A new discovery with exporting large projects

[Max Arwood]

I had a project that was just too big for my older computer to export. So I started to export buses, and I was going to do the final mix from the stems.  I selected my groups - strings, woodwinds, brass, etc.  I don't know why, but I selected my final bus as one of the stems. When I started listening to the stems, I saw the final bus stem. I clicked on it to listen and it was perfect. So what a bonus accidental find.  Now I have a way to export larger projects without getting partial bounces and crashes.

Export to sound card - I could only ever could get partial exports or crashes.  I was never able to export the whole song this way.

Export to Final Bus - worked like a charm. 

 

Ok, so now I am scratching my head wondering why and what is the difference. Both go to the sound card.

Why would it be a difference between exporting to a bus that goes to the sound card or straight to the sound card??

I hope this can help others that have really large projects or older computers or both.

(I just ran project scope to get some stats - 95 tracks 240 plugins, 24 soft synths [mostly frozen], 40 buses)

[Glenn Stanton]

not sure the difference between the H/W vs buss. but congrats! i'm a big fan of the export dialog. the options for tracks, stems, and in my case, i have "PRINT" buss which taps off the master pre-fader so i can adjust the master level (monitoring) and not impact the final buss output. then i set up tasks to export tracks or WAV rough mix (if record template), or WAV and/or MP3 2-track files (if mix template).

[David Baay]

The soundcard is not involved either way. CbB creates a virtual hardware bus for each hardware output on the interface (hidden by default but viewable in the Console by dragging the splitter at the far right to the left), and uses this to mix down if the Source for the export/bounce is Hardware Outputs or Entire Mix (all hardware outputs combined).  Like Glenn, I don't know why you would have problem exporting some or all hardware ouputs, but I always recommend exporting with Source = Buses, and only the Master selected so you don't have trouble with something like a headphone mix on another hardware out getting included in the export.

Edited August 12, 2023 by David Baay

[JnTuneTech]

I am just guessing, but in my mind having the DAW export to a hardware-defined output, versus a software defined one (such as a bus), will always have the limitations and circumstances imposed by the hardware driver, in most cases. -If I am right, the problems the OP experienced could possibly be due to various inconsistencies in the export type, and maybe even plugin data conversions, what have you, to accommodate the output destination - hardware/driver requirements.

Perhaps I can test this as well when I come upon a larger or problematic mix export. It may very well be that mixing and exporting straight from software defined paths is easier technically.   -Say for instance, if you are mixing in 32 or 64 bit, and your hardware driver is only rated at 24 bit - wouldn't something like that be an added complication?  To me, it seems like exporting to a hardware output is not a great goal, since a hardware output is not really the destination for a file - it's really just an output to an amplifier circuit, in essence.

Edited August 10, 2023 by JnTuneTech
clarifications...

[David Baay]

On 8/10/2023 at 12:31 PM, JnTuneTech said:

am just guessing, but in my mind having the DAW export to a hardware-defined output, versus a software defined one (such as a bus), will always have the limitations and circumstances imposed by the hardware driver, in most cases.

As I said, Sonar creates a virtual bus for each hardware output in the system and uses that to mix down. The driver is not involved. The fact that you can export  to a file format that your interface doesn't support - and even with no interface/driver loaded at all - testifies to this.

Edited August 12, 2023 by David Baay

[JnTuneTech]

5 hours ago, David Baay said:

As I said, Sonar creates a virtual buse for each hardware output in the system and uses that to mix down. The driver is not involved. The fact that you can export  to a file format that your interface doesn't support - and even with no interface/driver loaded at all - testifies to this.

And I will also repeat that what the OP has found in practice is that there is some difference in performance, on their system & projects, between exports using virtual bus outputs, and the ones that have problems for them are the ones that are identified as hardware output related.

I don't doubt that any of you are correct in your reporting & analysis, but since I don't write or know how to analyze the actual code involved, again I am looking forward to testing and seeing if I get the same results as @Max Arwood has posted. And again, I feel that programmatically there may simply be more involved in the coding for each output scenario, logically. -In the end of course, if it works better, regardless of whether my suspicions or reasoning is correct, I will be happy to have error-free exports on large projects. All of this is good to know, thanks all.

[David Baay]

58 minutes ago, JnTuneTech said:

what the OP has found in practice is that there is some difference in performance, on their system & projects, between exports using virtual bus outputs, and the ones that have problems for them are the ones that are identified as hardware output related.

It's not clear to me that this is reproducible enough to conclude that. I'd be inclined to think he's running up against some sort of resource management threshold, and that it might coincidentally have worked just as well to export Entire Mix at that particular moment. 

I'd want to see that there's a  a consistent difference in between exporting just the Master bus and exporting the 'Main Outs' that the Master routes to and/or Entire Mix, and also that it's reproducible with different projects.

A lot of users export the default Entire Mix without knowing any better and without encountering any issue.