Wavelab Montage clips and UAD DSP

Hi,

I am trying to use UAD plugins as clip effects. My UAD DSP meter seems to accumulate the total DSP required to playback every plugin on every clip within the montage. If I play a clip with no UAD effects then the DSP meter still remains high. I read somewhere that Wavelab should dynamically allocate UAD DSP depending on what is required to play back the current clip only. Is this right? If not then mastering a 12 track album with 3-4 UAD DSP intensive plugins on each clip is impossible and I’m forced to render each track separately.

I’m on Mac 10.10.4.

Thanks.

wavelab only process the plugins of the active clip, but the plugins of the other clips need to be pre-allocated all time.

Electrodaddy, I think your question has been asked before, but I can’t find it. I think you have a couple of options:

  1. Buy more UAD DSP
  2. Split your album into 2 or 3 montages
  3. Turn your clips into Superclips. That will free UAD DSP because each Superclip will internally render after making plugin adjustments.
  4. Try toggling the “reset plugins” prefs in Audio Montage Preferences (can’t remember if that makes a difference).
  5. Close and reopen the montage before rendering (also can’t remember if different).

I’m pretty sure that other programs that allow Clip plugins deal with the UAD DSP the same way as Wavelab, but maybe not. Maybe try the same thing in Reaper or Samplitude and see what you get.

Yeah, if i had 2-3 power hungry UAD plugins on each song then I would need one almightily UAD rig just to play back one track at a time.

Superclips definitely works well and keeps everything together nicely in one montage. The downside is that I have to do a lengthy render (UAD Manley Passive slows it right down) in order to move on to the next track. Being able to tweak each track in real time before rendering down all tracks at the end isn’t possible which is my ideal goal.

An alternative workaround is to have a montage for each track. As long as the plugins are at clip or track level then you can have as many montages open as you like without bumping up the UAD DSP. All plugins are kept open and you can flip between the tracks tweaking in real time until you’re happy. No rendering required. At the end you then have to render each track individually and create another mortgage to collate them all together. Obviously its not as neat and tidy as the first option.

Is it not possible to introduce a hybrid solution using the two? A montage within a montage which disables clip plugins when not in use?

I know for Audio Units versions, there is a setting in the UAD control panel to release the DSP usage when a plugin is bypassed. I’m guessing that VST by nature doesn’t allow this or it’d also be an option which would only be helpful if Wavelab had plugin automation in your situation.

I’ve used the AU release on bypass feature a few times because I previously used Logic Pro X to play audio into my analog chain. Sometimes on albums with a lot of songs, I’d max out my UAD DSP usage because each song was on it’s own audio track, but if I went and automated the CPU hungry UAD plugins to bypass when not in use, I could play the entire Logic session without maxing out the UAD card when it otherwise would have if all inserted UAD plugins were using DSP at one time.

Pro Tools now has dynamic plugin processing which I think does a similar thing. If the plugin isn’t passing audio, it shuts down. I haven’t analyzed it very close though, or with UAD.

Electrodaddy, I have to say I was wrong about at least one of the other programs. I tried this on the same Wavelab UAD Windows computer in Reaper and it acts as you’ve requested - an album’s worth of clips on one track of one Reaper session, and playing any one clip only uses the UAD DSP needed by the UAD plugin(s) on that one clip. So Reaper does as you’d like, and I think you have a legitimate request in asking the same of Wavelab.

From what I can tell, the only problem in Wavelab is during Play. That’s when it’s using all of the UAD DSP in the whole montage. During render of all of the clips in the montage, it’s only using the DSP needed by the clip currently being rendered (if you create CD markers and render Regions/Tracks as I do, at least on my system with my settings).

I guess it could be said that this will be solved by automation in Version 9, but I’d much rather continue to use straight clip plugins over automation, so I agree with you that this should be worked into Wavelab.

Thanks for the info bob99. Very interesting. Any thoughts on this PG? An interim solution would be the ability to bypass all plugins on a clip. Flicking between clips wouldn’t be instant but doable. In other DAWS this would decrease the UAD DSP. In Wavelab it stays the same.

PG, I’d like to ask again if this can please be made an option for Play. Reaper uses only the currently playing clip to add to the UAD DSP usage, and it can do it across clip splices without problem. When working on an album with UAD clip plugins (especially at 96KHz, and even more so at 192KHz now, which becomes impossible if the entire montage is pre-allocated), it makes a huge difference in whether an album can even be worked on in a single montage.

Renders in Wavelab are perfect when rendering Regions/CD Tracks with UAD clip plugins, because only the currently rendering clip adds to the UAD DSP. I can see that in the UAD control panel as Wavelab renders. I’d like to ask that that same behavior be applied as an option for Play.

Even after automation is added, I’d still like to have the flexibility to use UAD clip plugin chains as we have, in the most DSP efficient way possible, as Reaper has accomplished with their clip plugins.

Renders in Wavelab are perfect when rendering Regions/CD Tracks with UAD clip plugins, because only the currently rendering clip adds to the UAD DSP. I can see that in the UAD control panel as Wavelab renders. I’d like to ask that that same behavior be applied as an option for Play.

There is strictly no difference with playback and rendering. WaveLab behaves the same.

This being said, I will consider adding an option (both for playback and rendering, as this is the same procedure).

Philippe

I think there is a communication or misunderstanding here. I think the request is this:

Lets say you have 10 clips in a montage and you want to use a UAD plugin that uses 25% of your total UAD DSP.

Because of how Wavelab (or maybe it’s a VST limitation) handles this, only 4 instances of that UAD plugin are allowed in a montage before the UAD DSP meter hits 100%, even if the UAD instances are on 4 difference clips and will never be playing at the same time.

The argument is that UAD DSP usage should only be happening and visible on the UAD DP meter if a clip using that UAD plugin is being played live. If a UAD plugin is on another clip in the montage and not currently being played, it should release that DSP usage so you do not max out your DSP usage so easily.

Right now, if you have 4 audio clips on a montage, and insert a UAD plugin that uses 25% of the UAD DSP on each clip, this will max out the UAD card for playback purpose. However, when I render the montage to WAV files based on “CD Tracks”, the UAD DSP meter only reads the real-time UAD usage. So there is a difference.

Now, if I render a DDP, the UAD meter reads like it does when you playback, it reads at the highest level of UAD usage assuming all UAD are active at the exact same time.

I see how this could be tricky because say that you decide later to overlap two clips with UAD plugins, now you might exceed the UAD DSP limit.

Audio Units version of UAD has a mode that supports releasing unused DSP when a UAD plugin is not being used in a project. I don’t know if it’s possible to do the same with VST2 unless you are saying that Reaper can do this with UAD VST2. As we all know, there is no UAD VST3 and no sign of it to come.

Thanks Philippe. Jperkinski explained it better than I can, but basically there is a difference when rendering “Regions/CD Tracks” vs Playback in the Montage if UAD are used as clip plugins, a huge difference if you’re comparing a 12 song UAD dsp load vs a 1 song UAD dsp load.

If I was rendering “Whole Montage” there would be no difference as you say (Playback would load, say UAD 95%, and render would load 95%), but the way Wavelab is working with UAD now, the Wavelab “Regions/CD Tracks” renders only use the UAD dsp of the current clip or region being rendered. So there’s a huge difference. If the total montage exceeds UAD 100%, I can’t play anything in the montage, but I can probably render the whole montage as Regions/CD Tracks because the UAD Control Panel is only going to be seeing maybe 10% at any one time during the render.

There are no settings in Wavelab or Reaper or UAD that change the way this works (that I can find). Reaper splits up the UAD DSP for both Playback and Regions Renders. Wavelab only splits up the UAD DSP for Regions Renders. For Playback Wavelab pre-loads all of the UAD plugins in the Montage, which can oftentimes exceed 100% for a large high rate montage.

Yes yes yes. This would make such a massive difference to my work flow and would save me hours of rendering time every week. If I could only have one new feature request then this would be it.

PG, after recently finding that in Wavelab, Native Clip plugins are (apparently) not additive to DSP in Play, but UAD Clip plugins are additive to DSP in Play, does that mean the UAD Play problem can not be easily fixed in a future version of Wavelab? UAD doesn’t do that in Reaper, but I don’t know what they’ve done in Reaper to make it that way, and I wondered if you have UAD gear to test with?

As I’ve said, UAD Clip plugins are not additive to DSP when rendered as regions/tracks in Wavelab, so I thought it might be relatively easy to apply the same thing to UAD Clip in Play, but now I’m not sure. Do you know if this can be changed in Wavelab, or does UAD need to be asked why it’s different in Wavelab vs Reaper?

Already have an Octo, so it doesn’t make sense to just buy more UAD DSP. With large complex high rate (96 and 192k) montages, have already run out of UAD DSP at times, and double sample rate doubles the DSP.

The difference with UAD and the rest, is that as soon as you activate a UAD plugin, it uses DSP power, even if you don’t send it samples.
I have started to experiment with dynamic plugin switching. I don’t know yet the outcome.

This is great news. Fingers crossed there is a solution.

Thanks PG. In case I’ve been unclear at all in how I’ve described things,

With UAD plugins on Clips:
Regions/CD Tracks renders are great as they are (minimal DSP use).
Play is not great (maximal additive DSP use).

Sorry, one last thing. I’ve just tried render to a single file, (“whole montage” type render) in a session with many UAD clip plugins in Reap*r, and found it doesn’t even use 100% dsp for that.

It uses minimal DSP incrementally (current render clip dsp only) just like the “regions/tracks” type render. So maybe that’s dynamic plugin switching being used (?)

Wavelab uses “all uad plugins in montage” uad dsp for a “whole montage single file” render.

hi
I am late in this , just wanted to know if it has been “fixed” or solved in some way ?
there is some UAD plug that I like when I do some master … and of course I am getting the some problem as above :slight_smile:
I am 12core UAD (8core+4 core)
thanks !