How does Cakewalk time align auxes

[norfolkmastering]

If I have a track and I send that track to a bus and also to an aux; then I also route the aux master to the same bus, does Cakewalk have to do some timing work so that the two paths;

track to bus

and

track to aux to bus

are time aligned?

 

[David Baay]

Only if one path is subject to the delay of a PDC-inducing plugin that the other one isn't, andCW does handle that case correctly in my experience. Aux tracks themselves do not introduce any extra delay.

Are you seeing/hearing a problem? If so, what's the setup?

[norfolkmastering]

No problem when I’m mixing totally within Cakewalk. However I also mix in analogue using feeds from Cakewalk which are fed to my analogue mixer via the new external insert send only feature.  This is when I think I found a timing issue.

So consider this example:

Some ‘external’ feeds are derived directly from Cakewalk tracks.  These always time align in the analogue domain.

Then I add some ‘external’ feeds to my analogue mixer which are derived from Cakewalk aux masters.

Why aux masters?  I use auxes to collect together my 12 Session Drummer sources into five ‘microphones’. So each of the 12 drum sources is sent to each of the five ‘microphones’ (i.e. an aux bus) at different feed levels.

So I am simulating mic’ing a real drum kit with five microphones. It works really well.

It is the external insert sends of these aux masters which don’t seem to be quite timing tight with the track feeds.

And that’s why I wondered if the two paths had different timing path lengths within Cakewalk.

I’ll do some more tests in case there is another cause.