small issue with sidechain compression & bouncing

[angelbbgrrl420]

hi everyone. sometimes in my bounces i notice that the first hit of something sounds badly compressed, while the rest of the track sounds great. i totally understand this could have something to do with the knee, attack, and release settings. i understand what "auto" does and im pretty familiar with each compressor in logic and how they operate. its just some bounces, sometimes.

 

i started to think it could have to do with the fact that sometimes i have tons and tons of plugins on stuff when i bounce. lots of MIDI events and automations. often im bouncing just to listen to in my car or on my phone before i consolidate and simplify.

 

or maybe sometimes i use way too much system resources when i bounce. perhaps thats making it so the bounce cant happen properly.

 

i have my bounce type set to real-time. i read somewhere a while back that was highly recommended, but i dont remember why.

[Eriksimon]

Myth. Generally, bouncing offline is more consistent and more reliable than bouncing realtime.

Only if you have external hardware synths do you need to bounce realtime, although even then I would advice to bounce the hardware synth track to an audio track first, then mute the original, and then bounce offline. Realtime bouncing can deliver compromised results, especially with projects that are occasionally or regularly overloading. Hint: if the offline bounce takes longer than the duration of the song, then realtime bouncing would have failed. Offline bouncing tends to be much more consistent, and it can't overload. So I don't know where you read that realtime is better, I can tell you that it isn't. Offline everytime, unless you have to, for whatever reasion (but you actually never have to, if you bounce external MIDI tracks to audio first).

[angelbbgrrl420]

i guess it is possible that i am mistaken and 180'd the theory about offline/real-time in my head. either way, im bouncing in real time almost always.

 

i do use external hardware midi controllers, but they arent synths. i just use them with the AU synths. is this what you mean?

 

i almost always bounce these software instrument tracks to an audio track before i bounce the final version(s). if you think that my not bouncing down these tracks is the reason why i am having this problem, thats something im willing to deal with just for the demos. i tweak songs almost every day and bring them with me to work to preview, so bouncing down every MIDI track to audio before bouncing the whole project would be nuts.

 

really im just trying to avoid having to deal with this when im finished with everything. but by then, since i will have bounced everything to audio tracks, i hopefully wont have that problem. ive tried re-creating the problem but i never know when and where in the song its gonna happen until i listen back to the bounced audio.

[angelbbgrrl420]

btw, real-time has never taken longer than offline for me. the offline bounces happen surprisingly fast, depending on what else i have going on my computer.