Cubase Pro 14.0.32’s Direct Offline Processing (DOP) is cutting off the beginnings of audio files processed with many 3rd-party plugins. It does that with almost every Acustica Audio Acqua VST3 that I’ve tried.
In the ‘Direct Offline Processing’ window, press the ‘Plug-in’ button and select Metric Halo’s MH Channelstrip. * Note: Number 7 is mislabeled as ‘7a’.
What makes you think that this is a Cubase bug, when the plugins you’re adding seem to be dynamics plugins which (can) change (lower, raise or remove) opening transients (for example via the “attack” parameter).
I suspect that this is a Cubase bug because I don’t recall Metric Halo Channelstrip, Acustica Audio Salt ULTRA, or Acustica Audio Sand4 Ultra ever having this issue. They’ve been around for a good while, too. By the way, Salt ULTRA and Sand4EQULTRA are equalizers, not compressors. And, I’ve got the dynamics sections turned off on MH Channelstrip. Also, I tested many more plugins last night that, when used with Direct Offline Processing, resulted in the processed audio missing its front half. Furthermore, I suspect this version of Cubase is the culprit because it’s new and buggy. Although my topic here is only about this DOP issue, Cubase Pro 14.0.32 froze up and crashed on me when I simply moved around a couple of 12-second audio events in a project with one track. Up until now, Cubase 14 has been very stable for me.
Maybe I should post more examples when using DOP with plugins from other manufacturers…
Here are more examples of what happens when I use Direct Offline Processing with certain plugins from Louder Than Liftoff, Harrison, Analog Obsession, and SKnote. Look at the front half of that audio event.
Are these plugins linear phase by any chance? How much latency do they add?
As suggested by @Nico5, this can originate from how the plugin operates. But removing an entire transient is kind of odd. I have tried to reproduce the issue myself with linear phase plugins but the first transient doesn’t get removed. This works as expected on my side.
Also, your steps to follow include importing two audio files at the same time, which I did not do. Does this matter or are you also experiencing the issue when importing a single file?
Louis_R, with the exception of maybe the Harrison Mastering EQ, those plugins are not linear phase.
As for latencies:
SAND4EQULTRA - 35.4 ms
SALTULTRA - 26.8 ms
LTL SILVER BULLET mk2 - 1.3 ms
SKnote Marconi 1 - 0.1 ms
Harrison Mastering EQ, MH Channelstrip 3 v.2.0.3, and Analog Obsession KONSOL - No Latency Displayed by Cubase, which seems weird.
Even when I import just one file and process it via Direct Offline Processing with one of the plugins mentioned above, the front half of the file is chopped off.
While testing Cubase to answer your question, I discovered something! If I toggle the bypass ON and OFF in the DOP window, for some plugins, the transient eventually returns and audio is processed normally! The number of toggles it takes seems to differ, depending on the plugin.
As you can see in the pictures, I was able to get Acustica Audio’s SAND4EQULTRA to process correctly after toggling a few times. However, Louder Than Liftoff’s Silver Bullet mk2 always lopped off the front of the audio when used via Cubase’s Direct Offline Processing, regardless of how many times I toggled. And, I toggled many times!
I have not applied any “auto fade in”. And, if I had applied an “auto fade in”, wouldn’t that fade-in be applied regardless of which plugins I processed with? Why would it only be applied with some plugins, but not others?
Thanks for the information. I have tried with Analog Obsession KONSOL which is free, and I cannot reproduce the issue.
To me, it looks like what you are experiencing is the first transient being moved by AudioWarp. I know this may seem weird but when we look at your first post’s images 10 and 11, we can see that the waveform has moved to the left. The same happens in your third post’s image 2, where the first 1/16 seems to be stretched or moved 1/32 to the left.
Images
However in the image 9 of your first post, it looks like some fades or gain reduction have been applied.
I haven’t spent that much time trying different plugins but I bet there are many more variations. These issues come from plugins that have not been coded properly.
Except for the fade-in, which is normal with some plugins. To prevent the fade-in, just include a short silent Audio Event in front of the one you want to process and glue them.
Although with other plugins I also got the version where the fade-in disappears when bypassing and re-enabling the plugin, but in the case of entropyEQ+ it seems to be permanent.
These issues can mix with transient shapers and other dynamic plugins which makes it even more difficult to see what’s happening. I really do believe that these are NOT Cubase bugs, except maybe for the fade-in that goes away when bypassing and re-enabling. I think it has more to do with how the VST has been set-up inside the plugins than the program that hosts them. OR, there is a discrepancy between Cubase’s and the plugins’ VST version, which leads to strange bugs. The plugins may be using code that Cubase can’t read, as well as the other way around, as you don’t remember these bugs happening with earlier versions of Cubase.
I think this is the summary to be emphasized: even if the issue might not be within Cubase, in latest versions some legacy compatibility adjustment code seems to have been removed, which makes the bad implementation (VST standards) of some plugins become visible now.
Thank you for testing with one of the actual plugins that I used, Louis_R. You doing so caused me to examine my version of Analog Obsession’s KONSOL. It turns out that I had an old version! The new one works just fine with DOP. In my opinion, that leads me to think that you’re possibly right about the plug-ins being the culprits here, not Cubase. It seems strange to me that so many different companies’ plug-ins would all have problems working with DOP, especially when some of their other plug-ins work fine with DOP. I’ll contact the aforementioned companies to try to get these issues resolved.
By the way, when I tried your glue trick, I still had issues with DOP messing with the beginnings of the audio events.
Also, when I either rendered the event in place or froze the track, there were no issues with the front halves of the audio events coming up missing or mangled.
