Exporting a final mix

Yes. The recommended procedure is that you export your Master Bus, and take care of that everything is routed through it. That's the easiest way to make sure everything is under control.

Yes. The recommended procedure is that you export your Master Bus, and take care of that everything is routed through it. That's the easiest way to make sure everything is under control.

 
Hi there i export my project as 'entire mix',  then import it into a new project to master, then when I master the stereo 2 track mix I export the mastered version as 'Track' (normally this is the first track 'audio',  is this wrong? should I have put the mastering on the master bus and then exported 'bus master' I know theres different ways to do things, but is my way wrong? (I want to do it the best way...)
 
thanks for any help
Learning more and more each day from this forum!!
 
Nigel

Cheers Bristol J
 
At leastI know now I'm doing 'something' right!
 
Nigel

The cleanest and most deterministic way is to bounce the output of a final bus, typically named master as it is in the normal template but it can be any other name of your choice. 

For convenience we also allow the capability to output the "entire mix". When you choose "entire mix" internally the bounce process creates a "virtual master bus" and redirects the outputs of all the hardware mains to this. Then the virtual master is rendered. This essentially is summing SONAR's output to ALL hardware outputs. 

Entire mix can be a useful shortcut sometimes when you don't have a master bus - e.g older projects created before bussing existed.  However you have to be careful that you don't have any duplicate signal paths sending to your hardware, or these signals will be summed into your mix, probably not something you want. A common reason why this might happen is if you have your project set up to send to headphone outs.
Another common problem here is if you have adjusted the level of your hardware mains for listening purposes this gainstage will be included in the bounce which may not be what you want.

So in short its better to manage this yourself by keeping a final bus and always rendering its output wen you want to bounce your project. 

Maybe a dumb question, but if everything is routed to Master and you do the what-you-hear export, isn't that the same thing?  Just trying to get my mind clear.  Thanks.

Not necessarily. Remember "Master" is just the name of a bus. If the user directly routes tracks to hardware outs (or other buses that do not route to Master) then what you hear will not be the same thing as Master. The "What you hear" preset is basically selecting the "entire mix" option which is everything sent to ALL outputs. 
This is actually a common problem when users export and find the bounce sounding different from what they are hearing.

Hi again
 
Last night I had mixed my song levels etc and was ready to master the 'exported' mix, when I was creating a new file to do it in I noticed the template for mastering (Sonar 8.5 sorry I know this is the X1 forum but I imagine most of you have used 8.5)  so I thought yeah why not see what it is like, so I opened it up and imported my mix and wow the result was great I then noticed that the Master bus had all the mastering effects LP-64 EQ LP-64 Multi Boost 11 and Analyst, I then exported it out but heres where I get lost, what exactly do I export out ie bus, entire mix, tracks, main outs etc and if I use the 'what you hear' tick box will I loose the compression/limiter effect that was applied.
 
Also when i listened to the exported files (just for level purposes) on windows media player, I didn't seem to notice a awful lot of difference, could that be down to the fact that I had the levels near enough before the mastering took place?
 
Any help would be appreciated as always.
 
Nigel

Hi
 
Thanks for replying, I'll try that tonight, so do I use 'what you hear' or not? + is there any chance I may have done the mix not far off to start with, would that explain why I wasn't hearing an awful lot of difference in the exported mastered and non mastered versions?
 
thanks
 
sorry to be a pain in the neck!!

This is a really interesting thread! I've also been using Entire Mix thinking it was the same as Master Bus but based on the discussion here, it's not. Now I want to go back and export all my recent mixes using the Master Bus option and listen for a difference.  Perhaps this should be emphasized a bit more in the manual?

jrfrogers





I think it's boiling down to, if you route everything to the Master Bus, it's very straight forward, just export the Master Bus. And we haven't mentioned yet but assumed we all know, the tracks you want included in the export must be selected.

Alternatively: Just mute the tracks you don't want to export. Selecting nothing is the same as selecting everything.