I’m running into a recurring issue when using Render Titles in the Audio Montage, and I’m hoping someone can shed some light on whether this is a known bug or if there’s a setting I’m missing.
My workflow:
I process raw mixes in a dedicated processing montage, unedited, spaced 30 seconds apart, and use Render Titles to create a new montage from the results. This gives me clean, rendered files with 2 second spacing, and I handle all editing, fades and spacing in that second montage. I prefer this over Render Montage since it makes replacing individual tracks much easier without having to re-render the entire project, plus it’s 10 times quicker now with multi-core rendering.
The problem:
Sometimes the rendered output from Render Titles has a strange fade-in at the start of each title, almost as if the plugins aren’t warming up correctly before rendering begins. This happens on every song in the montage.
I’ve tried:
Different plugin warm-up settings
Enabling Reset Plugins before Rendering
The only thing that has any effect is setting plugin warm-up to at least 800ms, turning it off makes things considerably worse. None of the other settings seem to resolve the artifact.
No clip processing was used, only track and output processing.
Attaching screenshots showing the 5 second fade-in artifact on every title in the affected project. The top track is using Render Titles and the bottom is using Render Montage.
Side note / feature request:
When using Render Titles, Create new montage from result, metadata like CD-text and custom meta doesn’t carry over the way it does with Render Montage. Would love to see that addressed at some point, but that’s a separate issue from the rendering artifact above.
Usually a 3rd party plugin issue. I’ve seen it from a variety of 3rd party plugins including DMG which makes great plugins. They were able to fix the issue after it was reported to them.
Also, generally speaking, it’s a MAJOR reason why I consider it best practice to render the full montage as one continuous file first as cold starts and hard stops with a full CPU heavy plugin chain (or even a light CPU plugin chain with buggy plugins) is asking for an issue of some kind.
Yes, totally repeatable on my end. I’ll try to troubleshoot when I can, though it’s tough to carve out the time running a busy operation, I’d like to get to the bottom of this too.
Like Justin said, it’ll probably trace back to a specific 3rd party plugin or an unlucky combo of things.
Agreed that rendering the whole montage is best practice, but I still prefer my workflow, even if it’s a bit nerve wracking!
As a reference point, I reopened the same session and tried rendering “all titles” and “whole montage” again, with the same result: rendering titles produced a roughly 5 sec fade-in, while the montage render was clean.
I then disengaged all track plugins and rendered again, no issues. So I re-engaged plugins 2–3 at a time, and the fade-in didn’t come back, even once every plugin was re-engaged.
I’ll keep digging, but so far it seems like disabling (not bypassing) and re-enabling the plugin chain, in no particular order, is what fixes it.
Hey, found something interesting with this session.
The original session opens with the same processing glitch every time.
The fix (100% reproducible): disable and re-enable any single plugin in the chain, not bypass. That’s it. The whole thing clears instantly.
The problem isn’t a specific plugin, it’s how WaveLab recalculates internal state in the background. Toggling anything resets that calculation and clears the error. Happens on load every time, fixed every time.
Happy to send you the session file if you want to dig into it for debugging.
Yes, I tried this in my original troubleshoot. I just tried it again and got the same result. Using “Reset Plug-ins before rendering” does NOT fix this.
@PG1 - There is not a specific plugin that I can trace this to. Disabling and Enabling ANY one of the plugins I’m using in this processing chain (Track only in this case) fixes the issue 100% of the time. Loading up the original session always has the same bug present.
However, they must be. Because I have tried here with 4 plugins, Steinberg and Fabfilter, and I cannot reproduce your problem.
Therefore, I think you should continue trying to find the plugin(s) at the origin of the problem. For this, try with 1 plugin. Then with 2, etc.
Thanks PG1, really appreciate you taking the time to test this on your end!
I get what you mean about narrowing it down, adding the first plugin, then the second and so on until it shows up. Makes total sense, I just don’t have the time to sit and bisect it right now.
To be clear, in this particular session the bug is completely consistent, and so is the fix: disabling any plugin in the chain makes WaveLab correct itself every time. That’s what makes it tricky to pin on one specific plugin, there’s no single culprit since removing any of them resolves it. And it’s not just me, I’ve had it happen several times and apparently Justin has run into it as well, so if it is plugin related it looks more like some interaction than one bad plugin.
So I’ll leave it here for now and report back if I happen to stumble on it again in the future.
The fix (100% reproducible): disable and re-enable any single plugin in the chain, not bypass. That’s it. The whole thing clears instantly.
