Exported audio sounds slightly different whatever i try. Also there are random explosions in the sound

[kapernik]

Sorry for English

 

I work in the latest version of sonar.  Cpu ryzen 5 5600g , 32gb, external audio interface lexicon alpha. Windows10 with all updates. 

 

My project is set to 24bit 48000. Windows system configuration of the audio interface is the same. From sonar i export audio with the same configuration in WAV.

My project contains no audio files at all. It just has about 40 kontakt instruments inside a few multi instrument kontakt 7 instances. I use orchestral tools libraries, ggd drums, a few different guitar libraries and a few miscellaneous libraries. Project uses  about 15 gb of memory.

Of plugins I use fabfilter eq and compressors  and cinematic room reverb.  On master bus I use ozone 11 with an automatically generated preset.

 

I’ve been working with all this for 1 month. Now it’s turn to export some mix and there turned out this problem.

 

The exported audio doesn’t have the depth I hear in the session. It’s dry, the strings and all the solo instruments are muffled.  They are muffled by 1-2 decibels. Just a bit. Somebody wouldn’t notice it , but I , who work with this project all the time , definitely hear that. No bass depth, dry sound. No middle range depth, solo instruments are quieter. Just slightly, just a bit, but definitely it is different. Itss not some ear trick.  

 

It’s not about windows mediaplayer or any issue outside the daw.  I do an audio mixdown inside the session onto another new track, I solo it and listen and it’s different there.

 

And some particular instruments, at least some particular violin sounds completely noticeably different.

I draw cc1 modulation in all such midi tracks and when I bounce this violin it sounds like the modulation level is lower by 1/3 of its range, so it’s softer, quieter, it would be noticeable to anybody. I mean I tried just to bounce this particular violin inside the session and it always renders into this different sound.

 

So absolutely impossible to render audio to sound the way it sounds when playbacked.

 

Another problem is this. When I playback in the session and when I export there are always ‘explosions’ in the sound at random places. Every time in different random places. Here is the example https://voca.ro/14sCKdQATihs 

It’s been so from the very start of my work in september. I thought it wouldn’t be in exported audio and didn’t care, but it is.  I tried to turn out the ozone plugin thinking this issue might have to do with cpu usage (although cpu , as the performance visualization shows,  works at 20% of its capability),  the explosions are still there. I turned off all the reverb plugins and no changes neither.

 

I tried all possible audio settings in sonar, asio,wasapi,mme,  all sizes of buffers, dithering, ex[prted in wav , in mp3.  I disconnected my audiointerface and used Realtek audio driver. Nothing changes. I checked of course which buses to export, I export the final stereo out.  The exported/mixdowned audio sounds slightly different, instruments are muffled and the explosions are at random places.

 

One old guy is mentoring me in what concerns sonar as he is a user of it from 1990’s, and he’s never encountered this problem

[Noel Borthwick]

If the project sounds correct inside Sonar the most likely problem is that you are not exporting the exact same signal flow through your busses. Make sure everything is selected before exporting.

Another thing you can try is do a real time bounce to rule out buffer size problems. 

Also for troubleshooting page down your project to the minimum, removing plugins and bounce a single track and compare. It should be a perfect copy of what you hear and can be compared by phase inverting the bounce and original track.

[Mr No Name]

Might be something to do with oversampling algorithms, you maybe using plugins with two oversampling modes and they might be mismatching.

[kapernik]

2 hours ago, Noel Borthwick said:

If the project sounds correct inside Sonar the most likely problem is that you are not exporting the exact same signal flow through your busses. Make sure everything is selected before exporting.

Another thing you can try is do a real time bounce to rule out buffer size problems. 

Also for troubleshooting page down your project to the minimum, removing plugins and bounce a single track and compare. It should be a perfect copy of what you hear and can be compared by phase inverting the bounce and original track.

a mistake with buses is absolutely ruled out, i checked million times, selected everything both all the tracks and all the buses../

i bounced trying all the options.  what's interesting,  when i choose 'render in real time' + 'audio bounce'  that slight difference in the sound is already there. when it's played for rendering, i mean.

 

you said ''and can be compared by phase inverting the bounce and original track.' , but, as i said, i don't have any original tracks, i dont work with audio. only midi with kontakt sample libraries.   that's the problem . icant prove to anybody that there is the difference, cause i can't capture the original, or 'live' sound when the composition is produced out of samples in real time 

[kapernik]

2 hours ago, Mr No Name said:

Might be something to do with oversampling algorithms, you maybe using plugins with two oversampling modes and they might be mismatching.

i discovered this menu inside every vst plugin https://imgur.com/a/kg1M9oV  should i change anything in it?  now it's all the same in each vst. both kontakt and fx plugins

[Mr No Name]

15 minutes ago, kapernik said:

i discovered this menu inside every vst plugin https://imgur.com/a/kg1M9oV  should i change anything in it?  now it's all the same in each vst. both kontakt and fx plugins

some plugins have a choice for different oversampling for render and playback, if they are set differently, it can affect the sound of the rendered file from the playback one.

it might not be what is causing your problem but worth investigating.

[Noel Borthwick]

58 minutes ago, kapernik said:

a mistake with buses is absolutely ruled out, i checked million times, selected everything both all the tracks and all the buses../

i bounced trying all the options.  what's interesting,  when i choose 'render in real time' + 'audio bounce'  that slight difference in the sound is already there. when it's played for rendering, i mean.

 

you said ''and can be compared by phase inverting the bounce and original track.' , but, as i said, i don't have any original tracks, i dont work with audio. only midi with kontakt sample libraries.   that's the problem . icant prove to anybody that there is the difference, cause i can't capture the original, or 'live' sound when the composition is produced out of samples in real time 

You can phase invert even with instrument tracks. Solo the instrument track and the boxes track and invert phase on one.

If you attach a project file someone may be able to provide some clues.

 

[Jochen Flach]

Hello,

You do have a mastering plug-in in your master bus. After you bounced your mix into an audio track inside Sonar, are you deactivating all plugins in your master bus for listening to your mix? If not then you're running your mix through this plug-in twice. I also assume that your having your gain set to a value lower than zero in your master bus. That could be the reason that your mix is sounding lower in volume when you're listening to it after bouncing, because you're listening to your mix through your master bus, which has a gain lower than zero.

Regarding the "explosions": did you ever check your system for audio problems with this tool: https://www.latencymon.com/ ?

This is highly recommended. There you can see if there are problems on your machine that are not related to your DAW and are caused by your operating system and configurations.

Cheers

Jochen 

[Bristol_Jonesey]

Try importing your export into a blank project. If it sounds ok then your problem is outside of Cakewalk and you need to look at your monitoring setup

If it doesn't sound ok then you need to look at your routing and general workflow inside of Cakewalk.

[Mr No Name]

also maybe try not "rendering" the file but recording the live output to a cdr or something. ??  they used to use DAT tapes in the old days.

[kapernik]

Quote

You do have a mastering plug-in in your master bus. After you bounced your mix into an audio track inside Sonar, are you deactivating all plugins in your master bus for listening to your mix?

the master bus goes to 'out L + out R' of the audio interface. when i mixdown on a new track , that track is automatically routed to 'out L + out R' too.  so, it can't be that i run through one plugin twice, the difference would be very noticable.   

i checked 'gain' on every instrument track and bus, it's everywhere at 0.0

not sure if i did it right though,  i run a test in latency moon https://imgur.com/a/sQCtbSr 

tried importing the very same mixdowned mix (took the wav right from the project;s audio  data folder) into a new blank project. it also sounds with the difference.

also if somehow some bus was not  included in the rendered mix, or i oversaw any other routing mistake  , the difference in the sound would be very noticable.  but im talking about just a micro difference.  i'm even  beginning to guess it's normal, it's just because few people work with just orchestral kontakt libraries in sonar daw and maybe nobody notices the difference or reported this issue.   or maybe it has something to do with kontakt, or even with just the 'orchestral tools' libraries and how they behave when it comes to rendering

i'll try some other ways yet and then maybe i'll really attach the project

 

 

Edited Sunday at 11:55 AM by kapernik

[Noel Borthwick]

As I mentioned above the best test for issues like this is the phase cancellation test. Because it completely takes monitoring (and your ears) out of the equation. 

Route the kontakt track output to a master. Bounce the track itself. Now solo the bounced track and the kontakt track. Please invert one of them and play. You should hear silence or almost silence depending on if there were certain plugins used.

[Amberwolf]

Some thoughts:

If you're not posting the project itself, can you at least show us what is in the audio fx bin for a specific track and all of the busses it passes thru on the way to the audio interface?  

Or, disable all audio fx in the chain, then solo that track and play it.  Then render it with fx still disabled, and compare.  

That will eliminate all the audio fx as a possible cause.  

(there is an option during the render to not use the fx, but this doesn't change how it's played back, so it's not useful for this comparison). 

I don't know why an fx would be different during render (realtime or fast bounce) than playback, but if it is, it could be causing this problem.

There are synths that have different options for render vs playback; I don't know if any fx do (other than the dialogs you have already found, which are probably not from the fx themselves since they are all identical and probably wouldn't be if they were from the fx manufacturers).   

Note that even with that menu you've already found, there could be other (manufacturer) settings for this within the actual synth or fx for render vs playback (for instance, Z3TA+2 has such a setting for Realtime Quality and another for Offline Quality within it's Options menu), and if so, you may need to check inside the settings of every synth / instrument and fx to be sure they are set the same to get identical results...but even if they are different settings, you should not have a significant difference in the audio output; they usually only affect the quality of the render, and the difference in sound is usually slight, and does not normally have any volume differences). 

 

If it's not already been done, another test is to route one track directly to your audio output instead of to any bus, disable it's fx bin, solo that track, and compare direct playback to a render.   (this eliminates any fx bin or bus issue)

 

Another test is to create a blank test project, and copy/paste one track from your existing project to it (and do any synth setup necessary to make it the same as the existing project), and do the comparison within the test project.  (this eliminates all of the busses and tracks other than the one copied). 

 

It's unlikely that anything above has to do with the problem you're having, but it's worth checking. 

 

FWIW, the only times I have ever had a project sound significantly different in render vs playback was when I had something unchecked in the included stuff during the render, but your latest screenshot eliminates that.   The only other sound differences I've encountered were from the render settings within a synth, but these were all subtle differences, nothing like what you're experiencing. 

Edited Sunday at 06:07 PM by Amberwolf

[kapernik]

(the part about the dragging of tracks in this comment is not relevant anymore!)

 

i havent read the comment above yet, want to post a new discovery.  i ve been trying to solve the problem all day.    bounced it again and again with various options.  what concerns the explosions, one of the discoveries was that when i turn off all the reverb instances in the project. of which i have 10 (i know it's not good, i still have to learn how to work with 'send' system),  and the explosions almost fully disappeared, though there were crackles now and then still.   but i was more concerned with the problem some instruments can't be rendered with the original volume.  for making sure it's not the particular instruments that cause the problem i (and it's this that took me all this day because of one confusing moment) opened a blank project and added kontakt and loaded that same bass guitar and rendered some notes. and it was rendered absolutely correctly.  so the problem was not in the kontakt instrument.

  and then this: 

https://imgur.com/a/Vuux62e
i opened the main session anew. the instrument track  'A_bass' was number 45 in this project.  i soloed it and downmixed it into this (audio#1 https://vocaroo.com/1oFh9MOS8y8C ).  not right as usual. then i dragged the instrument track 'A_bass' to below the just created downmix. and i soloed it and rendered again a new downmix.   and now the render sounds just at the same volume as when the material is not rendered  (https://vocaroo.com/1h8nXttq15U0).     

what happened? i dont know.  somehow the dragging of the instrument track affected the precision of rendering.

 

now you can hear the difference in the volume i usually get when rendering. and with violins it's bigger.

Edited Sunday at 08:50 PM by kapernik

[kapernik]

i tried this procedure(dragging the track and then creating a mixdown) with one problematic violin which is always rendered very quietly,  and the trick didnt work. it only worked with the bass guitar.  although they're both by one library manufacturer

[kapernik]

yes, it's definitely something paranormal.  i again opened the session anew. i made a downmix of all the tracks, that same part with the bass guitar.   it lacked the bass guitar volume as usual. then i moved the instrument track of bass guitar to below all the tracks. and made the downmix again. and then it sounds right.  what's going on?  but this trick won't work with the violin which also lacks in volume after  rendering, even more than the bass. 

[kapernik]

i just realized the roots of the problem. it has to do with cc7 in midi tracks. it's too tricky intertwined with the rendering process, so  i still dont know how to deal with it, though.   but i need to describe it first , it will take me a couple of hours.

Edited Sunday at 08:16 PM by kapernik

[kapernik]

no, it's so complicated that  even in my native language it would be difficult to explain what i understood.   in short, it has to do with cc7 information in midi, 'default volume for new instrument and volume reset -6db' in kontakt's options. and it might have do with projects being too long (like my 40 minutes with a few songs in a row and blank spaces between them).

so i selected a bit of the song as usual, them opened the kontakt instance with this problematic bass guitar, then i opened the rendering menu, chose 'in real time', clicked mixdown and watched the volume indicator(or maybe it's called 'fader') of the kontakt instrument.  and when it was playing  this volume moved to -6db,  though there is no cc7 data in the midi clip at this part of the song.   the last change in cc7 was 20 minutes back in the project, and it was to 127, which is the maximum, so all the rest of the project this bass guitar is on 0.0 db  in kontakt (but only when played). BUT for some reason when it's rendered it won't stay at 0.0db , and it moves to it's reset level of -6db.  that's why such midi tracks sound 6db quieter when rendered. 

i'm still thinking how to solve it. maybe i should draw 127 cc7  more often in such long projects and then it would matter when it comes to rendering

Edited Sunday at 08:47 PM by kapernik

[kapernik]

no, it's far from over.   i captured it on the video, please watch..  i set that 'default volume for new instrument and volume reset' setting in kontakt to 0.0 (and i restarted sonar as it said i should).    when i play the project the volumes stay still.   and when render it also should stay at 0.0 now.  but watch the video. still some instruments slide down to -6db.    in this instance it's the cello, in another kontakt instance it's other instruments.     in this cello's assigned midi track there are no cc7 changes at this part of the song. even if they were, then the volume would change during simple playback. but it stays still. whereas when rendered it moves down and the rendered audio has this cello sounding 6db quieter.   i'm completely at a loss.  

 

Edited Monday at 12:01 AM by kapernik

[Jochen Flach]

Hey, 

as you are starting the playback of your song somewhere in the middle of your project I guess you do have MIDI CC7 values in this track some bars before. So CC7 is set to -6 db somewhere before your starting point. If this is the case, then starting your playback after this CC information will ignore this -6 db value. (Curious that the export process is fetching this value)

You could go to Preferences -> Project - > MIDI and select "Chase MIDI events" (or something like that... I'm not in studio).

Then your playback will fetch MIDI information that happen before your starting point of your playback.  Try this please 🙂

Jochen