Annoying Solo bug

Mixed movie
Solos/Mute work great
Go back for another pass
When I solo a channel, some channels do not mute
The same channels do not mute every time. For example, every time I solo any channel (whether it’s “Narration”, “SFX”, “Amb” channel), “Music B” Channel never mutes.
However if I then solo and then unsolo “Music Channel B”, “Music Channel B” stays unsolo’d/muted

This has happened in Nuendo 4 as well.

THoughts?

Dave

I’m still hoping here. Maybe one day. When solo & muting is fixed overall, I want to know.

Automated mutes were not dependable in N4 either. I don’t know if they work in N5. There was quite a list of mute-solo-folder & automation bad interactions that were incredibly inconsistent to try to duplicate. Things would work sometimes & other times not.

Do you use automated mutes? Sometimes those will punch right through your “solo” and your solo won’t be so solo anymore. That was in N4.

I don’t know about N5, don’t have it yet, and have just asked those that upgraded about the current status.

Most solo/mute “bugs” are simply due to the operator expecting one thing while the program does another. They’re not bugs as such but some of the pain can be eliminated by good practice (e.g. solo safe effects returns, logical routing etc).

There are 3 levels of solo - “intelligent” SIP solo, AFL, and PFL (AFL and PFL via the control room). Can you provide a simple session showing what you’re trying to do?

If the program does one thing one time and another at another time with the same parameters…

And yes, if this person has something that needs a review, by all means please. He just said that it did one thing great one time and something different when he came back (reopened apparently and I’m guessing on this) it is not working the same in that the music channel B doesn’t mute unless he FIDDLES with it. Oh, and N4 does the same thing.

I agree, some basic checks on routing to see if a solo’ed channel is routed somehow to a track/channel that doesn’t mute would be good, or that the solo/mute type being used is correct for expectations all of the way through.

BUT, what he describes is exactly the same as one of the solo-mute issues in N4. Well, I don’t have N5, so I cannot really say anymore.

Mute automation aside (which I personally rarely do except on my effects returns) I can’t say I’ve run into the situation where I get unexpected results. I have seen other instances where this appears to be the case but it has usually been down to operator error/confusion.

I’d be interested to know of a reproducible scenario where your unexpected results are occurring.

I like to use muting in conjunction with automation, and with folders, and also use solo, all in the mixer (not control room centered mute/solo functions), and my issues are in N4. I’ve been waiting, hoping that this could be addressed in N5. In N4, mute/solo issues have happened far too often for me and in scenarios that have given me cause to drop the use of automated mutes altogether because I cannot depend on the outcome.

So I’m hoping Dave will reply. I’m gone out of respect that this is the N5 forum.

There is definitely a bug I see with channels that use mute automation.

I often find that after applying mute auto to a channel I am working on down the line and solo some other track, only to hear, say, my lead vocal open too ripping it up all over the triangle paradiddles I am trying to listen in to…
You will find if you click on the mute button of the offending ‘open’ track it will be silent once again…but that is pretty arduous to do every time you solo some other track.

I will work on a repro for this and post it here…

The fix? Dont use mute automation in Nuendo, it is broken. Use volume auto instead.

There is a bug here for sure…its just that after the amount vitriolic psychosis that emanated on this forum the last time some of us were pushing to have the mute/solo system fixed, I guess I could never really be bothered going there again.

I have done a few tests between PT (10) and Nuendo (5.5) and things seem to be operating as expected for both platforms. Where Nuendo and PT differ is that PT adopts a “dumb” style solo approach more in line with a traditional console - soloing a track won’t automatically solo related tracks up/downstream to hear a SIP solo. You can certainly help Nuendo out with SIP operations by doing what you might do in PT and solo-defeating certain group channels/effects returns (removing some of the guesswork that Nuendo is doing).

As mentioned, Nuendo offers the 3 levels of solo functionality (intelligent SIP solo, AFL, PFL), preferences (Group Channels: Mute Sources as well, Mute Pre-Send when Mute), and automation panel options (suspend mute automation) so there are a variety of options at your disposal to ensure that the results you hear are the results that you expect.

Actually there is a subtle bug at play here. I should really report it.

If you solo a track that is sending to an effect, the effect will be soloed too. Great, not so “dumb”. BUT: if you revisit the project (re-openi it whatever) and try the same thing, the FX track does NOT solo with the track. Meaning that SIP works one day, and not the next.

A workaround, I found, is to quickly hit twice the FX Send defeat switch next to the channel fader. THis re “kicks” in Nuendo’s brain, and the SIP will now work.

Annoying to say the very least.

Regarding sporadic solo behaviour N5 seeeems a little better than N4, but I am careful and think before pressing solo.

B

I have just tried this and can not reproduce (that’s not to say it isn’t happening on your system - maybe post a project file?) but I personally always solo defeat my effects returns (old habits from consoles and PT) - anything to “help” Nuendo take the guesswork out of what you’re expecting to hear. The other benefit of this is if you add a new send on a channel you don’t have to toggle unsolo/solo to hear your new effect.

So in other words, you are admitting that the posters here are right and Nuendo’s solo logic simply isn’t working correctly. Solo-defeating busses/fx is in fact the standard workaround for this bug - this is exactly what we had to do to avoid it, and it does in fact bypass the solo-path “feature”. I’ve seen it when soloing one track, then soloing another with a different fx/buss path, then going back to unsolo the first - it’s path is now confused and I end up having to manually solo or unsolo a buss. Hardly a time-saver.

Perhaps it would be more constructive to just let people here voice their desire to have this issue corrected. I don’t think the marketing lines are going to convince anyone they’ve been soloing and muting tracks wrong with consoles and other DAWs all of these years, just because Nuendo’s upstream/downstream logic is faulty.

If there is a genuine bug then absolutely it should be fixed (I don’t believe I’ve said anything to the contrary) - if you have a method to reproduce some of these issues then I’m sure there would be many people (myself included) that would be happy to take a look.

At the risk of repeating myself, Nuendo has a degree of “intelligence” in the SIP solo however in reality it’s not as smart as the operator would like, so sometimes the results you get are not what is expected (to some this might be appear to be a bug). As there are a few preferences which affect solo, routing possibilities, linked tracks, direct outputs, folders, and multiple solo options, the potential for Nuendo to get confused is at times quite high. In the situations I have encountered this and spent the time to figure out why it was happening it has always come down to a clash of operator expectations versus what the software is doing - in other words, not a bug but simply some confusion.

I’ve already mentioned some ways to alleviate this confusion but if you have any other helpful suggestions by all means post them.

“Alleviate confusion”? Do you tell that to your clients?

The simplest solution may not be popular here, but it worked well for us. ProTools.
But for the people here still using Nuendo, “alleviating confusion” with workarounds doesn’t appear to be what they are asking for. Why don’t you try harder to repro this since you are the one wanting a irrefutable proof before asking Steinberg to fix it? Perhaps they will even let you have a look at the code as well. It wouldn’t be that hard to track down.

If you’re asking about my personal situation, I don’t run into any solo/mute issues - nor do the other studio engineers I’ve helped train on Nuendo. I will say that every time I had a question from them regarding solo it has 100% been down to a confusion between their expectations and what the software thinks they want to do hence removing some of the guesswork for Nuendo. It’s not a big deal really - we have to do very similar session setups when doing a mix in PT except that Nuendo’s solo functionality extends much further (with the control room).

I’m happy to spend the time trying someone else’s repro steps but I don’t encounter any issues myself.

I’ve now tried the three following things:

1: As in the OP’s vague example I’ve soloed every track I have in my project and all tracks mute like they are supposed to. Nothing unpredictable.

2: I then wrote mute automation on one of my tracks (#1) which had dialog on it. The track mutes for about 3 seconds. When I solo other tracks this track with mute automation indeed “plays back” the automation, but audio isn’t playing out when the track umutes even though the mute light goes off.

So to clarify: Even though the actual mute button indicates mute is off, audio is NOT playing back.

3: I now routed tracks 1-3 to Group A, and 4-6 tracks to Group B. Soloing any track/group in any order resulted in the appropriate track/group soloing with it. I.e, soloing track #2 which went to Group A resulted in Group A soloing as well. Soloing Group B resulted in tracks 4-6 soloing as well.

It should be noted that soloing Group A resulted not only in tracks 1-3 being soloed as well, but that track 1 now executed its mute automation with “audible” results.

4: I took the routing from example 3 above and added an FX channel with a reverb on it. Track 1, which goes to Group A, now sends to this FX reverb.

Soloing the reverb FX channel also solos track 1 (but not Group A).
Soloing track 1 also solos BOTH Group A and the FX channel. Mute automation is active and “audible”.
Soloing Group A results in tracks 1-3 being soloed as well, but NOT FX reverb.

It should be noted here that if I solo track 1, which then leads to both group A and FX to follow (solo), the disarming of the solos depend on which solo you hit next:

Pushing the solo button on track 1 unsolos all three.
Pushing either Group A or FX unsolos ONLY that channel.

5: Now adding to the above I routed from track 4 to the same FX reverb. This results in exactly the same behavior as above, but with the following two notes:

Track 1 had mute automation on it, and when the track unmutes it sends neither to the outputs nor to the FX channel.
Soloing the FX reverb channel now soloes both track 1 and 4, as they both have sends going to the FX.



To me that seems to cover a lot of bases. If you guys want I can check some other combos.