Issue with exporting audio or render in place “timing”

Hey hey,
Haven’t had to post in a while but for some strange reason I noticed when exporting a midi track to audio or render in place the wav file always has the audio slightly in front of the beat. I have checked all my settings to make sure I haven’t screwed something up. I decided to pause the preferences when loading just to see and of course it works with no issues. So, I must have messed something up but have no clue what. Before I pull my remaining hair out does anyone know some potential areas that maybe I could remove within my Cubase preferences? I hate to rebuild everything but may have to in the end. Just curious if anyone might have experienced anything like this and if so what caused the issue. Thanks for any advice. Also, I did check and make sure a vet plugin wasn’t causing this. I made sure the vst instrument was going straight to stereo out with no plugins in between. It happens with any vst instrument as well. Very strange lol.

There are many strange things happening with the preferences and sometimes project files, too.

If you used Ctrl + Alt + Shift in order to surpress the usage of your user preferences, then the culprit is most likely either the file “Defaults.xml” or “UserPreferences.xml”. I always forget which one of these two it is.
However, depending on your usage of Cubase there might be a lot of entries in each of these files and finding out exactly which line is causing the issue is very time consuming.

If you find it is neither of these two files, you can find out which file is the “whodunit”. Depending on how much time and effort you can and want to put in, here is what I have done in similiar situations:

  1. rename the current “faulty” preference folder (to e.g. Cubase 14_64_faulty)
  2. start Cubase in order for it to create a new folder with factory settings
  3. create a copy of this new factory settings folder
  4. replace individual files inside that new folder from step 2 by copying the ones from your faulty folder over. Copy, not move.
    For this to work you’ll have to quit Cubase, then copy the files, then launch Cubase again in order to check if result.

Now, there are different strategies in which way to replace the factory files with your “faulty” files. You can do the 50% approach by copying the upper half of files in one go. If the problem comes back the issue is within this upper half of files. Restore the factory settings by using the files from the folder created at step 3. Then only copy the upper half of the upper half of files from your faulty folder to the new one. And so on and so on.

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This is extremely helpful and thank you for taking the time to reply. I completely understand and I think that’s a great way to approach this. Honestly the time consuming part doesn’t bother me as much as what in the heck I did to cause it lol. I guess it could just be a glitch but there has been so many times I have cussed Cubase only to find the issue was me making a stupid mistake. I will give this a shot and report back!! Thanks again.