(New?) Bug with Arranger Track and (Realtime) Audio Mixdown

Cubase
,
1

Alright, here comes my bug (Cubase 11.0.20 Pro / Windows 10 Pro)

Simple arrangement with 3 ranges for the Arranger Chain.

1x A (Intro)
3x B (Main)
1x C (Outro)

Did the Audio Mixdown without Realtime Export first and noticed that in the second round of part B the sound file ended.
Did the Audio Mixdown with Realtime Export and could directly see that the “Estimated Time” did absolutely not match the expected song length and then it happend, the playback and hence the export stopped almost in the middle of the B block during the 2nd repeat. No error messages, nothing. Just stopped.

First thought the Arranger Mode would not work with Audio Mixdown but in fact it started to replay the second block but liked to stop after approx. 50% of it.
Since I do not have any older Cubase Version installed atm and don’t want to rollback to 11.0.10 (not even shure if it worked down there), wondering if anyone had ever tried Audio Export with Arranger Track?

Thx

2

This did not work like this ever, as far as I know. You have to do the step of flattening the arrangement first.

3

Sick! What’s that, Steinbergs? Will raise a ticket then. Not accepting such damanged features.
Thanks Steve for a first confirmation.

4

Apologies if you know all about this already, but you didn’t mention anything about Locators… Have you set them correctly.? Make sure you extend the length between these, to accomodate the span/length of the Arrangement chain, as if it were ‘Flattened’. This is how an Audio Mixdown has always worked for me (non-Realtime export).

For example, in your case above, if ‘A’ is one bar length, ‘B’ is two bars and ‘C’ is also two bars, your Locators should span 9 bars total length (Left Locator at start of ‘Intro’). If that is what you are doing and its still failing as you describe, then there’s a problem…

Can’t check myself right now, sorry.

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5

Oh, wow, Nice one. You got that to work, eh? I remember trying to do that and not being able to – maybe I didn’t calculate the length accurately though.

6

If you read my initial post you will notice that the Audio Mixdown contains already a little piece of the Arranger Chain. The firs repeat of the “B” part is starting and at one point (approx. 50% of it) it just stops exporting. The locators do a) not play a role by my understanding when using the Arranger Track, becuase the arranger track’s total length is anyway not in correlation with locators you’d set and b) in my case the locators are set from bar 1 to the end of the content of the song structure. Where the export stops does not correlate with the total length (bars or time) of the broken export. So the locators range is out of play here.
I will create a demo project and post a link to download, if you are interested.

7

I read it quite carefully; what mostly struck me, was no mention of Locator settings throughout

And this is what alerted me to the possibility of incorrectly set Locators; hence my response, hoping to be helpful.

I used to think this too; but I experimented and found that for (unflattened Arranger Track) Audio Mixdown, they DO play a role, just as I described. - i.e. the mixdown has to account for the lengths of all the repeats in the chain. The Locators are the only mechanism Cubase uses to calculate/set that duration correctly. Its like adding enough length for a reverb tail to play out nicely

Sorry, but its my belief this will never work for you.

You’d think; but you might be surprised.

In the meantime, please humour me (so I can eliminate myself going slightly mad on all this.!) and as an experiment, arbitrarily stretch the Right Locator say, 30secs longer than the end of your song structure and re-do your Audio Mixdown.

I can only apologise if I’m wasting your time with all this, and it fails to produce any different outcome - maybe I am completely wrong and you have found an actual ‘bug’ here somewhere.!

Of course, as @steve has said above, the ‘recommended’ way of obtaining a mix of an Arranger Chain is to run a ‘Flatten Chain’ process first (then do your audio mixdown - noting that the Locators would need to encompass this new, full length of song).

However, in the past, I have found my method does work… (which eliminates a whole, big stage in the workflow, allowing ease of further ‘tweaking’ before final commitment).

In fact, thinking about it, you could temporarily do a ‘Flatten chain’ first to gauge what eventual length your song turns out to be; then perform an ‘Undo’ and now make sure the Locators span this new duration on your unflattened Arranger Chain structure.

And yes, I’d happily try out a demo project from you.! Though I am away from the music machine til next week.

EDIT:- Phew.! I see someone else agrees with me… :wink:Cubase 11.0.20 maintenance update - #50 by Musicmind

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8

I have been working with Cubase using the arranger track on several musicals where I create backing tracks. It’s true it works like this:
Create the arrangement in the Arranger. look in the Duration column for the last arrange block and place the right locator AFTER this point. Activate the arranger - playing the arrange - and bounce the project.
Create a dummy at the end of the arrangement chain on 8 bars!!

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@Puma0382 & @Musicmind

Thanks guys for chiming in and especially Puma for the detailed feedback and information.
Hontestly, I was sure that my locator length wasn’t in correlation to the duration of the incomplete mixdown, but as you both now mentioned it might be the case I have to revisit it and check indeed the length of my final Arranger Chain. Perhaps the locator was at one point changed by myself and hence is now reflecting the portion of exported audio in the mixdown. Quite interesting if that’s really the bummer. Then it’ll be great if either in the Mixdown dialog the choice could be made to something like “Export length follows Arranger Chain” or it automatically detects the active Arranger Track and sets the export length to it.
I will report back if I could make any progress and also found a solution by using your approach.
If that’ll make it, Steinberg must have known it. Cubase is still not a Live DAW, so it should have been changed (fixed) long time ago, imho.

Again thanks for the help. I’ll share my results here soon.

10

No problem - I hope it turns out this is something of an explanation for you or anyone else interested… :wink:

And of course, when you say…

…you’re completely right.! If you run a forum search, you’ll see this exactly has been requested before, many times, over many years already… I’ve written on the topic a good deal myself in the past; there’s lots wrong with the Arranger Track mechanism/behaviour that could be improved…

However, ‘waiting for updates to appear’ frustrations are over for me - that just amounts to wishing your life away. One (DAW) solution isn’t enough these days… :wink:

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