Audio Export - add "custom" Group to Queue

The new audio export function and its options for rendering stems are absolutely great and a big time safer!

But I would love to see an option, to add “custom” groups to the export queue.
I have lots of groups (pretty standard: drums, percussion, bass, keys, vox, …) in my template, but sometimes I want or have to export some “unusual” combinations of stems / instruments / groups, where you normally have no group or sub mix for.

So it would be great to have an option to group / bounce selected tracks to one audio file / stem in the export queue! Then it would be a 100% flexible and one would be able to bounce whatever combination he wants.

Thanks in advance

You could already do this with direct routing. Add a group channel with no output, open direct routing rack in mixer and additionally route your tracks to the new bus. Seems as easy as your request plus you get the opportunity to insert a limiter for example.

Cheers,
Alex

Honestly I think this would make for a bit of a mess, at least potentially.

Basically you want the ability to mix (sum) paths in the export window rather than in the mixer. I think that potentially it’ll look messy because you’d need a way to display just which sources are to be summed. And further more I’m guessing that if this was possible people wouldn’t want any limitations, so now you have to facilitate setting up numerous sums as well. Perhaps a matrix would make this easy, but at that point why not just do it in the mixer.

The other thing I think is a bit not-so-good is that the custom settings need to be stored with the project somehow. In other words I don’t think it’d be good to set up custom sums in your export and it doesn’t follow your project. I’d imagine someone might want to recreate a particular summing and the export not being available.

But by keeping everything in the actual project’s mixer it’s all contained, including potential naming schemes based on group/bus names etc.

If it doesn’t complicate it for regular use then of course I don’t mind. To me though this just doesn’t seem that necessary.

PS: As for “big time saver” I really think setting up templates appropriately is the way to go. If you’ve once done a song with an instrumental mix then you can keep that available in your template so it’s easy and quick to access.

@Audio-Alex , @MattiasNYC
thanks for your replies!

Yes I know direct routing and all the mixer capabilities, but for me it would be a great feature to have this flexibility “on the go”, when you have the export window open. You already have the options in the export queue, if you want it dry, with inserts, or sends inserts and master… so the possibility to route it through your projects signal paths (master limiter) is already given.

The export queues are also already saved with the project, so this should be no problem at all…

In general, good templates are key! That’s right! I work with customised templates for different purposes for years now - this is the basis for a fast workflow.

At least for me it would make sense.
Cheers

It might help if you could envision and describe how it would look in the actual dialog box, pretty specifically.

@MattiasNYC
I think it could look like this

  1. So first go to multichanel export and select your tracks
  2. Choose your effect chain / signal path and enable the “export as sum” checkbox, which is not enabled by default.
  3. Add the job to the queue and you will see that:
    a) all selected tracks get exported to 1 file
    b) an additional visualization, all tracks are framed by a bracket and marked with (sum)
    c) the resulting file / filename is shown on the bottom of the bracket.

So all in all it would be like it is now, but with the additional checkbox described in 2).

You seem to forget that there is a complete audio engine behind the audio export.
You can’t just “summ” a couple of tracks without summing the tracks into a group.
It’s not because digital audio is just “math” that you can add whatever signal you want, to any other signal. That is just not how it works.

Fredo

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Hmmm…

So really what’s happening in your example Chednb is that you’re effectively soloing the three audio channels from the Kanalauswahl / Channel selection box and then doing an output from “Stereo Out”, correct? Because if you had selected “Stereo Out” as your source you would get the path but all audio tracks, and by selecting the way you did you would normally get three individual files. So what you want is - to put it differently - the effect of soloing the three tracks and taking the output of their destination as a source. Right?

I’m thinking technically this is what you’d likely want. Because if it isn’t then as Fredo says you need to sum the signals of course and you’d get none of the benefits of any processing you’d normally have on a group or output bus.

I’m almost thinking it might be better (or easier to program) to allow for soloing/muting from the dialog box then rather than forcing Nuendo to create a new path to do the summing.

I still think it’s a bit messy and probably not “best practice” to go about it this way though.

Yes that’s correct. So far I always did it like that…
If I was to lazy to set up a respective group or wanted to have unique combinations of tracks, I soloed all the tracks I wanted to “group” and exported them through my master bus (Stereo Out) as a stereo print.

Yes that’s correct as well and I know about the audio engine, but I didn’t intend to do so.
The Export Queue already provides different options to “route” your audio signal through different signal paths / busses, whereby (pls correct me if I’m wrong) the signals always go through the master bus, no matter if you choose dry, inserts + channel strip or master+group+sends…
It just bypasses / turns of the inserts or sends, depending on the export effects option you have chosen. So in my example of the feature, the selected tracks would always get summed via the master bus.

For me the feature would replace my manual workflow of soloing unique combinations of tracks (or at least I would have to do it just once in the export queue), with the big benefit, that I would be able to do as many different combinations as I want and would have an overview about all these combinations in the job list.

Hopefully now my feature request is clear and you can see what I want to do with it.

cheers

Unless I misunderstand you, that is not correct.
The Export Queue provides different options of exporting the audio signals that have already been correctly routed.
The Export Queue let you render/export different predefined tracks/busses one after the other.

You wrongly think that you can change or redefine the routing that already is in your project.
It’s not because you can make a selection of the predefined routings, that you can change them.

Fredo

@Fredo

ok this was not pro “audio language”, I agree.
So it was not meant to re-route or redefine routings, I meant you have the option to pick off the signal at different points in the signal path and print it. Generally I don’t want to change routings etc.

But I think you know what I want to achieve right.
So at one point or another, every track or sound which should be hearable in a mix at the end, gets trough the master bus (main mix), right?

Then lets say, that my feature request is bound to finally run through the master bus (main mix), or my idea is not thought to finish at this point?! I’m open for suggestions to make this feature idea a good one, or you say it is completely useless - except for me :joy:

best

You can do that, but you can’t summ them together.
Before two signals can be “merged”, they need to pass through an “adder”.
A group or buss.
Without tracks being routed to that Group/Buss, there is no way you can merge two signals together.
Example:
-Track 1 & 2 are routed through group 1
-Tracks 3 to 9 are routed through group 2

There is no way to “glue” together (export) tracks 2 & 5 without using the solo function.
And they still will be routed through group 1 and 2.
No way to “pick up” their signals before they reach their groups.

Fredo

@Fredo

This is how I did / do it manually.
I want the export queue to do this for me.
The “adder” bus will be the master bus (main mix) sum up the tracks [if they are routet that way, which they are at an earlier or later point to be hearable on the master bus / in the final piece of sound / music / …].
Should work, right?

If I want to pick up the signals of the selected tracks at an earlier stage of the signal path (complete dry or inserts+sends…), then they still would be summarized by the master bus (main mix)[if they are routet that way, which they are at an earlier or later point to be hearable on the master bus / in the final piece of sound / music / …] - with bypassed inserts / sends, depends on where you want / choose to pick up the signal (except post fader plugins on the master e.g. for a limiter).

As I said, if this doesn’t work, suggestions how to get this work are very appreciated.

Well, just to be picky - signals don’t always go through the master bus, and I don’t think they necessarily go through ‘a’ particular place in general. I recently did some remixes of shows that contained a VDS track (spoken description), and that mix is separate from the normal version, so the VDS mix never passes the main mix output. Now, this show also had dialog and narration and there were separate stems for those two types of content. Supposed someone said they wanted me to output narration, dialog and VDS in one stem, then using your method the software would have to literally create a new bus to sum the signals and then sum them.

This could of course all be fine, but I would imagine that with some combinations you could end up in trouble. There’s how we treat mono into stereo, stereo into mono, there are cases where you have a limiter for ‘safety’ on an output or maybe other plugins… how would the software determine what to add and where and how to adjust levels, and if it doesn’t then would we remember the implications of what we do before we execute the export?

I just basically think that the potential for unforeseen problems is pretty big, and if users run into those problems there’ll probably be a lot of frustration because of it.

So while I think it’s not a bad idea on the surface I really think best practice and the best way to go is to simply set up templates with a sufficient amount of summing/outputs available to export from.

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OK, I’m doing 80% music…
For audio post or mixing other formats where the master bus is not the end of everything this is true.

+1 for me on this.

The ability to create “custom stems” on fly and batch export them would be a huge time saver come end of every project for me. The batch export is brilliant and this would make it even more so.

To plan each project with busses and keeping send effects, parallel processing, layers all neat all the time would make the projects much larger. And every time you want to try something quick, you need to rememberand take the time to go back and “make it export safe”.

If using soloed tracks to add to queue is technically difficult, maybe using different mix snapshots could be a reasonable way forward?

Best reagards,
johannes

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