Bounce to disk trimming resulting files (DP5.1)

[tikibars]

Hi

I did a search for this topic, but couldn't find anything.
Pardon me if this is redundant.
If it has been answered, and someone knows where that thread is, a pointer would be great.

Otherwise -

When I do a bounce to disk in DP5.1, sometimes (not always) the resulting bounced file has a second or two of audio at the beginning trimmed off. This happens maybe 20% of the time.

Very annoying.

Sometimes if I re-bounce, the second attempt is fine.

So, if I bounce ten files, then on the average two will be messed up, and I'll re-do those two, sometimes more than one time, until they're right.

Any idea what solves this and what a solution is?

thanks

[wurliuchi]

I and others have had this problem. For me it's silent for the first six seconds and then it will cut abruptly into the music six seconds in, but only on certain projects. I haven't been able to figure out what specifically it is about those projects that make it happen, and I don't know if it's fixed in 6.02 or not.

Some people are just adding six seconds to the beginning of the bounce. I wrote to MOTU about it and this is what they suggested:

Me:
"Been using 6.1 since its release. All of the sudden now Bounce To Disk is silent for the first six seconds. Never had that problem before."

MOTU:
"Try loading the contents of this project into a new project. Open a new project with an "Empty" template, and choose Load from the File menu. A Finder window will appear, asking you to choose a file to load. Navigate to the Project file you are attempting to open, and click on Open. Then, a Load window will appear. In the white portion of the window, select the Chunks you wish to load. Also, select any other parts of the project you wish to load (Consoles, Bundles, etc.). Then, click on OK. After the project loads, select Chunks from the Project menu, and play-enable the chunk you have just loaded."

[James Steele]

Is there any chance that you have any volume automation events in the project... say that fade the song down at the end?

I've found sometimes that bounce to disk is a non-realtime, real-time process-- meaning that DP is sort of "playing back" your sequence while bouncing. This explains why you can watch plug-in meters bouncing around during a bounce. Because of this, if you listen back to your sequence and have played it past a point where a track has received automation setting the volume say to zero and you then do a bounce to disk, the transport in essence jumps back to the beginning boundary of your selection for the bounce to disk and plays from there. Much like in real-time playback, if you don't have chase controllers enabled and don't have a prior volume automation event, the track could be silent until a new volume automation event is encountered.

This might not be the issue at all and may be fixed, but I remember getting into the habit of manually locating to the beginning of a sequence and playing back the first bar to verify all initial track volumes were reset and correct, and THEN starting the BTD.

HTH.

[wurliuchi]

I can't speak for anyone else, but when this first started happening to me I tried all the things you mentioned, James. Matter of fact, I deleted all the automation in the project and I'd still get silence and the start. I forget now, but I think it's exactly six seconds every time. Weird. I tried like heck to retrace all my steps when it first happened but I couldn't figure it out. I will say it hasn't happened in quite awhile.

I use BTD for quick one-offs for myself and clients. It's a great time saver. I record real mixes in real time.

Hey, I can see my plug-ins work when bouncing to disk.

[tikibars]

Hi

Thanks for the replies.

The sessions in question don't have any automation.

Also, I am not getting six (or any) seconds of silence, I am getting one or two seconds completely truncated; the audio file that results from the bounce sounds as if someone just randomly lopped a little bit of audio off of the beginning.

Weird.
Frustrating.

Just bounced a piece four times before it bounced cleanly (not changing ANYTHING between bounces - just kept re-bouncing until I got a good one); but three other pieces of music within the same session of music bounced properly the first try (this session was a vinyl clean-up thing with a few LPs worth of audio on a single stereo track with some MOTU and Waves plugs on the track).

[Armageddon]

Is it possible that a plug might somehow be the culprit? Some weird latency introduced that takes a second or two to kick in with some (but not all) cases? I used to track with MH's Control Strip, and the compressor would invariably take a second to kick in when I'd mix down to two tracks (not in DP), so there would be some kind of weird fade in. I'd just put a Waves Renn. Compressor in its place and copy the settings from Control Strip to the compressor, and it sounded better, anyway. Odd. I've never had that problem in 5 or 6 when freezing tracks or bouncing to disk.

[tikibars]

Yeah, after trying lots of trouble shooting things, like bouncing to a different hard drive, changing various audio settings to try to up efficiency a bit, and more, I think that it is plugs that are choking up here.

Looking for a workaround... will report...