WLP 9.5.5 build 208, X.14.5 - I have a montage with staggered tracks. On one track has WL native Gain plugin on it. It is active, but the gain setting is 0.0. In Effects>Output, DMG Limitless. Nothing in master section besides MBit+. Rendering created a pop / transient spike at the beginning of two tracks/files. Deleting Gain plugin = no pops. Ugh. Now I feel I can’t trust the render and need to inspect and listen to each and every file that is rendered. Not good. “Never turn your back on digital.”
Today, using DMG Dualism in Effects>Output, no other plugs, WL crashes repeatedly upon playback with Dualism turned on. One time the audio actually played, and it was garbled. Otherwise, crash. My workflow hasn’t changed, I’ve commonly used Dualism and Limitless as only two plugs in Effects>Output. I’m running latest version of DMG plugs as well, and their plugs perform flawlessly for me in Reaper.
I use DMG Limitless in WaveLab here daily without issue. Your workflow begs the question…if the native gain plugin isn’t doing any gain change, why is it needed?
I haven’t tried Dualism yet so I can’t speak to that. DMG in my experience has been pretty responsive to crash reports and fixes, including sharing a beta with you if they can fix it.
Have you tried both VST2 and VST3 of Dualism as a potential workaround for today?
There are many ways to render but I always render the full montage in one pass first to lock in all processing, and there are a series of easy steps to recreate the montage for track by track rendering at various sample rates if needed.
Yeah. VST2 if Dualism is not happy in WaveLab in the global master section, or montage output sections. Seems OK on clips strangely enough.
However the VST3 version seems OK, or at least to not crash WaveLab.
I have no idea how this plugin works but there seems to be a routing issue when using the plugin in WaveLab. VST3 version only has input in section 1, nothing in section 2.
VST2 version shows some crazy level/feedback/DC offset in section 2 when used in the the global master section, and when used in the montage output section, it produced a crash (attached here for PG).
I think for Dualism you need to write to DMG about having them test it in WaveLab.
For the rendering/popping issue, I can’t say other than don’t use the Steinberg gain plugin set to 0.0 on the track which doesn’t really do anything right? WL_Dualism.zip (56.1 KB)
Glad you’re seeing Dualism issues as well. It’s interesting, some presets make things problematic, yet building the same preset by hand sometimes works perfectly fine. Dave is awesome, I just need to make the time to follow up with him, and provide better documentation. Trying to do a comprehensive bug reports / steps to recreate sometimes just seems like too much time these days. No excuse, but it’s the reality.
As for gain plugin, I needed more gain than I could access via the volume line/envelope overlay. Eventually, I had enough small edits to warrant going back to Reaper and take care of that and other edits. Why I didn’t delete the plugin vs. resetting to zero is beyond me, but it’s also beyond me why WL’s native plug-in ostensively doing nothing should create such a problematic outcome. Completely my fault for not checking, I was clearly too trusting with WL. Their gain plugin was the only difference in over 6 months of this exact workflow. Sure, maybe DMG doesn’t play nice with WL, but WL has a pretty rich history of plugs not playing nice, and when said plugs seemingly always work fine in the major DAWs… just frustrating. /rant.
Anyhow, on the other hand, I want to thank you once again for the work you do in support of this community. I’d gladly pay for your instruction, as it often mirrors my workflow, and the time savings would surely justify a modest fee. Food for thought!
Yeah. There a lot of variables and little quirks for sure. Aside from the gain/volume envelope, the clips tab also provides a hefty amount of gain that you can use. It’s kind of hidden but it’s there and be done either pre or post effects.
In the past I had a weird issue where Limitless applied a very short fade in on rendered files unless another certain plugin was in front of it. It was weird but DMG fixed it ASAP. Maybe there is something about how DMG interacts with plugins before it.
Also, in an attempt to consolidate things, you may consider putting the dither plugin in the montage output section instead of the global master section. This way, the plugin is saved with the montage and then maybe you can avoid ANY processing from happening in the global master section which could in theory minimize issues.
I use Limitless on almost every project in the montage master output and with my workflow, I haven’t seen (or heard) an issue with Limitless in a long time.
It’s beyond my knowledge why WaveLab is more sensitive to 3rd party plugins than other DAWs but I think a big part of it has to do with lack of testing by the plugin developers. I hope WaveLab can help meet them in the middle with this issue but I have 0 coding skill or knowledge so I don’t even know if that’s a reality. From what I gather of other niche mastering DAWS (Sequoia, Triumph (RIP), Samplitude, and Sonic Solutions (almost RIP), it seems that they all are in a similar place. Too small of a user market for many plugin developers to bother testing, or testing carefully.
In my years of battling this, I’d say 80% of the time the plugin developer needs to fix it, and 20% of the time it was on the WaveLab side.
At the risk of being entirely off topic … t happens that this is one of the things that I believe could be ‘improved’ in WL. If you work primarily in the box, gain staging is super important. The DMG Track Control plug has and in and out gain control, along with active metering. It would be really nice to see the WL gain side of things adopt something like this. Anyway … back to the topic.
Yeah, it’s definitely hidden. I’m doing a bit more “in the box” work with WaveLab than I did in previous years and one thing that’s really great is the Meta-Normalizer. I initially wrote it off as a gimmick but now, when doing stuff ITB in WaveLab, I use it nearly every project after getting the songs sequenced to get them all on the same page loudness-wise.
The “Top Of Loudness Range” setting is really pretty natural sounding in terms of getting all the songs feeling the same loudness and hitting my dynamics processors roughly the same. This then allows you to start from FX chain presets easier and have the dynamics threshold(s) be at least close.
If you do this to say -18 LUFS or -16 LUFS (excluding any FX) you’re in good shape to start working from there and Meta-Normalizer changes the clips gain pre-FX and you still get the full volume envelope to play with and of course, it’s all non-destructive.
