If your plugins are working that way, then you would be right, the plugins would still need time to buffer even if you printed stems. But I imagine that adding silence should help, since you would be giving them time to buffer.
If Cubase lets the plugins start buffering during the precount bars, you might be able to set the number of pre count bars to something high, and record everything to an audio track instead of exporting the usual way.
So inserting silence seems to help… sometimes.
Here’s the fun part: I can do the export of a certain session without any problems for quite some time, but then, after an hour or so of working, impossible… I get the same problem again with my exports (of this session, and others).
Strange, right?
Also, I seem to get an error most of the times, before the starts occurring.
‘VST bridge lost…’.
I don’t know how I can lose the thing, but restarting everything doesn’t seem to help.
Day afterwards, everything’s peachy again.
I love you Cubase, why you do this to me?
Referring back to an earlier comment, you said that if you turn off output processors - you don’t have the problem. This clearly indicates that one or more of those is the main cause. Try removing one processor at a time and running a short render test. Switching the processor off isn’t enough - store the settings and remove completely from the signal chain.
Secondly, if you are losing bridging with VSTs - that is pointing in the same direction. This issue may well turn out to be caused by a single plug.
I very occasionally lose bridging and I haven’t solved it completely as yet. I do highly recommend buying a software called JBridge - it’s around 15e. It has eliminated almost all VST related issues for me.
P
Well, I’m learning as I go here.
I’ve found that, once I have the error, I can turn off whatever I want, the problem remains.
Strange things…
What could cause you to lose the bridge?
And how can you euhm… find it again? Restart seems no help…
On the odd occasion I have lost it, it has been when closing Cubase down, so I have just rebooted to solve it. I highly recommend JBridge. It seems to be more ‘solid’ than Steinberg’s bridge.
On one system I had a problem causing a bridging failure, it turned out that I had two identical instances of the same plugin. It caused the bridging to fail and messed up the GUI of the plug in, before causing a complete freeze up. Took some time to discover and solve that one! Maybe you have something like that going on?
I do think that there is going to be a single VST at the root of your problem. Probably in your master inserts. I am guessing that it will turn out not to be a problem caused by Cubase program itself.
P
I gave up on Cubase’s VST bridge on day one and got JBridge. I also recommend it. If I am right in presuming that you are bridging 32-bit plugins into 64-bit Cubase, and if your project isn’t utilizing more than a couple GB of RAM, then you could try opening the project in 32-bit Cubase and see if the problem still exists there.
jBridge seems to help for plugins that wouldn’t normally work, while mine do.
But I understand it can be more stable.
Let me research how it works and how to install it…
Thanks for the advice.
If I would use the demo, to check if that solves my issues, is it easy to revert afterwards (uninstall and go back to Cubase bridge…)?
I think so, in the absence of JBridge, Cubase will analyse and bridge your 32bit plugs as usual. I think what JBridge does is make an adapted version of each plug that is directly 64bit compatible - somebody might well know more than me on that subject though. It’s a very popular software.
Set a restore point as well, that will give you a route back to pre JBridge just in case of a problem.
P
You are correct, JBridge creates separate “bridged” versions of your plugins. The bridged plugins go in a separate directory, and you tell Cubase to look for those plugins rather than the original ones.
It was indeed linked to one single vst, you were correct!
Still might look into that jBridge thing though… Whatever renders your system more stable, is fine by me.
Thanks for all your help guys!