Export POP at the start of tracks.

[Mark D.]

I export huge amounts of tracks, both full mixes with mastering on the bus. or full albums I'm mastering. Sonar / Cakewalk always had this issue. I get why it'll happen, the end of the fade out, even on professional mixdowns, doesn't get quiet enough of a level (i.e. -100 db or lower) to prevent that "pop". If you bounce out  a full song, in a mastering project. Then, you go to a blank area (after all the tracks) and hit play, your master bus meter will show -40 or -50 - ish in a quick spike, then it fades. In seconds, it can quiet be below -120 db.

What I do is put my cursor after all tracks for the duration of the project. Click the track to export through FX of course, & click play, to see it go from that -40 db - to -120 or so.  That ensures there is no transient "pop" at the beginning. There is a way to chose all 10, 12 - whatever mastered tracks to export, one after the other - and that function does work. However,  because I don't do that 'extra fade' run a few seconds before each bounce all will have the pop at the start. Meters may show -40db, but sounds louder than that for me. 

Thus it'd be nice if there was a way / function to select that does a little 'run the silent blank space after the bounced track for like 3 seconds before rendering the next track'. Yes, it could be a 'feature request' but I think it's worth discussing here to see if others experience this and found a work-around for it that has helped in bulk track exporting for you. I mean where there are FX in us on the master bus and / or tracks, which is when this happens. It doesn't happen when bouncing out even huge numbers of tracks, if no FX are used.

Edited Sunday at 10:21 PM by Mark D.

[Amberwolf]

Does it help to toggle the "Play effects tails after stopping" off, then back on again, just before the export?  

 

 

[Starship Krupa]

I'm having a hard time parsing this. From reading it, I can't make out what the issue is nor what the proposed solution is.

You get a "pop" sound at the end of exported tracks when you use effects, and you don't hear it when you don't use effects?

Can you post a small section of audio that demonstrates the issue?

None of the songs I've ever exported contained a pop sound at the end. And I use multiple effects, both on individual tracks and on the master bus.

[Amberwolf]

1 hour ago, Starship Krupa said:

You get a "pop" sound at the end of exported tracks when you use effects, and you don't hear it when you don't use effects?

At the *start* of the tracks, from what the post title says. 

 

I've heard this myself occasionally in just live playback when I stopped playback when there was (presumably) some large difference in where the waveform ended when i stopped and (before the fx could decay out) I immediately hit rewind and play to start from the beginning where it was silent.  But I haven't had it in an export.  (keeping mind that i am not using a recent version of CW or S). 

 

[Mark D.]

4 hours ago, Amberwolf said:

Does it help to toggle the "Play effects tails after stopping" off, then back on again, just before the export?  

It's now called "Always Stream Through FX" and I've turned it off. I'll see if this helps. Thanks.

 

 

 

[Mark D.]

Tested. Haven't tried this in a while. Seems "Tracks Through Mix" and the flushing plug ins is newer (didn't have those last time I'd tried) fixed it.
Having the FX stream thing toggled off may not have a role but saves CPU, so still good for me to keep off. Thanks for the replies and help folks.

Edited Monday at 04:06 AM by Mark D.

[Starship Krupa]

13 hours ago, Amberwolf said:

At the *start* of the tracks, from what the post title says.

I guess I read the bit about "the end of a fade out" and it threw me off. As I said, I had trouble parsing it.

Nice that your suggestion helped.

[David Baay]

I believe the issue here is that the Always Stream..." option will only flush the buffers at the end of live playback. Fast/offline bouncing may not allow that to happen so there's still a non-empty buffer of audio waiting to be streamed or rendered to file when you next the start playback of do another bounce. I thought this had actually been addressed quite a while ago and haven't noticed it myself recently so wonder if it might be related to misbehavior of specific FX plugins that are not getting flushed...?

Whatever the cause, one way to handle this on tracks is to freeze the track with some time included for the FX tails to play out in the Freeze Options. For bus FX, having a volume envelope that runs to the end of the FX tail (or overrides it) will do the trick. Since so much modern pop/rock music ends with a fade-out this usually happens automatically if the mastering and final fades are being done in Sonar, but if you're exporting stems or raw album tracks for mastering by a third party, that might not be the case.

[Mark D.]

Okay, I spoke to soon. This did not fix the problem. About 50% of exports have this issue. This is with "Always Stream" off. So maybe I need to turn ON "Always Stream"? 16 songs bounced as tracks through mix. Flawless in every way, except this pop at the start. Rather than hearing  a harsh digital spike here is a visual. The only conceivable difference between this bulk export and my old technique to avoid it was I would have my cursor bar AFTER the longest song. Once one song is bounced, I hit play to let it go from -42 db or whatever to super low, like -120 db. Hence it brings me back to my original idea. If that is a buffer issue, or whatever, I have to think it can be fixed. It could be certain plug ins, but I've used so many hundreds over the decades with it - and this is a consistent problem.

Edited yesterday at 12:15 AM by Mark D.

[Mark D.]

Okay, finally found it. It was the Sonitus Delay, I had a tiny bit on a send. When I took that out, it stopped, completely. Too bad, I really love Sonitus products.
I won't stop using it, but in the future I'll render / freeze it to a track should the clicks return in some way. They don't always happen. Thanks again everyone.

[57Gregy]

30 minutes ago, Mark D. said:

in the future I'll render / freeze it to a track

That would be my advice to everyone, always, render first. Saves me a lot of frustration.
You don't have to save the project that way. Once mixed down and exported, just close the project without saving.

[David Baay]

32 minutes ago, Mark D. said:

Okay, finally found it. It was the Sonitus Delay, I had a tiny bit on a send. When I took that out, it stopped, completely. Too bad, I really love Sonitus products.

That's interesting. I was actually trying to reproduce the issue earlier, coincidentally using Sonitus Reverb, and could not.

How big is that transient in your screenshot? Looks way too big to be from "a tiny bit" of Sonitus Delay, but maybe the track scale is zoomed..?

[Bristol_Jonesey]

7 hours ago, Mark D. said:

Okay, finally found it. It was the Sonitus Delay, I had a tiny bit on a send. When I took that out, it stopped, completely. Too bad, I really love Sonitus products.
I won't stop using it, but in the future I'll render / freeze it to a track should the clicks return in some way. They don't always happen. Thanks again everyone.

Try putting a volume envelope on the bus containing the Sonitus Delay.

Drop it to -INF 

[Jorge Arias]

21 hours ago, Mark D. said:

Okay, finally found it. It was the Sonitus Delay, I had a tiny bit on a send. When I took that out, it stopped, completely. Too bad, I really love Sonitus products.
I won't stop using it, but in the future I'll render / freeze it to a track should the clicks return in some way. They don't always happen. Thanks again everyone.

I understand that the developers are working on some of the Sonitus plugins, I think on the Delay as well. Maybe the problem will be solved.

[Terry Kelley]

I use the Sonitus delay but this might be spot where you need to use someone else’s delay.

[Ashwin Rao]

We'll take note of this issue with the current Sonitus Plugin and share it with the team. 

Thanks for reporting!