I’ve run into the odd problem of some channels spontaneously muting themselves, and some not. I couldn’t figure out the problem, as the settings were identical to working channels, and I even bypassed all the inserts.
I’ve found out the culprit which is a plugin requiring me to activate it again for some reason, but the point is, the plugin is bypassed. Only when removing the plugin from the insert chain does the track unmute.
How is this possible? I’ve spent way too much time on this and it happened while I was working with people which left me quite clueless. I thought bypassed plugins are… well, bypassed.
Is this a bug or a feature? If it’s intentional, I would expect an indicator of some sort that the effect is still affecting the channel.
BTW, I’m using Cubase 13 Pro, I experienced the same behaviour on Cubase 11 Artist
They are, the input is turned off so no Audio can get in. But the plug-in is still enabled. If you hover over the bypass control it tells you how to disable it (maybe ctrl+click, but not sure).
A bypassed plugin is still participating in the calculation for latency compensation
So turning bypass on and off does not impact the latency compensation - therefore allowing the audio to continue streaming smoothly when flipping that switch.
Turning the plugin off takes it out of the latency compensation calculation and that forces Cubase to recalculate the latency compensation. So if you do that while the project plays, this causes a brief interruption of the audio stream.
A nice test is to turn a plugin on/off vs turning bypass on/off while the project is playing.
That’s mostly true. Any plugins that are latent are fully processed when bypassed for the reason you mention. All other plugins however, are deactivated completely and not processed. Unfortunately that can cause a problem with tails when the plugin is unbypassed. For that reason, I’ve always considered the Cubase bypass behavior to be incorrect.
In either case though, there should never be any muting of the signal chain, which I think is what the OP is saying.
Well not even for performance purposes, but just general usability. For example if you have a delay you only want to apply to the last word of each line. You could Automate the Bypass to only open for that last word. But you wouldn’t want that to control when the echos occur - as you’d want them to continue beyond the last WORD Word word word word wor…
If a plugin fails (hangs) while in bypass, since as previously said by other friends, it is still being calculated, strange things may happen, one of course is that you have a muted track in the sense that upon failure, the signal doesn’t proceed to its next destinations. You can even witness “looping” and other unpleasant stuff. This can actually happen with a VSTi as well.
They are two different controls, but as I mentioned above, for most plugins, including your delay example, the bypass and deactivate controls do the same thing (with the minor exception that deactivate does a buffer reset).
I would argue that neither of those controls does a “bypass” when acting on non-latent plugins. This can cause problems, especially with delay and reverb plugins, when turning off the bypass control.
As others have shared their very good points, this behavior does make sense for technical reasons, so thank you all for enhancing my Cubase knowledge
But I think the main point lies here:
This can seem like a bug, or at the very least unintended behaviour - even if the plugins are enabled and have audio streaming through them for technical reasons which does make sense, it does seem odd that a failure in one of the bypassed plugins can mute an entire channel. I would expect either
some sort of indicator in Cubase that an insert is cutting off the audio (not necessarily an error indicator as this does make sense for a gate for example)
duplicating the signal into the bypassed effect and into the next non-bypassed insert/destination and switching in between (could be difficult I suppose)
Is there a more appropriate place to place this bug report / feature request?
some sort of indicator in Cubase that an insert is cutting off the audio (not necessarily an error indicator as this does make sense for a gate for example)
The audio being mute seems like a pretty good indicator?
duplicating the signal into the bypassed effect and into the next non-bypassed insert/destination and switching in between (could be difficult I suppose)
I wasn’t clear on that in your original post. You’re saying you have a plugin that will mute the track when bypassed? If so, the answer to your original question is: that is a bug. A plugin should never do that and you should report this bug to the maker of the plugin.
