N12 stops outputting drums on mixdown. Argghh!

This is a weird one that stressed me out for three hours. I produced a song on a new artist. I normally check every part of a mix but I must have been in a hurry and only checked the first half. Big mistake. Halfway thru the song the drums drop out. I would have had to do that myself. So I opened up the song file and it plays fine all the way thru. I rendered a mix and EEEK! The same thing happened but randomly. The snare dropped in and out after the first chorus. Drums stopped completely after the bridge. I have a master drum sub that I route all the drums to so I can bring all of them up or down easily when mixing. First thing I do is route the drums directly to the TRACK out. Nope, same issue. Then I tried mixing in sections and figured I’d just edit the pieces together. Nope, drums still dropping in and out. All other instruments rendering fine. Everything plays fine top to bottom, they’re just not rendering correctly. After three hours of trying everything I can think of like removing any plugins, making sure there’s no ghost automation anywhere, etc. I decide to close Nuendo 12 and open the song in Cubase 12. Where it plays and renders perfectly the first time. WTF??? Does this mean my install of N12 has somehow gotten corrupted? I’m scared to work in Nuendo until I get this resolved. Any and all ideas will be greatly appreciated.

Ted Perlman

If you reboot and reopen in Nuendo, (after you’re done, and there is no deadline, thus no stress), does it play correctly?

That is sure weird.

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Hahaha. Exactly!!! No other way to describe it. Thank goodness for two programs!!

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It “could” become the alt version… I mean, if it was only in the bridge.

LOL.

That would have been easy to fix. This was bizarre. Snare would drop out in different places each time I rendered. But snare played perfectly when listening. All four snares!! The drums would drop out in different places each time on the mix. But playback was always perfect.

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Are these MIDI triggered, or just audio that would refuse to play consistently?

If only audio, were they going out to a group to be processed by the same plugins?

If MIDI, is the plugin ok, or has it given you issues on other sessions?

Here’s where it gets really weird: the exact same mix with everything exactly the same played (like in Nuendo) perfectly and rendered perfectly. Like things normally do in Nuendo. So it can’t be any of my plugins, etc.
Does this mean my install of Nuendo is corrupt? Oh yeah, this is the ONLY song this has ever happened on. Corrupt song? But it shouldn’t behave properly in Cubase then.

Arrrghhh! So confusing!!!

Same questions.

Yes to all of those questions. Audio samples, VST’s, midi, all of it. Didn’t matter about plugins or routing. As if a ghost hand pulled down the individual volumes of all the drums and percussion instruments. That’s the only way this could have possibly happened.

Funny side effect: The artist thought I did it on purpose! “What a great and cool effect!” she told me. I sent her the proper mix (rendered in Cubase) but she’s gonna put that out as a “Full Radio Remix” because everybody loves my “Nuendo dropped out all the drums” mix. Ugh!! Go figure!

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Typically, when I mix, I render every single thing into an audio file. Avoiding the messiness of weird stuff happening. Or running out of CPU power during the mixing stage.
It’s kind of a standard, created by us at NARAS.

Maybe try rendering each MIDI or virtual instrument into an audio file before mixing next time? That should cut down on this type of mystery dropout situation.

Cheers.

Yes, that’s a great work mode. I always render all online samples from streaming sample libraries because I’ve gotten burned by those before. But my “problem” song has both audio samples, midi VST’s, and drum samples. They all stopped after the bridge but the snare would drop in and out at the first chorus. How is that even possible? I would have had to have automated that and it wouldn’t be arbitrary. And…it wouldn’t render correctly in Cubase but not Nuendo. I reinstalled Nuendo but it didn’t help. Like I mentioned, I don’t trust Nuendo anymore. Of course, until I have an issue with Cubase. Then I’m SOL.

Those tracks needed to be rendered into one audio file per track before mixing. Well, at least you know this… maybe you did not have the time to get that done this time?

Cheers.

My install of Nuendo is definitely whack. I just tried to simply bounce some audio and the resulting wav file was empty. Nothing there. Went back to Cubase and bounce audio worked perfectly, as it should. I think I need to uninstall Nuendo and start again.

Wow. All audio was routed correctly to the main output buss?

Can you send the Nuendo session? I don’t need any audio. just want to see your settings.

I took a mix from Cubase and ran it in Nuendo. Rendered okay but sounded terrible. Ran it off in Cubase and it sounded perfect. (as perfect as I can get hahaha). This is after I completely uninstalled Nuendo 12 and then reinstalled it. It had stopped being able to bounce audio. Just made a blank file. Something is terribly wrong with Nuendo on my system. But thank goodness Cubase is working perfectly. I can’t undertstand how this happened out of nowhere.