Never had this before, but seemed to start with 13.0.40.
I’m getting huge LF spikes. They are happening randomly. When I export a mix I always see a couple of them, so I’m currently having to export two or three mixes, then use edits to comp up a final mix.
I’m struggling to pin it down (I’m in the middle of album mixes), but I’m currently suspecting it’s Vocal Chain.
Is anyone else seeing similar?
Only on export, or do they also occur during regular playback?
I was going to say only on exports, but over the past couple of days I think I’m hearing them in normal use too. With the next song I’m going to try a test mix with the Vocal Chain tracks muted and see if the thumps still appear.
Here’s an example of two mixes, with the output waveform of the first mix file clearly showing the thump. In the second mix file the thumps were in other places:
Yeah, trying to first reproduce and then singling out one process at a time to narrow it down is really the only way.
I’ve never seen anything like it in Nuendo. I’ve used Vocal Chain recently on post production jobs but didn’t notice anything like this.
The more I think about it… The waveform seem to show that the problem is across the whole file, maybe suggesting it’s not confined to one track/plug-in. The waveform flattens out on one edge.
This is a new one on me. Has nobody else seen this problem?
I need to get this fixed ASAP - it’s making mix output a tortuous process.
So is there anything on the ‘master’?
No. Nothing on the master buss at all.
It’s an ‘odd’ error.
How about the sign-bit being corrupted and all values are either positive or negative for a portion of the signal?
If so I would suspect data corruption on a hardware level. I.e. try exporting to a different drive and/or try exporting on a different computer (to also isolate system memory problems).
Also I suppose you could try to export audio in completely clean projects with zero plugins. If the problem is hardware related it should persist even without plugins.
It only began since I updated to 13.0.40 (I’m now on 13.0.41).
I’m going to try an export on Cubase 12 - see if that does the same.
(Appreciate the responses, BTW).
Just exported the mix from C12 - no problem at all. Clean mix files.
The only plug-ins reported missing from the C13 Project were Vocal Chain and Black Valve. I now strongly suspect it has to be one of them causing the trouble,
I’m done work for today, but next chance I will undertake a mix in C13 with the Vocal Chain channels muted. I’ll report back.
Visually that is a really weird looking waveform - especially how they head off in the opposite direction. Maybe a DC offset or a phase issue? Have you tried using Supervision to examine it.
Can you measure the length indicated below. That will get us into the neighborhood of the frequency involved.
I had an issue like this six years ago. Turned out to be one of the inputs on my interface had a short, and the waveforms would show me this error. In my case the error was completely random. Only solved it by getting a new interface.
@Resonant_Serpent That’s not the case here. The recording is fine. The thumps are added randomly by Cubase at mix. This has nothing whatsoever to do with my interface.
@raino The length of the abberation is around 3000 samples at 44.1kHz, maybe around 67-70 ticks.
I’ve cut the section of audio. Here’s a link to it:
Thump.wav
I hope I didn’t miss this fact in a prior post:
is it a real-time export or off-line?
Offline export. But I think I’m hearing the thumps during realtime playback too. I never render mixes in realtime.
I was asking because realtime exporting can introduce another wildcard: external devices.
With offline export, to the best of my understanding, that possibility would seem to be eliminated.
However, just for completenes’ sake: Does Cubase have any external audio devices defined in your setup?
And since this seems to be a rather rare outlier thing: Is there any chance that there’s a MIDI controller sending spurious messages? This should also not affect off-line rendering, but it seems we’re chasing an outlier type of bug, so even checking things that shouldn’t be possible may be a reasonable thing to do.
As one other experiment to try: Maybe run an export, that creates multiple output audio tracks during the same export run:
And then check if the thump is also present in one of the channels that’s sending to the final mix channel.
Also one more question: What’s the audio file format of the export - is it WAV or something else?
Just a thought… I have looked more closely at the thump.wav content and I get these :
(I can’t see how a power problem could affect an offline mix…)
Export format - WAV 24-bit. Tracking was, and is, clean. Nothing nasty in the recorded audio. I’ve deleted my external FX devices.
Anyway, this morning I seem to have narrowed the problem down consistently to the lead vocal track. I looped part of the song, with the vocal Group peaking at -5.2dBFS consistently. After a while I heard the ‘thump’ - and now the Group showed it had peaked at 0.7dBFS. I did this a few times and caught it a couple of times over a 10-minute period.
I removed all plug-ins and sends - still caught a thump. I processed the audio to remove any DC offset - still thumped.
I exported a mix and also took the vocal as a separate file. It’s a shame that Cubase renders each as a separate pass. The result: mix file with a thump - vocal Group output clean. Repeated this process three times with same result each time.
Fourth time - got it! Thump in vocal group export file (nowhere near the thump in the mix file - its always randomly placed):
Interesting that this time the thump wave only goes positive.
I have to move on. I’ve had this problem with the last three of the album mixes, since installing 13.0.40. I’m doomed for now to render multiple mixes, then edit out the thumps in a separate Project file.
To me it still seems like it could be a hardware problem, especially if there is no processing being applied at all. Did you try moving the project to a different drive?
