how to route to bus?

[whyterabbyt]

I have drawn a picture explaining what i want to have. http://i68.tinypic.com/2wqd100.jpg or http://oi68.tinypic.com/2wqd100.jpg There is one mistake on my part the blue line from amp vst should go to aux s rever of track 7 and not track 8. and then go to aux r rever.

Doesnt really help that much, because you still dont make it clear what you're expecting from those effects; you've got some of the effects tracks drawn with two input signals and two output signals, so (like I asked before) are you expecting them to process a mix of those two inputs, and output two copies of the one processed signal, or process the two inputs completely independent from each other?

In other words, do you want your amp VST to process your bass guitar and your guitar, but send an amped-guitar-only signal to your cabinet plugin?

Because if you think that, Im afraid it wont work.

And either way, I see no need for the cab and chorus to be in send/return loops, since they're only processing one signal.

To me, it would have made more sense to draw the signal flow you want without the send/return tracks. I think you're overly fixation on send/returns and its preventing you from thinking about the signal flow properly.

[jabe]

I have drawn a picture explaining what i want to have. http://i68.tinypic.com/2wqd100.jpg or http://oi68.tinypic.com/2wqd100.jpg There is one mistake on my part the blue line from amp vst should go to aux s rever of track 7 and not track 8. and then go to aux r rever.

I've had a look at your diagram, and (I may be wrong in this summary; let me know if I am) to summarise, you want

1. The guitar to go to the amp and then the reverb, before the out/master
2. The bass to go through amp, cab, reverb, and chorus, before the out and master

It appears that you are hoping to use just one instance of each effect.

Unfortunately, the way you are hoping to route the signals means that the bass and guitar BOTH go to the amp VST first, but because you have only one instance of the amp, if it is possible to have multiple inputs, there will be only ONE output - a merged bass + guitar sound. With only one instance of the amp, you cannot have separate outputs.

The same applies with the reverb. A single instance of a reverb VST will only give you one output, assuming it will accept separate inputs.

If you wish to process the bass and guitar sounds separately, you will have to use separate instances of the plug-ins.

If you wish to minimise your use of plug-ins, it should be possible to group tracks together into a folder track, and put effects on the folder track, so that all the signals from the sub-tracks are finally sent through those effects.

If the problem is that you're concerned about the processing power of your PC, there are ways to freeze tracks, so that each one is rendered as a fully-processed audio file (until you wish to change it again), and then treated as a single audio clip with all effects included, but on playback the effects don't need to function since they've already been applied.


I'm not certain that I've totally understood what you're trying to do, but I hope this helps.

[solomute]

@jabe
Yes you have understood all correctly and thanks for clearing out that i have to use several copies of a vst and my plan in the diagram won't work. Does it also mean that when i use busses or stereo pass thrus if i send sound of several instruments to one effect vst i always get dirty sound since most vsts have only two ins, two outs and can't process signals from different tracks separately? As far as i understand the only difference from my diagram is that in my diagam signals are to be processed in series while in reality busses and pass thrus always take signal only from the first vst on a track.
Isn't there a way to overcome this like creating virtual ins and outs for the effect plugins and using different micro time intervals like irqs to process samples from different tracks at different times?

[solomute]

How to do that freezing of tracks?

[jabe]

@jabe
Yes you have understood all correctly and thanks for clearing out that i have to use several copies of a vst and my plan in the diagram won't work. Does it also mean that when i use busses or stereo pass thrus if i send sound of several instruments to one effect vst i always get dirty sound since most vsts have only two ins, two outs and can't process signals from different tracks separately? As far as i understand the only difference from my diagram is that in my diagam signals are to be processed in series while in reality busses and pass thrus always take signal only from the first vst on a track.
Isn't there a way to overcome this like creating virtual ins and outs for the effect plugins and using different micro time intervals like irqs to process samples from different tracks at different times?

I believe the answer to your first question is, yes, you will get - well, let's call it a "merged" output rather than a dirty one. But, normally, there will be one output signal from an effects plug-in. Not always, by any means, but mostly. I was a computer programmer - plug-ins are computer programs, and most plug-ins have one input (or perhaps a stereo input) and one output (or perhaps stereo output). Within the plug-in, something will be processing the incoming signal, and it'll usually only see it as one "thing" to process (it might see it as two "things" if it's stereo). Using a rack or folder tracks to make a plug-in receive two or more signals will not, in most cases, make the plug-in aware that it doesn't have two or more inputs if it's not designed to deal with multiple inputs.

I've never used send and receive aux busses; some of my earliest attempts at recording where on a Portastudio I bought in 1984. It had send and receive busses; my understanding of these is that they are a way to allow a signal to be processed by some external device added into the signal pathway. With recordings on computers, I've also never needed the send/receive busses, because I haven't needed to send the signal out of the PC.

The art of programming DAWs is something I would prefer not to get my brain sucked into! I've written programs in Visual Basic.Net that use parallel programming (or, more accurately, threading), and they make my head spin. IRQs are not something I want to think about. However, having multiple instances of plug-ins does appear to be the normal way to deal with your concerns, and is probably far less complicated than routing signals to and from the track they started on. As I say, there are a couple of ways to reduce the processor effort required if your computer starts to struggle with the load.

The two ways to reduce the load on a track are these (there may be others, perhaps someone will add them):

1. There is a Waveform plug-in called Freeze Point. This is inserted somewhere among the plug-ins on a track and causes Waveform to create an audio version containing ALL the processing preceding it. On play-back, the preceding plug-ins do nothing at all. So you can still make adjustments to plug-ins that follow the freeze point, but until you remove the freeze point, everything before it is now just an audio file. Once you're happy with a track, stick the Freeze Point at the end, and leave it there until you need to adjust your track.

2. You can fully render a track. It's like the Freeze Point option, but you do it for the whole track (perhaps simpler would be to just add the Freeze Point plug-in after all other plug-ins on the track). This is most useful if you have resource-heavy plug-ins. The way to do this is to highlight the track and choose Render Track in the Properties Panel (middle list). You can render to a separate track, or have the rendered version replace the existing track. If you rendered to a separate track, you can mute the original, so its plug-ins will all go, or you can mute the original, and its plug-ins shouldn't do anything.

There is a CPU usage display at the top right and you can see what is using all the processing resources and get clues as to which track is using too much resource and might benefit from rendering or freezing.



If you're newish and haven't seen these, there's an awful lot in them:

There is a Waveform manual, and it's currently being converted from the Tracktion 7 manual into a Waveform one. Here's the link: https://da4okk3156q95.cloudfront.net/wp ... -guide.pdf
Chapter 38 contains details of all that is new to Waveform.

There is also a Waveform-specific Quick Start guide (it's all useful information): https://da4okk3156q95.cloudfront.net/wp ... -guide.pdf

Hope this helps.

[solomute]

Jabe, you made the most informative and helpful post i have met about routing in general! Thanks for clearing things out. Everyone SHOULD read it. I have spent a lot of time on that routing with busses which i could have spent on creating music if i had figured out at once that those busses are kind of a fraudery or a joke over poor users. I admit there are cases when you would like to have parallel processing by sending signal from instument vst to an effect vst located on the same track and to another effect vst on a bus in which case the bus's vst receives dry signal from the instrument vst non-affected by the effect vst located on the instrument's vst's track. But you WON'T want to use that bus for processing 2 or more instruments since there signals will be mixed into one steam which can influence quality and perhaps panorama! If you do panning after buss send filter or pass thru send filter, the buss receive or pass thru receive filter stil gets unpanned signal since it gets always dry signal from the first vst in the filter chain and thus your stereopanoram is sure to be ruined... And not only stereo panorama - actually any subtle effect will be weakened by busses. I have noticed noticeable drop in quality after moving vsts to busses, especially for saturation plugins. They simply stop giving the noticeable effect. You may check yourself with buzvintagemaxi vst saturation plugin. So I will have to remake my configuration of the project to get rid of busses and use several instances of vsts instead. I wish we had quantum pcs
And concerning rendering I have tried selecting a clip and have chosen rendering option below with replacement or adding new track but each time i get empty audio file. The only way which works is via export - render which i use to render between In and Out with muting all tracks except the one i want to render and then i have to import the wav manually. That is not a convenient way at all and i hope that that freeze point will solve this problem. I can't render the entire track because I have several songs in the same project and it will take much time to render the entire track or perhaps i can try to render the track between In and Out, still i expect it will work the same way as with rendering the clip.

[jabe]

You're very welcome.

I'm surprised your render didn't work. I've just rendered to a separate track and it's worked (but I needed to mute the original to stop it using the plug-ins). As you say, perhaps the Freeze Point method will work best for you.