sondod Posted April 14, 2008 Share Posted April 14, 2008 Surely I'm not the only one that runs into the painful pattern of finding tracks floating out of sync as plugins (usually of the third party variety) and busing is introduced. It gets particularly complicated when the track count starts increasing. You adjust the delay here only to find out it pushes the _______ out of sync. So you adjust that delay and _________ starts slipping. If you're lucky you find a combination that ends up working perfectly. If not though then what? Been working on a mix for about a week and am close to saying its not going to work this way. I'm thinking of bouncing all the tracks to audio with their plugin's either individually or as stems. Any and all suggestions in this realm would be greatly appreciated. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ashermusic Posted April 14, 2008 Share Posted April 14, 2008 Surely I'm not the only one that runs into the painful pattern of finding tracks floating out of sync as plugins (usually of the third party variety) and busing is introduced. It gets particularly complicated when the track count starts increasing. You adjust the delay here only to find out it pushes the _______ out of sync. So you adjust that delay and _________ starts slipping. If you're lucky you find a combination that ends up working perfectly. If not though then what? Been working on a mix for about a week and am close to saying its not going to work this way. I'm thinking of bouncing all the tracks to audio with their plugin's either individually or as stems. Any and all suggestions in this realm would be greatly appreciated. I am firmly in the "bounce all tracks to audio to mix" camp. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sondod Posted April 14, 2008 Author Share Posted April 14, 2008 But what about bus effects and automated effects. I never know how to handle these post effects properly. And are you doing stems or individual tracks? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ski Posted April 14, 2008 Share Posted April 14, 2008 Can you be more specific about which plugs you're using that are causing problems? Also, you say that you're adjusting delay here and there... are you talking about the track delay parameter? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sondod Posted April 14, 2008 Author Share Posted April 14, 2008 My main culprit would be the Liquid Mix, but i can start running into problems as soon as I start introducing bussing, whether its bussing the drum kit and adding effects especially if there are Aux effects being sent from the tracks. And yes I'm talking about the track delay parameter and - (neg) delay to compensate. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sondod Posted April 14, 2008 Author Share Posted April 14, 2008 The track has 64 tracks and 12 busses (5 bus groups, 7 effects busses). Should I be bouncing the individual tracks and sending them to the bus groups as pure audio. Bouncing the bus groups. And on the effects busses I'm most concerned because of the ammount of automation going to those. Should i just bounce those and mix them in as audio? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fader8 Posted April 14, 2008 Share Posted April 14, 2008 Hi sondod, Yes, I've had peculiar instances where tracks that should be in sync somehow no longer are. It's a rare occurence and I can never attribute it to anything in particular, but, it happens on projects started in LP7 more often, always 3rd party plug-ins, always when there's a lot of routing going on, and usually if instrument tracks are involved.. My hunch is that under certain conditions some plugs misreport their latency to the PDC system, but that's just a guess. It's a real brain teaser to try and figure out the problem plug as Logic has two PDC systems, one that plays audio and instrument tracks in advance to compensate for the worst case latency track, and another that adds delay to compensate for the wost case latency path for the aux and output channel audio. When things start getting complex, it can all be a bit numbing. My brain has ground to a halt on a couple of occassions thinking about this stuff. Do you have any plug-ins on bus objects themselves as opposed to aux objects? Are any tracks assigned to outputs, or is everything going to a sub? Are you using any sends on your aux channels? Is it all audio "(streamed file") tracks or are there some instrument tracks too? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Musicianista Posted April 14, 2008 Share Posted April 14, 2008 Should i just bounce those and mix them in as audio? Definitely. Life's too short to be chasing the sync train... Freeze tracks, bounce the Liquid Mix stuff. Anything to glue the intended feel and groove together. At some point we must remind ourselves that adjacent tracks on physical tape was the only way to keep sync static and since we drifted away from tape our only form of absolute sync drifted away too. Firewire busses and plug in delays etc mean that complex mixes are juggling enormous amounts of data and need enormous amounts of data flow. Audio doesn't anymore. Tracking everything and removing as many "on the fly" calculations that you can will give you a much more reliable experience at the helm of a complex mix than trying to constantly juggle the push and pull of processor cycles etc. Arguing that the software should be able to keep all these balls in the air is unrealistic. No matter how robust any software is someone will always push it to the wall. In the analog days we used words like "print" to tape or "commit" to tape. This was the point where the track or tracks we were working up had reached a point were we should move on and track the remaining production ideas. The difference now is that it is infinitely easier to "unfreeze" a track and tweak it down the line. One at a time... Good luck and happy sonic trails! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sondod Posted April 14, 2008 Author Share Posted April 14, 2008 it happens on projects started in LP7 more often You know what I think this here may just be the key. I just realized this song goes back to LP7. So bouncing to audio it will be. Starting back in tomorrow... may be back here with some ?'s. Still wondering about automated bus effects if anyone wants to chime in. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Randall Voth Posted April 15, 2008 Share Posted April 15, 2008 Something like this just happened to me yesterday. I opened up a one minute, 5 instrument "idea" project from LP7.2 into LP8.0.1 and worked on it for a couple hours, adding a few sections so it was about 4 minutes long. I recorded a region on a particular track and went back to the beginning to listen... It sounded terrible. A bit of scouting through backups and it turned out all the regions on that track (EXS24 with logic effects) had moved over, delayed, by an 1/8 note. (The MIDI data, not the regions had moved.) There were a couple of third party instruments in the project, but the one with the problem was all Logic. Moved them back and it sounded fine. Not a nice bug if the timing has to be perfect. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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