In Cubase, Spectralayers 11 Pro works as expected with stereo audio. But with mono audio, the Mute layer button has no effect, and the Center channel (associated with the mono audio) does not even allow me to press Mute. Some sleuthing suggests that this is a routing issue, but I am unable to alter any routing, as the “Device” panel is simply unavailable in the Spectralayer: Edit–>Preferences. The other four panels are all there. In the standalone version, the Device panel is available and seems to work as intended. What am I doing wrong?
It sounds like you’re trying to Mute the only available channel with mono files, why would you want to do that ? That’s by design that you can’t mute the only channel available, since muting the only channel available would make all spectrogram and waveform view disappear, and no audio at all would come out of SpectraLayers.
If you want to Mute layers, mute the layers in the Layers panel, not in the Channels panel.
The Device preference panel is missing in ARA because in ARA the host controls everything about the audio.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. It is helpful to know that the Device preference panel is supposed to be missing. But the mono audio still does not work. I can mute the layer (with mono audio), and the waveform display disappears leaving a blank window, but the sound continues to play. If I add a second layer and paint some noise onto it, I don’t hear that noise. If I erase low frequencies using the eraser, I still hear those frequencies (and in fact the sound is unchanged) when the audio part plays. But all of those things work just as they should when I am working with stereo audio. Thus, I am still wondering how the Center channel is routed when using SL11Pro in ARA mode. Cubase does not (as far as I can tell) give me options to route inputs and outputs to/from SL. That is, SL does not show up as a track. So how can I route the Center (mono) channel to go to both sides of my main Stereo Out?
That should be up to the Cubase (the host) track.
The (mono) track in Cubase is routed to my main Stereo Outs. And it works just fine on its own, sending a mono signal to both R and L of the stereo output. The problem is that, when using SL on either the whole (mono) track or an individual (mono) audio part, SL seems to have no effect. Muting in SL does make the waveform display disappear, leaving a blank display, but it does not make the sound disappear. It’s as though the Cubase track is simply ignoring what happens in SL and as though SL’s Center channel is not being output to any hearable outputs.
I found the problem: I had Melodyne as an insert on the same channel, but evidently, Melodyne isn’t really a “plug-in” but only an ARA operator, which means it was trumping SL when used as ARA. If I turn off or remove Melodyne from my inserts, SL now works fine.
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