Exporting Errors

[utsman]

Hey Masters,

I am finding an occasional export error from cubase. ie when playing back through cubase there is no problem but after exporting a stereo file there is a pop at a certain point. I also found this with fruity loops on a couple of occasions. Any ideas

Utsman

 

[Blue Bear Sound]

Likely a bad edit.... if you cut a waveform at anywhere other than a zero crossing, you're very likely to get a pop or a tick...

 

[SouthSIDE Glen]

Yeah, what Bear said is a usual suspect.

Also possible, depending upon further elaboration of what you actually mean by "exporting"...

If you actually mean "mixing down to stereo" and then saving a stereo WAV file, it could be that the mixdown is clipping in places.

If you are exporting to an MP3, it could be the MP3 encoder glitching. Some less-than-top-shelf encoders introduce occasional encoding errors that can range from clicks to howls.

Go back to your Cubase project and look at the tracks at the points in time where the clicks/pops occur. Zoom in on the time line and look for bad edits (places where the wavefrom has a "fault line" in it.)

If there are no obvoius bad edits, then look and see if they are at points in the song where the meter is pushing 0dB because you have two or more tracks with strong peaks in the same location. If so, trim one or more of them down a dB or two before mixing down.

If you can export a WAV file and it sounds OK, but the MP3 file pops at you, try a different encoder or encoder setting.

If none of those work, take two asprin and call us in the morning.

G.

 

[Blue Bear Sound]

...if you are not hearing it while it is playing back in the app, you shouldn't be hearing it on a rendered file either....

That simply isn't true.... I've had a few instances where a tick due to an edit shows up only on the rendered version that wasn't heard on playback. It SHOULDN'T be that way, but it does happen....

 

[SouthSIDE Glen]

Nuendo and Cubase are the same thing as far as the audio section.

I have heard this happen as well from products from Sonic Foundry and Cakewalk. It is quite rare, I think I may have come arcoss it only two or three times in hundreds of mixdowns to WAV, but it can happen.

I'm not entirely convinced of the cause; I think there's a chance that the "bad edit" or the clip is a "manufactured" glitch, that it simply doen't exist in the multitrack playback stage. This glitch could maybe just be a perfect storm of math that exposes an algorithmic bug that hits only when Jupiter is aligned with Mars on the third Tuesday of an odd-numbered month. But that's just pure speculation on my part; but I can confirm that it does happen - though rarely - on perfectly good software.

The good news is that, in my experience anyway, those clicks are just short impulse spikes that are easy to eradicate in the editor without affecting the surrounding music.

G.

 

[lomky]

Nuendo and Cubase are the same thing as far as the audio section.

I have heard this happen as well from products from Sonic Foundry and Cakewalk. It is quite rare, I think I may have come arcoss it only two or three times in hundreds of mixdowns to WAV, but it can happen.

G.

So what did you do to fix it? Did re-exporting make it disapear, or did you fix the spike in the exported track?

 

[SouthSIDE Glen]

So what did you do to fix it? Did re-exporting make it disapear, or did you fix the spike in the exported track?

I don't believe I ever re-rendered. It was always in the premastering (in Sound Forge) that I discovered it and it was better to just fix it there.

The alternative would have meant going back to the multitrack project, re-rendering the mixdown, bringing the new mixdown into premastering and then re-performing any and all premastering work I had already done on the old file on the new one.

Instead I just zoomed in on the spike and attacked it with a little negative volume. Got rid of the spike seamlessly, colorlessly and inaudibly in a matter of seconds without losing any of my other work in progress.

And UB, I can understand never coming across the problem. Like I say it seems to be fairly rare. You're just one of the lucky ones so far .

G.

 

[Blue Bear Sound]

Well, hundreds of renders later, I just haven't heard a clitch in a mixdown that I couldn't hear in a playback in the original software.

I suppose it "could" happen. This is just the first time I have heard anybody state that it has for them.

Well I guess YOUR version of Cubase/Nuendo is just SO much better than mine, Ed -- Steinberg must've sent you their "special" version...........

 

[MadAudio]

Instead I just zoomed in on the spike and attacked it with a little negative volume.

I much prefer the pencil tool in cases like that.

 

[SouthSIDE Glen]

I much prefer the pencil tool in cases like that.

Yeah, that'll work too. Anything to just manually smooth the waveform at high resolution. The only reason I use the negative volume is force of habit. For some reson over the years that has become a "go-to" technique for spike removal for me, it's become "comfortable". But re-drawing the waveform would do the trick as well.

G.