Creating Audio Montage from Result yields Reference Track if Track 1 is Reference Track

Hi folks,

first of all I want to shout out to @Justin_Perkins for his tutorials on how to use Wavelab. This was truly a great help in getting things up and running. Many thanks for that! This is awesome!

There is one thing I was unsure whether this is intended or a bug.
Here is how to reproduce:

  1. Start WaveLab Pro 12

  2. Create New Montage from Audio Files

  3. Select, e.g., 2 WAV files

  4. Setup Montage location

  5. Choose Stagger Files on Two Alternating Tracks

  6. Use the Album Wizard to setup the track markers, which I’ve configured as follows (following JPs CD Init):

  7. Add a reference track, insert a clip into it, and move it to track position 1

  8. The session should now look as follows:

  9. In the final step render the whole montage with the following options (here I rendered the montage as 64bit 48kHz WAV file):

  10. The created montage starts with a reference track as the following screenshot shows:

  11. In the original montage move the reference track down to “Track 2”. Render the whole montage again. The resulting montage will not feature a reference track but a regular track instead:

Is this by intend? I was initally confused by this because after rendering the whole montage I could not hear anything during playback and thought something was broken.

Any ideas?

Interesting find. I’ll have to test it but I guess I normally have the Reference Track on the very bottom.

I can try it your way and see if it’s a bug or something else.

I just tested and no matter where the Reference Track is placed, I can’t get it to appear in the resulting montage.

There must be more to the story.

I can produce and this is indeed a bug. To recreate a new montage, WaveLab takes the source one as a template. Since the first track is a reference track, this track is reused, but this should not be the case. Don’t set the first track as a reference track and the bug won’t appear.

Thanks for your report.

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Maybe I didn’t test right but I can say that I always have the Reference Track on the very bottom so that’s probably why I never saw the bug.

I must admit that this did work in the first place. So after the first whole montage render I got a new montage that looked as expected. However, after a 2nd whole montage render the generated montage suddenly behaved as described.

What I did between those two renders was moving and renaming the tracks - but the reference track always was on the top - and performing the peak normalization you described in one of your tutorial videos just to get the level between the reference and regular clips right. But I doubt that this would cause that behavior.

Tanks for the confirmation @PG1. If there is anything you need to help you tracking down the issue feel free to contact me.

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