Left channel inexplicably weaker than the right when exporting the "entire mix"

[Richard Lloyd]

Hi Everyone,

This is my first time up in the forum and I wanted to share some really strange behaviour in Cakewalk; the problem being that in the exported mix file the left channel is significantly quieter than the right whilst they are on a par when simply playing the song through the master bus.

I've tried everything! By-passing all the plugins, checking all the export parameters and, of course, the panning of every track. It all looks fine. However as soon as I export just one track, let alone 24, the difference in levels is already apparent. 

Fortunately I found a workaround which was to export the master bus instead of the entire mix. Same thing. And that works, so there must be a gremlin in there somewhere.

But when I uploaded the (good) mix file into another cakewalk project just to master it, the exported file also had the weak left channel !! Same workaround. Export the master bus itself instead of "entire mix" of the single mix channel through the master bus and it was ok.

Any ideas? I've only encountered the problem in this project so far, but now I'm worried ...

Richard.

[Glenn Stanton]

make sure everything being exported is output to the "master buss" OR the speakers. if any of your tracks are going only to the speakers and the export is happening only on the master buss, then you will be missing parts.

Edited January 29 by Glenn Stanton

[David Baay]

 

2 hours ago, Richard Lloyd said:

Fortunately I found a workaround which was to export the master bus instead of the entire mix.

Most likely due to Inadvertent imbalance of the separate L-R level controls on the "Main Out" hardware bus in the Console (drag the splitter at the far right to the left if you don't see it). You can double-click to reset them, and then click the Lock button to keep them together.

EDIT: I always recommend exporting just the Master bus, anyway, because having a send to a secondary hardware out for any reason (e.g. a headphone mix) will get you in trouble with the two outputs being merged with Entire Mix.

Edited January 29 by David Baay

[Richard Lloyd]

Voila! David you're a star ...

[Richard Lloyd]

And I now realise how it must have happened. I was fooling around with a control surface called "Touch DAW" on my mobile phone, when I noticed that faders 1 to 8 were all being set to -8.7db whenever my head was turned away. That must have also been done to the left channel on the hardware output. -8.7db!

[David Baay]

Ooh, good one!

[msmcleod]

If you're using a control surface with a master fader, clicking the lock button in the middle of of your hardware output can solve this problems.  However, be aware that if the hardware output is not at unity gain, your audio exports will sound louder or quieter than what you're hearing in Cakewalk.

A better way, is to assign your master fader to the master bus.  If you're using Cakewalk's Mackie Control control surface, you can do this in the Mackie Control dialog under the Utilities menu.