load and play CSC programs.

Running the Rapture Session installer after CSC will automatically pick up the CSC programs making them available in Rapture Session.

[John Vere]

And a very good acoustic bass is found in Dim Pro if you have it. But I’ll toss in another vote for try and replace all 32 bit instruments. If I have a problem it’s mostly been due to 32 bit VST. Or Dx stuff. I even avoid the tts-1 now. I only use it for preview 

[scook]

36 minutes ago, Cactus Music said:

And a very good acoustic bass is found in Dim Pro

It might be the one in CSC. All the bundled CSC content came from DP and Rapture.

I can't imagine anyone using CSC if they had DP/Rapture unless the program came from a CSC expansion pack.

I purchased one CSC Expansion pack but instead of using it in CSC, I moved the samples to my Rapture folder and reconstructed the programs in Rapture.

[AndyLeF]

21 hours ago, Lord Tim said:

Put a tick in Render in Real Time in the MIX AND RENDER section in the export options and see if that helps, if not, freeze the track first - if it's just audio when it's exported, it should bounce down correctly.

Yes that works the same as applying "Freeze" to the problematic synth track - takes the full real-time to render each time to export so if exporting a lot, it's better to "Freeze" the synth tack.

 

19 hours ago, David Baay said:

More specifically regarding 32-bit synths, there is a bug in Bitbridge that adds an empty buffer of audio to the start of rendered audio, causing it to play back delayed. This can be mitigated by running a very small buffer when rendering offline. Or, knowing that rendered audio is exactly one buffer late, you can slip-edit the buffer off the clip and slide it earlier by that amount. Beyond that, the relatively inexpensive 3rd-party Jbridge add-in does not have this issue, but may not be worth it unless you have a favorite go-to sound in a synth that has never been updated to 64-bit.

Thanks for all the Bitbridge info David. 
I'll live with the freeze synth fix for now - once a synth track has been finalised, it might just as well be frozen while the rest of the project is progressed.

 

19 hours ago, msmcleod said:

Check your timing master settings are set correctly:

Thanks. All the same settings as mine except for the check in the 64bit double precision box - but that didn't fix my problem.

 

17 hours ago, David Baay said:

I guarantee this is due to the Bitbridge issue described above - acknowledged by the Bakers long ago but never committed to be fixed due to the increasing 'un-necessity' of using 32-bit plugins and the availability of work-arounds.

Yes, I agree David! 

17 hours ago, scook said:

SONAR Home Studio (later versions), Artist, Professional or Platinum all included a 64bit version of Rapture Session which can load and play CSC programs.

Running the Rapture Session installer after CSC will automatically pick up the CSC programs making them available in Rapture Session.

Thanks - I'll look into that!

 

16 hours ago, Cactus Music said:

And a very good acoustic bass is found in Dim Pro if you have it. But I’ll toss in another vote for try and replace all 32 bit instruments. If I have a problem it’s mostly been due to 32 bit VST. Or Dx stuff. I even avoid the tts-1 now. I only use it for preview 

Yes, I must try and move forward with the times! I'll check out that Dim Pro acoustic bass - thanks.

Edited September 8, 2022 by AndyLeF