Weird bug with Cubase and Wavelab

This happened twice, and it’s a rather annoying bug because I’m working on a project that takes several minutes to open and several to close. The first time I thought I had accidentally changed something, but it just happened again and I know I didn’t do anything I wasn’t supposed to.

The project I’m working on is 24/48. When I did a mixdown earlier and another just now, I set it to open in Wavelab Pro 12, since I got used to get the project sounding as good as possible in Cubase Pro 14 and then export a WAV to Wavelab to do the final touch, or mastering.

We all know how much of a pain in the butt it is when you’re working in a project in Cubase that is one sample rate, and then you open something else in another program, and Cubase hits you with the annoying dialog that there’s a difference in sample rate, etc, etc, if you don’t change the sample rate, it asks you if you want to convert the audio files, and so on. Terribly annoying when considering that Cubase uses ASIO, and the rest of the system uses WASAPI or whatever it’s called.

Well, it seems to me that this bug occurs when selecting that choice that sends the mixdown to Wavelab Pro once it’s rendered. Obviously this shouldn’t happen because the file I exported was the same bit and sample rate. I would expect this if I had chosen to export it as 24/96 for example, but I didn’t.

Even worse, when that annoying popup appears, I normally disregard it, and just save the project and then open it again. Well, this time it decided to convert my project to 96 Khz but keeping it at 48. Sure, this doesn’t make any sense, but what I have now is a project that plays at half speed. So this is all seriously annoying. Now I need to set the project to 96 Khz, and this is a rather large project, so not the kind of project that I would choose that sample rate for.

So it’s not the end of the world, but just to be safe, it’s better to leave that setting off and then just load the file in Wavelab Pro manually.

Even though two different driver models are at work you audio interface still has only one audio clock. That’s the reason why it cannot run two different sample rates at the same time.

Some software, like macOS, circumnavigate this by resampling everything to the same sample rate on the fly. Ie. as a user you might think you listen to 96kHz but it is 44.1kHz instead. Just an example.

Activate the resampler in WL master section. This will enable you to play back at whatever sample rate you’re device is expecting.

Fine, but you guys are missing the point. This shouldn’t be happening, period. It should happen if my Cubase project is 24/48 but in the mixdown dialog I choose 24/96, so when it’s done exporting and it opens in Wavelab, then Wavelab changes from 24/48 to 24/96.

But I was working at 24/48, and in the mixdown, it was set to the same, so this change shouldn’t be triggered.

Are you using Windows? There’s a Windows “feature” where the OS will hijack your audio settings if you open two programs at once. I lost a studio day trying to figure out what was happening when I had Live and Cubase open at the same time. Windows 10 was bumping up the sample rate, without asking or notifying me, and it caused all kinds of havoc.

Yes, Windows 11. But whatever Windows does, it shouldn’t cause Cubase to switch the project to twice the sample rate. I was working this project in 24/48 and now I’m forced to work it in 24/96, because Cubase decided to switch the tracks to 96 Khz without switching the project sample rate, so if I left it at 24/48, everything was half the speed.