again the problem with external plugin. I render the track with external plugin running through my analog gear and it randomly creates a dropout of around 1 sec or bit less in resulting file. Why is this happening? WL7 doesn’t create such dropout if I render without external plugin.
I also use Nuendo 5 and external plugin works without problems in it.
I thought possible solution would be to set different hard drives for reading and saving information. Maybe it happens because WL7 reads and saves to same HDD and it slows down at some point. But again this doesn’t happen if I render with VST plugins only.
I have projects going on and cannot afford wasting time re-rendering again and again hoping that drop out doesn’t happen by some miracle:)
External plugins is a totally different thing than standard plugins, because this requires some hardware synchronization with the “external world” (playback and record happen while renders happens).
I advise to have larger audio blocks and a bigger number of buffers (cf. Audio Streaming Preferences), to give more elasticity to the playback/record constraint.
This being said, I will review this part of the program for next version, to see if this can be improved.
Yeah, I saw similar posts on gearslutz as well. People are increasing buffer (introduces big latency) size and using 2 hard drives. I hope this part can be improved in further update. Otherwise I will need to go back to Nuendo for mastering purpose and use WL7 for digital masters only. Which is shame.
same here… never had this problem with WL6 and that had a LOT less latency a.nd buffer needed.
If i rendered a track now i have to listen to it again from start till end just to make sure there are no dropouts.
To me that is really unacceptable! It’s 2011 and it’s only a 2 track audiofile…
What I did last time. I chose a different HDD to render the master to (I used same HDD for reading writing data before). Buffer was set to 32 (max is 64). WL rendered wav file through External plugin without any dropouts this time.
Of course this is like playing a quest game, trying to find a hidden solution.
But this is the world we living in, nothing is ever working perfectly. And even if it was, new upgrades introduce new problems and so on. Companies need money, we need working software. I guess such situations will happen in 2050 as well and even more:)
Jut got an email from a customer that he had a glitch that i totally missed.
I’m actually pretty p!ssed of about that! This really should not be happening with a program like wavelab and PLEASE don’t tell me it’s probably my soundcard, harddisk or whatever. It’s 100% sure WL7 causing this!
Indeed m8, its something in WL7 4 sure. Maybe this part of program was not taken care once developing. Hopefully will be fixed soon. Until then its not possible to use it for commercial purposes, 2 much risk to make clients unhappy and hurt your reputation:
PG? any news on this? For me, and i seriously think a lot (most) of others, this not just somewhere on the far away prio list but at the nr. 1 position that needs to be fixed asap.
I really don’t trust WL7 and think this bug already cost me a customer which i really think is not a good thing…
Next update is in 2 or 3 months. I will review and try to improve this special plugin, but I am not on that now. I have no problem here on various systems, but it’s true they are all fast systems, 4 cores, and I don’t have access to all the audio devices you might have. And maybe I have not tested enough anyway. You will need to be patient on that one.
I’ve experienced this here as well (2.53 gHz MBP, 4G Ram, Metric Halo ULN8).
In addition to the issues reported, I’ve found that when re-opening sessions with an External Gear ASIO plug in the master section, that plug is never saved. It’s always an empty slot. I just put it into a saved chain, so it’s easy enough to recall now, but still… bug.
It may be a fluke, but for some reason my rig’s renders with External Gear are more reliable when I monitor the render path as it runs down. I can do this via MIO Console, even though WL7 keeps the task itself in the background. In that configuration I get less dropouts.
The problem is bad enough and consistent enough that I’ve mostly stopped rendering entirely, and just playback out of WL7 and capture manually in MIO Console. It’s more reliable as a recorder, and ensures I see/hear errors as they happen. Given Philippe’s comments I think I’ll stick to this approach, and avoid External Gear plug entirely.
As cool as it seems and feels, I’m not convinced any process involving External Gear should EVER be a background task, at least on macs (PC MMV). I see few functional benefits to pro mastering engineers for “rendering” captures as background tasks. I concede this feature may be slick and compelling to DIYers, newbies and non-pro users, but given the nature of mastering gear (unique, expensive, hand-patched and modded), once it’s engaged in a delivery, you can’t really do anything else anyway. Further, if you want to change settings or something, you’ll need to hear what’s going on. So in most applications, foreground capture (already possible, maybe more stable already) is most desirable. I guess if all you’re doing is limiting or curving something you might like background, but it’s really a nice-to-have feature, not an ideal.
Do a lot of testing with a chain which is something like this: liniar phase eq > external gear > ozone4 > limiter.
There are no cpu-spikes and hdd is fast enough (systemdisk is a SSD, audio= fast 7200rpm 1tb disk). Audio is 24bit 44.1khz wav with a a rme hdsp9652 with lucid 88192 converter.
I’ve never trusted the external gear plugin. I just open 2 instances of wavelab…One for playback, and one for capture with the ASIO input plugin. (There’s a thread here about how to open 2 instances of WL7. Not sure why they restricted it on the new version) You’ll need a proper mastering console to monitor but it works great. You can still add plugins after the ASIO input section. I’ve been working this way for years. Maybe that help until they fix the external gear plug.
To run multiple instance of WaveLab, there is a backdoor, not documented, not supported. This is not supported espescially because saving settings shared by several instances is a bit tricky.
You will simply edit one setup file, and add one line, as follows:
canMulti=true
The file is this one:
Windows 7/Vista settings:
C:\Users[UserName]\AppData\Roaming\Steinberg\WaveLab 7\Startup.ini
Windows XP
C:\Documents and Settins[UserName]\AppData\Steinberg\WaveLab 7\Startup.ini
I’m using WL6 for playback and WL7 for capture and rarely have any problems on XP
I’m using 2 sound cards…
WL6 Playback (at original sample rate of files ) RME PCI Digital out–> Lavry DA → Analog chain EQ-Comp-Lim → Lavry AD
WL7 Capture (@32bit/44.1) Lavry AD Dig out → Steinberg PCI Sound Card Dig In -->WL7
(I have 2 RME’s but the cards didn’t like working at the same time )
I’m always careful when I open/close the programs.
1- I Always start: Open WL6 , New montage @ xx sample rate , Load wav files . . . .
2-Open WL7 put in Record, monitor . . . . Play WL6 . .
I usually never touch the Audio streaming preferences since each program saves it’s own and I always work the same way.
Closing I do in reverse.
Close WL7 → Close WL6
I’m still on Windows XP. I’m fortunate to not have had any dropouts using WL7 so far. But since we’re talking about the external plug-in here, I thought I’ll use the opportunity to mention that nasty click I’ve been getting at the beginning of the rendered file if the latency of the plug-in is not increased to something like 10 ms. The auto latency setting doesn’t work. This issue has actually been inherited from WL6.
Finally, I would like to join the posters here in emphasizing just how important the proper functioning of the external plug-in is for those who use WL7 for capturing their analog processing chains.
Here it is not only the dropouts (especially when rendering, which really should be NO problem at all, regarding the fact it is only stereo), but the “External Gear”-Plugin also crashes Wavelab (“schwerwiegender Fehler”) most of the times. You then only can get it working again when closing WL7 and then restarting it.
But then the External Gear will often cause nasty artifacts in the audio signal when playing, or won’t play the audio through at all - which can only be stopped by closing WL7 and restarting the computer. Maybe something wrong with synching the different I/O’s internally in Wavelab or with the driving of the audio cards, which is leading into all those troubles?
Furthermore I have 2 seconds latency introduced by External Gear (RME HDSPe AES-32 is set to buffer size 512 (12 ms)) while I have next to nothing in latency going out only via ASIO and RME to the monitoring without using External Gear? What’s wrong with the latency-correction?
