Bouncing down all tracks resulting in stereo image different. - FIXED !

Any stereo plugin on Mono tracks? Or Mono plugins on Stereo Tracks? Any Stereo Tracks being routed to Stereo buses?

Don, I have a mono lead guitar track, which I send to a stereo 'Lead Guitar' bus with Guitar Rig 4 on it with some stereo fx on it. However, the lead guitar takes up only 10-15% of the track, and in the project proper sounds balanced when I solo it. However, the entire mix sounds (and looks on the waveform) like its 75% panned left....

So Gary, have you tried just doing an export?

This should do exactly the same thing as bouncing your entire project

You might also want to look at the options that you have enabled during the bounce. Not sure what you meant about the guitar track only tacking 10-15% of the track. Routing the mono guitar track to a stereo bus is fine. Just make sure you have automation enabled in the bounce or your mono inputs will appear as mono and will appear on whatever side or the stereo pair that it is coming in. For example, guitar on input 1L (left sided of the input 1-2 stereo pair) will appear 100% on the left - regardless of the track panning if you don't have automation enabled for the bounce.

Hi Kalle, Yes I have seen those too, and Soundclouds new interface, for instance, puts a line though a displayed waveform slightly below halfway through the images of uploaded track, so it LOOKS like every track is unbalanced, but they aren't. However this is more that that. I did try to follow Charlie and Bristol Jonesey's advice last night and tried to export the track, which then promptly hung up Sonar X2 and I had to reboot ! - which rather added insult to injury right now....

I did delete the two mix tracks and tried for a third time, having corrected a couple of interleaves on a couple of tracks. I still got the same result...The normal project plays perfectly balanced as I tracked and set it. (31 tracks including split drum tracks and all vocals) Selecting all the tracks - bouncing down to a single stereo file, selecting all the options - track fx, bus fx etc...and the waveform produced looks to have half as much more amplitude on the left as compared to the right. Archive all the project tracks, play back the bounced full mix track, and it plays as it looks, mainly biased towards the left speaker. I cant progress with finishing this project until I get to the bottom of this, and in fact it's pointless doing more edits on the tracks if I have no confidence I can bounce it down successfully.
 
All of my synth and audio tracks are frozen - with FX, with the exception of Superior Drummer 2. As one of my quad core processors was just starting to peak into the red before I did this. I also have raised the ASIO buffers from my highly acceptable 3.0ms tracking level, to a comfy 15ms for mixing. Of course, even if I didn't do any of this freezing or raising buffers, I would only be risking dropouts surely? not this skewing of the audio to the left channel on mixdown...

Something is causing this, I was tired and ran out of time and ideas last night. Any more suggestions?. I am not back in my studio until this evening but that does give me time to mull on this, gather a few ideas from fellow forumites and get back to resolving it tonight?

No suggestion will be dismissed, for example, why did my normally 100% stable X2 crash when I tried to export? Is that connected? I will try that again also tonight.

thanks, please keep the suggestions coming, I want to get back to making music ! ....

Notice I put 'fixed' onto the threat title and not 'solved'. I will share what happened here, I am delighted because I can now complete the final edits and plan to put it on the songs forum very soon now.

Basically I found the problem by going through the entire signal chain in my track. From balances on individual tracks, checking interleaves, busses, interleaves on busses, soloing them all in turn, checking outputs from VST's including Channel Tools on an acoustic guitar bus and Guitar Rig on a lead guitar bus.

I finally get to the master bus, still everything seemed OK, but realised that there was one more stage in the X2 signal chain, which was the interface outs. Even with the console view across 2 monitors, I couldnt find them, and hadn't seen them for a long time. By clicking and dragging on the right edge of the console, I found the three sets of outs for my audio interface, and lo and behold, the main outs were not locked together and the left channel was set 6 to 7 dB higher than the right channel ! I locked and fixed them, performed another bounce to tracks, and finally, both the waveform and the playback were back in balance. Total Joy of course. I also know how this happened. A few nights ago, I was fiddling with ACT and my sliders on my PCR-500, and when I was controlling the busses, I worked one slider which didn't appear to be attached to any parameter, after waddling it about for a minute or so, I though best to leave it alone and attempted to put it back in the position I found it, correctly as it turned out, thinking I might be changing a parameter I had simply failed to see. I will have to go back and experiment, but it is almose certain that it was controlling the left channel of the main outs, which were permanently hidden to me at that point...one big mystery solved.

However, this poses a strange conundrum. Why did my playback sound balanced when I played through the normal project with all tracks, yet only appeared left biased when I bounced down? I tryed bouncing down both from the master channel (ie before the outs) and from the outs, and got the same, off centered sonic results each time. I also did try an export from selecting all the tracks to a wav file, and this was also left biased now. Surely by logic, if I had mixed 'compensating' for my left out being raised, putting the outs in sync again would then make the project right biased during playback. However, no, it still plays back with the stereo balance intact. This seems to defy all logic, unless someone has a decent explaination.

However, I am delighted to understand what happened and fix it, albeit scratching my head as how I got the results I did... I think this is worth sharing for future forum searches however because the main outs are so often out of sight and out of mind, that I can see how it would be possible for anyone to accidently move them on a control surface (particularly if they are included in an ACT preset) and hear the consequences without it being obvious where the problem subsequently lay.

Hope this helps and thanks for your suggestions guys.

Garry Kiosk

Boydie, I think you may be onto something there...somewhere. My main monitors are connected to the first pair of outputs (called 1 and 2 I think, I am away from my studio right now), then my rack mounted headphone amp is connected to the second output (2+3) I was so elated and tired last night after locating the problem that I closed down and didn't investigate further, which I will do tonight. However most of my monitoring is done on my studio monitors and I use the headphone amp for tracking most of the time.

Also, the difference was not so slight that I could have been in danger of decieving myself by lookiing at a wonky waveform when listening. The drop in the right channel was huge, all centered instrumentation almost disappearing and unmistakeable.

Thanks for the suggestion, I feel I want to investigate further, I certainly think it helps to know how Sonar processes mixdowns / bounces to tracks differently when selecting either master or main outs.

Garry