Clipping start

Hi Guys

I’ve noticed that only very occasionally, when I export a track, it always clips the start. This is even with a track that has very few plugins.
I’ve even gone to the extent of creating a fresh montage and opening up the saved plug in chain. I’ve also placed the marker several seconds before the audio starts. Same result.
Ultimately I need to edit in the first second, but I couldn’t find another work around. I confess these are rare occasions, but frustrating none the less. (p.s. I’m running a brand new mac studio so it’s not horsepower)

Find the guilty plugin. This is not a matter of quantity.

Thanks PG.
But why would this happen on some instances with this plug in and not others?

In software, when two similar things behave differently, this means the context is different.
Without knowing more details about the context, I can’t say.

Also, the symptom needs to be carefully examined. For example, when you say “clip the start”, what exactly does that mean? And by what amount? And for a given case, is this reproducible?

But as soon as you have a reproducible case, the one procedure is to remove the plugins one by one to know which one is causing the problem.

It doesn’t seem as straight forward as that to me in this case PG.
I have 4 plugins open on a particular track. When all 4 plugins are engaged, the resulting render causes the intro to ramp in clipping the first half a second. When I disengage ‘any’ of the plugins, leaving only 3, the render is perfect. This is odd as I have many projects with a lot more plugins in use with no issue. Also, the 4 plug-ins I have in use are not new ones but plugins I’ve used for a long time. This scenario has only now started to occur on several projects over the last few weeks. I’m having trouble figuring out the cause.

Clipping is a slightly confusing word to use in this context because it can mean more than one thing when it comes to audio.

Export is not a clear term for WaveLab troubleshooting as rendering is the most common way to process audio. Export could mean something else.

Track is also not a clear term. Do you mean Audio Montage track, Album/CD track? Where are the plugins actually inserted? Clip Effects, Montage Track Effects? Montage Output Effects? Master Section? Is the audio going out to analog and back or is this strictly all digital/in the box work?

There is really too much left to the imagination to really be able to help. Knowing the plugin chain could help others try to reproduce it and see what’s going on.

The method of rendering and the Rendering Source could also have an influence. For example, you can render a region (CD Track), a Clip, the whole montage, a selected audio range, etc.

Anyway, is the file the expected length, but it’s just that the audio ramps up from total silence to the expected level? Or is there actual time removed from the resulting render.

As somebody who has seen many plugin issues over the years, including something similar where DMG plugins were adding a roughly 75 millisecond fade in when rendering, usually the issue does lie within the plugin and not WaveLab so the issue must be reported to the plugin developer to fix. Something I’ve seen DMG and a few other good plugin companies/developers do.

If I recall correctly, the DMG fade issue didn’t happen when another plugin was inserted before it, but if the DMG plugin was the only one on a given clip, the first few milliseconds of audio would fade in which sounds kind of similar to what you have going on here where one plugin may be (negatively or positively) influencing another plugin in an unexpected way.

Hi Justin,

The issue you had with DMG sounds the pretty much the same as mine.

And I agree clipping can mean two things. In this case I was referring to the intro of a song containing a quick fade in. This is caused when using clip effects in a montage environment. And by export, yes I did indeed mean Render.

I will try your suggestion and re-order the plugins to see if there is a solution.

Thanks as always.

Joe

Ah, yeah. It was years ago but this was happening to me in some cases and the cause was a DMG plugin. Interestingly, the temporary fix was making sure that another plugin (pretty much any plugin) was inserted before the DMG plugin and the issue didn’t exist. It seemed to cause the DMG plugin to stay awake and not have rendering issues.

DMG was able to quickly fix the issue though with a plugin update so that no workarounds were needed to get accurate rendering.

My feeling is that it has to do with a certain plugin, and the issue may only exist when used in combination with other plugins.

Also, toggling the setting in the attached image OFF can sometimes help things but I prefer to keep it on to prevent other rendering issues. YMMV.

I would also try the same plugin chain in Output (as opposed to Clip) effects and see if the problem persists.

Right. That is also why the Render Source can be a factor. If your clip is trimmed super tight and there is actual audio in the first few samples, a fade-in rendering bug might be noticed.

If there is a pad of silence at the start of the clip with no audio, a fade-in bug might not be a factor. With a lot of my project where I go analog, my captures from analog have 200ms of silence at the start of each clip so a 75ms fade in bug wouldn’t even be detected in a normal album master.

The nature of the audio in the file, how tightly it’s trimmed, where the plugin(s) are inserted, and the Render Source all have an influence.

Putting the plugin chain in the Montage Track section or Montage Output section could have a different result because in that case, the processing starts at the start of the render vs. the start of the tightly trimmed clip.

Again, that is not a definite solution but a means of testing.