In Nuendo 12, editing an audio event using any ARA plugin, I’ve encountered the following behavior:
- mono and stereo audio plays back just fine at all times, with No Extension (built-in sample editor) or with an ARA extension
- quad and multichannel audio plays back only with No Extension (built-in sample editor), but is completely silent when using any ARA extension (returning to No Extension restores sound); the waveforms are visibly present, and the playhead moves, but it’s just silence
This is not unique to a particular ARA extension: it does the same thing in SpectraLayers and in Acoustica. Tried 32-bit and 64-bit float processing precision, no difference in behavior. Mono and Stereo play back successfully, multichannel does not.
Not seeing anything in the documentation about this. Am I missing a setting somewhere?
(Worth adding is that these ARA plugins do make sound on multichannel events when used in other ARA-enabled DAWs like Reaper, so this appears to be limited to Nuendo.)
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Posted this a few months ago. This continues to be an ongoing problem with multichannel audio. Any multichannel audio through an ARA extension will not play back any audio (Spectralayers, Acoustica). Is there a workaround or a fix pending?
Opened a ticket about this problem a month ago (with Yamaha USA, which handles Steinberg in the US). After the usual punts and time-wasters (“would you please send us your audio file?” “you can use ANY multichannel audio file of any size, bit depth or rate” “we need it anyway”), Yamaha confirmed that they do indeed see the exact same behavior.
They emailed the developers in Germany weeks ago to find out if this is “intended behavior” (why on Earth???), and despite repeated follow-ups they have not heard back at all.
Is Steinberg Germany support always this unresponsive? Even to their own support channel partners? The only other time I filed a ticket—about the misbehavior of Nuendo’s own built-in Ambisonics panners—I was told quite specifically that Steinberg doesn’t support Ambisonics and to ask about it in this forum instead! (* What other built-in Steinberg-developed features are marketed and sold but not supported?) So far that’s 0 for 2!
Also, how can Steinberg not use multichannel audio files in the QC testing of their multichannel flagship?
Starting to despair. In the time that this ticket has been sitting unanswered at Steinberg, Reaper has released at least two updates. Is Steinberg “quiet-quitting” on us?
unfortunately that’s been my, and others, experience.
I remember your thread about this in the Spectralayers forum - where @Robin_Lobel said he had fixed the Quad file issue (still not released I don’t think?) - although obviously won’t work in Nuendo, despite it working in other DAWs
And yes, it’s a shame this isn’t implemented in Nuendo, I suspect it’s low priority for SB.
Progress. Steinberg finally recognized this issue as a bug. ETA for fix unknown.
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Dusting this off.
Yamaha Support told me on April 12, 2023: “The development team in Germany has issues an official bug report after recreating the issue and is working on this now for an update. Thanks very much for bringing it up to us and, even more so, thanks for your continued patience.”
It is now May 2024. Steinberg has rolled out Nuendo 13 and Spectralayers 10. And still this problem exists, both in Nuendo 12 and 13.
When I followed up in May 2023, Yamaha Support told me that “Spectralayers only supports stereo in ARA”. But Spectralayers 9 and 10 have worked with multichannel in Reaper in ARA all this time, so that’s not true. The only place it doesn’t work is in Nuendo.
Additionally, it’s not just Spectralayers: every ARA extension I have will not make a sound in Nuendo 12 or 13 when using multichannel audio: Melodyne, Acoustica, Auto Align Post 2, Auto Align. It is and has always been a Nuendo (and presumably Cubase) thing.
I work with multichannel audio all the time. I cannot be the only person in the world using multichannel audio in Nuendo and needing ARA. The inability to hear sound when editing in ARA is completely detrimental to my work.
Is there any hope of ever fixing this in Nuendo?