Vocals sound fine in the DAW but are silent when I export to .wav audio

[Jack Emily]

So I am still a novice to most DAWs, aside from GarageBand, so I'm positive this is just a rookie mistake. But I can't find help anywhere on google or YouTube for this particular problem. Anyway, I had recorded guitars, bass, drums, and then vocals, and I mixed and mastered and all of that, and it was fine. But come to find out, I had exported to a Wave file, and I couldn't hear the vocals! I've tried starting over, re-mixing the song, changing the file format, and changing the drivers plus the settings on my recording interface. If anyone can help, please do. I looked on the forums for this exact issue and its solution, but couldn't find anything.

[57Gregy]

26 minutes ago, Jack Emily said:

So I am still a novice to most DAWs, aside from GarageBand, so I'm positive this is just a rookie mistake. But I can't find help anywhere on google or YouTube for this particular problem. Anyway, I had recorded guitars, bass, drums, and then vocals, and I mixed and mastered and all of that, and it was fine. But come to find out, I had exported to a Wave file, and I couldn't hear the vocals! I've tried starting over, re-mixing the song, changing the file format, and changing the drivers plus the settings on my recording interface. If anyone can help, please do. I looked on the forums for this exact issue and its solution, but couldn't find anything.

Welcome to the forum.
Ensure that all the tracks you want in the export are selected.
Ensure that all of the tracks are sent to the source of your export, i.e. Busses>Master Bus.

I generally Bounce To Tracks all my tracks to a stereo track in the same project to check that everything is there before exporting and then export that stereo track if I'm satisfied.
Which doesn't mean the song is finished.
Or even good.
It just means it's all there.
For better or worse.



 

[Amberwolf]

I usually just do CTRL-A to select all, verify that there's enough additional timeline selected to let everything fade out and not be cut off at the end, then choose the export function. 

In my version the What You Hear preset in the export dialog includes everything that comes out of the hardware outputs in the buses, so it sounds the same as what I hear when listening (hence the name). 

The format and bitrate and bitdepth chosen depend on my use for the file, but primarily I just stick them on Bandcamp and Soundclick which work fine with 44100 / 16bit wav files, so most of my exports use that.   

(if I need an MP3 later, I just use LamedropXP to convert the above file)