Rendered file goes mute after some time whereas playback works

[scotofil]

I'm desperate: I have a medium size project (80-90 tracks) in W11.5.18 x64 Free in Win10 with partial, yet significant processing on it (10-20 tracks have 2-8, mostly 3rd party plugins), and I tried to render it. No matter what I do, the render goes mute around 1:36, whereas the playback in the DAW works just fine even after this magic time instant...

What I've tried already during troubleshooting without any step forward:

• There's nothing specific in the project at this time (no clips, transients, automation, nothing starts or stops around 1:36)

• 1:36 is not some "meaningful" fraction of the song's length

• I unfroze all frozen tracks

• There's no automation on the master (even according to the "Active automation curves in Edit", I certainly did not create any master automation intentionally), and I even tried with disabling "Read automation"

• The only plugin on the master is HOFA's project time; I'm quite positive that shouldn't mess things up

• I disabled ALL plugins in the project except the native "Volume & pan", the "Meter" and "Aux send/receive" plugins.

What else could I check?

[Watchful]

Do you have an OUT marker set at 1:36, up at the top? If I recall, that may be telling Waveform to "stop rendering" at that point.

As a backup, consider a bounce track.

1. Create a track called Master.
2. Create a track called Bounce.
3. Change the audio INPUT on Bounce to "Master."
4. Mute Bounce.
5. Arm Bounce for recording.
6. Change the OUTPUT of all live tracks to "Master."
7. Press record.

This will route all tracks to the "Master" track, which Bounce dutifully records. I use this pretty much all the time now to bypass potential issues with the Master Bus.

You'll find the bounced track in your project's Recorded Items folder when done.

EDIT: As a final thought, have you tried disabling the plugin in your Master bus? Just to check?

[scotofil]

Do you have an OUT marker set at 1:36, up at the top? If I recall, that may be telling Waveform to "stop rendering" at that point.

As a backup, consider a bounce track.
[...]
EDIT: As a final thought, have you tried disabling the plugin in your Master bus? Just to check?

Thanks a lot for the recommendations! Unfortunately though:

I do not have the in & out markers set at around 1:36 (I also moved them a lot during troubleshooting), and rendering stops at the out marker only if "Render Only Marked Region" is ticked, which is not the case for me.

I tried disabling the plugin on the master bus, no difference unfortunately.

I also tried the bounce track, and whereas it kinda does the job, it wouldn't really work for this project, because with this amount of tracks and processing, freezing is vital for me, and since Tracktion works in a way that it's not possible to freeze submixes or tracks if they are channeled to a different track, only the target track can be frozen, I would need to freeze the master or bounce tracks which is practically freezing the entire project, which of course doesn't make sense (and since there's apparently no easy way to change the output of multiple tracks at once, I'd need to click through all ~90 tracks one-by-one changing the output whenever I wish to render, which is not practical at all). Additionally there's the minor problem that the project is 48 kHz 24 bit and I'd need to render to 44.1 kHz 16 bit, which then requires a second conversion which is also doable but rather inconvenient.

So all recommendations would be still appreciated!

[scotofil]

While having a closer look to the rendering process, I can see that even after the rendered signal flatlines in the render window, the meters in the project keep moving. Not quite sure yet what (if anything) to make out of this, but if there's some means to automate track routing, did I perhaps mistype something for that?

Or is it perhaps possible that I left some misconfigured modifier in place somewhere? I can't see any track level modifiers, and in the only rack where I was playing with it, it appears to be correctly removed as well; is it perhaps possible to list them somehow similarly to the active automations?

[TWfriend]

Could you provide a screenshot or two (perhaps of the rendering popup box that appears)? This could help allow more eyes to search for clues as to how to solve this problem. Try rendering at 1x speed and see if that works.

[Watchful]

Well, I am also starting to suspect there's some hidden automation somewhere that's killing the render by lowering the output 100%.

Normally, I'd suspect there's some hidden fadeout in the master bus, but you (a) already said you never used that and (b) you'd also *hear* the audio levels fade to black as it plays.

Have you tried disabling the plugin in the master bus yet? [SORRY: Saw you confirmed trying this to no avail.]

I wonder if there's some hidden automation kicking *in* at 1:36 that's causing the output to be blocked. The bounce track approach may not be useful to you, but it sounds like it worked in the sense that there's something going on at the master bus. That's the only thing left I can think of that would stop the entire rendering process so consistently.

[scotofil]

Could you provide a screenshot or two (perhaps of the rendering popup box that appears)? This could help allow more eyes to search for clues as to how to solve this problem. Try rendering at 1x speed and see if that works.

Sure; see below (the last one shows that even with automation disabled, the render still goes mute)!

I am using exclusively folders, no submixes, and all lead & background vocal tracks are routed to the "Vocals" track and everything else is routed to the "Instruments" track (you can see these below the folder tracks), and these two are routed to the "Master" track with all this routing being done via the track output settings.

The very weird thing is that apparently the "Instruments" track still receives media after the render goes mute, but neither the "Vocals" nor the "Master" tracks do. Is there something like automated output control, media break points or anything like this that I might have activated accidentally at some point which would stop certain tracks' output? If so, I'd be still puzzled how and why playback in the DAW works well..

EDIT: I've also tried rendering at x1 speed, it doesn't make any difference whatsoever unfortunately.

01_Folders_and_automation.png

02_Render_options.png

04_Render_flatlines_highlighted.png

05_Rendering_without_automation_read.png

[scotofil]

Well, I am also starting to suspect there's some hidden automation somewhere that's killing the render by lowering the output 100%.

As you can see in the screenshots, there shouldn't be any automation on the master bus, and also the master volume plugin remains at 0 dB after the render goes mute.

Normally, I'd suspect there's some hidden fadeout in the master bus, but you (a) already said you never used that and (b) you'd also *hear* the audio levels fade to black as it plays.

Correct, playback works well in the DAW.

I wonder if there's some hidden automation kicking *in* at 1:36 that's causing the output to be blocked. The bounce track approach may not be useful to you, but it sounds like it worked in the sense that there's something going on at the master bus. That's the only thing left I can think of that would stop the entire rendering process so consistently.

As you can see, even with disabled automation, the render still goes mute, even though there's clearly media on the tracks well after the problematic time instant...

[Watchful]

WTH. Everything here looks perfect.

1. This is happening only on this particular project?
2. If you aren't rendering,and just play through, everything works perfectly, right? It's purely when rendering? I'm asking because only your instruments track is showing activity...other tracks in the screenshots look inactive.

If it's not happening during normal playback, I think we can rule out automation. There's nothing automation can do during rendering you wouldn't hear happening through playback.

I am very eager to get this fixed for you. But this is bizarre.

[scotofil]

1. This is happening only on this particular project?

Yes, other projects render like a charm.

2. If you aren't rendering,and just play through, everything works perfectly, right? It's purely when rendering? I'm asking because only your instruments track is showing activity...other tracks in the screenshots look inactive.

Yes, that's the weirdest. Playback works smoothly (as in all media is played back at any time instant, but it's certainly challenging the hw), and recording the "Bounce" track also works fine. It's only the render that's wrong, and apparently the track routing seems to be problematic (nothing's received on either the "Vocals" and "Master" tracks) after around 1:36.

If it's not happening during normal playback, I think we can rule out automation. There's nothing automation can do during rendering you wouldn't hear happening through playback.

I'm quite positive we can rule out automation as there's no master automation displayed among the edit's active automations, but more importantly the problem persists also when automation reading is disabled.

I am very eager to get this fixed for you. But this is bizarre.

I'm grateful for your efforts, and couldn't agree more that this is bizarre (would add though that it's also extremely annoying, especially given the submission date being Friday, the 28th). I still suspect that it was me pressing something that I shouldn't have pressed, so probably I'm at fault here, it's just that I've no clue what else to check...

Worth noting perhaps is that when trying your recommended workaround of recording the "Master" track's media on the "Bounce" track, initially there were also some submixes in use within the folder tracks containing only tracks (neither folders, nor submixes). Media from these submixes didn't reach the "Master" and "Bounce" tracks, so I applied the submix processing to each child track and removed the submixes completely. I'm not 100% sure that the initial setup (submixes within folders) is valid, but if so, something is clearly messed up big time in the track routing.

I'll sniff around within the project files to see if I can clean up the track routing manually. If anyone has some advice, don't hesitate to let me know!

[scotofil]

By having a quick look into the edit's tracktionedit file

• I found two racks which are never meant to be in the project, I removed those, but no difference.

• I was hoping to find something like more than one OUTPUTDEVICE listed for the tracks, but it looks good. Although all OUTPUTDEVICES are references by name, and I wasn't able to find the track number/id to device name string mapping so it didn't help all that much...

Any hints what to check?

[Watchful]

I know this is going to be a pain, but try muting/disabling half your tracks and see if the problem goes away... if not, try the other half.

If the problem goes away, disable half of those...and half again, until you pinpoint the track.

[Watchful]

And if the problem doesn't go away, disable the other half.

The idea is to trap the source of the problem by boxing it in.

My fear is that you'll disable the upper half to no success...and then disable the lower half, and the problem still occurs.

[scotofil]

And if the problem doesn't go away, disable the other half.

Thanks for the recommendation (I'm clear on binary search trees ), yet it's obvious that not a single track's at fault, as all of a sudden the "Master" and "Vocal" tracks don't receive any media from any of the tracks that are routed to them, and then I guess there could be additional tracks misbehaving individually as well. I might give this a go though, but I'm rather skeptic that it would bring us to any conclusion...

[scotofil]

I managed to kinda solve it, although the root cause remains unknown.

By comparing the track numbers in the tracktionedit file, and the actual track numbers in the edit, things seemed to be mismatched, and then some tracks had multiple outputs as well, so I went ahead and changed each track's output to a single new dummy track, and then back to the default (exclusively). At this stage rendering works correctly.

Now comes the part when I try to resume my original grouping/busing/routing concept with rerouting everything; hopefully it will work out well...

In any case, I have no clue how I managed to end up in the original problem, and I tend to believe that whatever I pressed, the observed behaviour (the rendered file goes mute in the middle of the track) shouldn't be expected.

In any case, thanks for the help!