Fast Bounce Fail

[Jim Stamper]

I'm on Cakewalk Sonar build 084, X64

I only recently transitioned from CbB. I've been using fast bounce for years and almost zero problems, it's one of the best things about Cakewalk.

But now in my 1st Cakewalk Sonar project with about 12 tracks, I've had 3 tracks that are bad with fast bounce. The notes come out sounding low resolution and often the release tails are chopped off.  If I render in real time they sound fine.

This is a huge problem for my workflow. I always bounce each track to audio before final mixing ... and I'm typically bouncing them multiple times before final mix because I continue making revisions. Its a big deal if I can't depend on fast bounce - now I have to listen to each bounced track full length to see if it survived the bounce. If not, I have to render in real-time.  This is a huge slow down, not to mention if I'm up against a deadline.

[Jim Stamper]

I meant for this whole post to be a reply in the Sonar 2025.07 Feedback topic, that's probably where this should be

[David Baay]

Bounce or Freeze? If freezing, getting tails rendered properly is  just a matter of enabling it and setting the time in Freeze options. When bouncing, you have to deliberately select a longer time range to  include the tail. The quality issue may be due to particular plugins not playing nice with Fast Bounce or in combination with a low ASIO buffer size which is the default for offline rendering. Try setting BounceBuffSizeMsec in Config File to 20 (milliseconds).

 

Edited Tuesday at 08:34 PM by brundlefly

[Jim Stamper]

1 hour ago, brundlefly said:

Bounce or Freeze? If freezing, getting tails rendered properly is  just a matter of enabling it and setting the time in Freeze options. When bouncing, you have to deliberately select a longer time range to  include the tail. The quality issue may be due to particular plugins not playing nice with Fast Bounce or in combination with a low ASIO buffer size which is the default for offline rendering. Try setting BounceBuffSizeMsec in Config File to 20 (milliseconds).

 

Bouncing, not freezing. The problem is the tails on every note, not just end of range. So, every note sounds low res and chopped off release. I've had it happen with more than 1 plug-in.  But not until the new Sonar.  In past versions Fast Bounce has been very solid for me. I'll try setting BounceBuffSizeMsec in Config File to 20 (milliseconds) ... it was at zero.   Thanks 

[sjoens]

Curious if changing Stretch Method or Clip Tail Duration in Preferences would affect this?  I've had instance where using the wrong stretch method rendered some bounces unusable.

[Jim Stamper]

4 minutes ago, sjoens said:

Curious if changing Stretch Method or Clip Tail Duration in Preferences would affect this?  I've had instance where using the wrong stretch method rendered some bounces unusable.

I can keep it in mind. I'm not stretching anything. And every note is being chopped, not every clip. As much as I'd like to, I can't take the time to fiddle with preferences that have worked OK in the past, test the changes, and keep trying to isolate the problem without breaking something else 😂

[David Baay]

2 hours ago, Jim Stamper said:

it was at zero

Zero is the default that tells Sonar to use the real-time buffer size for Fast Bounce. After encountering problems with rendering of some synths at very low buffer sizes I long ago raised it to 20ms and have had very few Fast Bounce issues since.

Would be interesting to see a project with one particular track and FX that reproduces the issue.

Are you seeing this with any super-common plugins?

[Jim Stamper]

44 minutes ago, David Baay said:

Would be interesting to see a project with one particular track and FX that reproduces the issue.

Are you seeing this with any super-common plugins?

I don't know exactly which tracks. It was a project with a tight deadline, I was bouncing a lot of tracks, various plug-ins, and when a bounce failed I would render in real time and move on. I nearly didn't catch one of them and it would have ruined the mix. Anyway I didn't have time to keep a record of each incident, I was up until 2AM finishing the mix, so it wasn't the priority at the time.  All nighters used to be easier 😂  Thanks

[Noel Borthwick]

13 hours ago, Jim Stamper said:

Bouncing, not freezing. The problem is the tails on every note, not just end of range. So, every note sounds low res and chopped off release. I've had it happen with more than 1 plug-in.  But not until the new Sonar.  In past versions Fast Bounce has been very solid for me. I'll try setting BounceBuffSizeMsec in Config File to 20 (milliseconds) ... it was at zero.   Thanks 

What was your driver latency set to in preferences when you did the bounce? I can't think of any change in Sonar that would do things differently at the midi note level so it's almost surely a difference in how you have CBB and Sonar set up.

If you can repro this, do a careful comparison of a bounce in cbb at the same buffer size and other settings compared to sonar. If you have a reproducible issue send us a project file.

[Xoo]

MIDI Buffer size?

[David Baay]

6 hours ago, Xoo said:

MIDI Buffer size?

MIDI buffering issues generally manifest simply as dropped or stuck notes (more often the former) which shouldn't really affect how a plugin behaves unless maybe you're automating synth parameters via MIDI controllers or key switches.

It would be really nice to at least know what specific plugins are implicated. I understand the OP doesn't have time to investigate thoroughly but we're not likely to get to any diagnosis without more detail.

Edited Wednesday at 06:50 PM by David Baay

[Xoo]

It was MIDI notes though - that should affect just the start but since it's a weird one, you never know.

[Jim Stamper]

4 hours ago, Noel Borthwick said:

What was your driver latency set to in preferences when you did the bounce? I can't think of any change in Sonar that would do things differently at the midi note level so it's almost surely a difference in how you have CBB and Sonar set up.

If you can repro this, do a careful comparison of a bounce in cbb at the same buffer size and other settings compared to sonar. If you have a reproducible issue send us a project file.

I didn't change any settings from CbB to Sonar, it seemed that the Sonar installation did a great job of duplicating settings. My goal in this forum was to see if anyone else had it happen and might have a definitive fix, and also to give awareness to you bakers of a possible issue. Thanks as always!

[Noel Borthwick]

Thanks but having awareness wont result in a fix. Only a concrete recipe can help if at all its an actual bug and not a 3rd party issue.