I spent the past two days learning about warping and the audio editor while working on a simple guitar single note melody line.
I just figured out that rendering a track with Elastique Pro messes up the timing so much that it isn’t worth using the algorithm.
I also figured out that rendering with “Standard SOLO” doesn’t sound good enough to bother.
Then I figured out that the problem with Elastique was recognized and acknowledged as far back as Cubase 6.0.
It seems as if the warp feature in Cubase isn’t ready to be useful while in the two DAWs that I have experience with, the warping has been working well for a decade or more.
This is very disappointing news for a Cubase newbie to learn.
I thought I had a work around; I routed an analog output to an input and recorded the guitar melody in real time thinking that it would preserve the timing and I could enjoy the sound quality of elastique pro.
What I learned is that the timing of the actual playback drifts as well. By measure 16 I can see a slight drift and by measure 105 at the end of the tune the notes have drifted back the equivalent of a dotted 1/16th note.
They don’t just drift back consistently either, some notes move back closer to the correct timing. There is a sort of ebb and flow with timing but a general tendency to drift towards being late.
FWIW, I have already checked my round trip latency and am using a record offset that lets me run 5 minutes of a snare drum sample playback at sample accuracy with round trip analog out to analog in sync testing.
In other words Elastique Pro as implemented in Cubase 7.5.3 seems useless if the goal is to use it to correct small timing adjustments.
This kind of makes me think that Cubase’s warp feature is not going to work for the very basic digital audio workstation task of correcting timing in a way that makes the corrections seem to have never happened.
The original guitar part was closer to the target timing than the results of the drift are.
This morning I was thinking that Cubase seemed likely to become my favorite DAW. Now it just seems like another DAW with skeletons in it’s closet.
It was written somewhere (by a mod) that some important architectural changes need to happen within Cubase as well as discussions/negotiation with the folk at Z-Plane, in order to properly address these shortcomings. It is disappointing that these issues have been there for so long.
However, having said that, what I have done is to use the STANDARD SOLO or the MIX algo on shorter segments that needed work; can bring acceptable results (for me). Or, for things like solo acoustic guitar (and again with shorter passages only) I’ve used the ‘Plucked’ algo.
Make a copy of your original take; examine closely and cut up into sections that absolutely need working on (try and leave the bulk of your playing intact - better for the feel…!). Bounce out those cut up sections (so they become new files in their own right) then do your warping etc…
It might help…
I see Elastique v3 is released (which has already made it into Reaper).
Fingers crossed for the upcoming 7.5.40 maintenance update. The above two threads I quoted are in the ‘Collected Issues’ page after all…
It was about a year ago I think that I wrote to zplane about this as Ive ran out of options and nobody at SB paid attention. Zplane was surprised it had still been broken on SB’s side.It took a random user from another country to have two local companies exchange one sentence worth of info (about a feature that has been broken for many years).
This is THE single most important thing to fix in cubase in my opinion. This problem is in cubase 6.5 to wich I use, and I won’t upgrade until it’s fixed!