I really liked the way AD2 sounded when I first listened and selected my 3 paks ...
 
Now, when using them I have 2 issues, which I really don't understand:
 
(A) Why are basically all presets so hot??? This makes them unusable out of the box because ProChannel and Sonar FX bin are overloaded / clipping ... is there any general setting / knob / switch where I could bring that down? So far I've only found an output knob per channel which you can set to max. -12 dB (but that is not enough in many kit presets) and the channel faders ...
 
(B) I usually route drum tracks to a drum bus and send the drum bus to another bus (drum comp bus) for traditional parallel compression (NY style). This works fine with all VSTs I own without having to freeze ... but when doing the same thing with AD2 I get very strong phase issues as soon as I pull the compression bus fader up, i.e. there must be a processing delay involved which causes the phase shift ... Pls note this is independent of compressor used (ProChannel compressor, WAVES, IK) and is not present with other VSTs (if I route K5 Abbey Road drums throuh the same buses it's not there) ... something is going on inside AD2 because when freeze AD2, these phase issue are gone ...

For the level issue, you can quickly pull down all the input Gains on the audio tracks receiving output from AD using quick grouping (i.e. select all tracks, and Ctrl+drag the Gain down on one of them).
 
For the phase issue... I dunno. It doesn't make sense that you'd have a phase issue between two buses in SONAR getting their input form the same source tracks when the audio is live-rendered, but not when it's frozen.
 
The only think I can think of is something involving the behavior of AD2's internal FX and/or bus outputs. You might start by muting any tracks receiving AD2's bus outputs (Overhead, Room, Bus, Master), and seeing if the problem goes away.

About the phasing issue: make sure you are not also routing ad2's master and room channels. Mixing say the snare output with the ouput of the parrallel compressor bus and the room/master ad2 outputs will cause phasing if the snare kit piece is contributing to the room or master channel.

brundlefly
For the phase issue... I dunno. It doesn't make sense that you'd have a phase issue between two buses in SONAR getting their input form the same source tracks when the audio is live-rendered, but not when it's frozen.
 
The only think I can think of is something involving the behavior of AD2's internal FX and/or bus outputs. You might start by muting any tracks receiving AD2's bus outputs (Overhead, Room, Bus, Master), and seeing if the problem goes away.

I doesn't make sense and doesn't happen with other VSTs ... that's why I asked ... muting AD2 internal bus outs is what I tried right away but did not make a difference ...
 

js516
About the phasing issue: make sure you are not also routing ad2's master and room channels. Mixing say the snare output with the ouput of the parrallel compressor bus and the room/master ad2 outputs will cause phasing if the snare kit piece is contributing to the room or master channel.

I need the room channels. I blend them in and finally add a bit of parallel compression of the entire drum bus - if all plug in delay is properly compensated for, there must not be any phasing ...
 
I suspect something odd going on in AD2 (because when bounced there is no problem) - I have also noticed some "strange" options like AD2 buffering some WAV file that you could drag somewhere (???) ... definitely don't need that, suspect this causes overhead but have not found a switch to turn that off ...

I am not sure yet if you can shut that off. Each time the AD2 engine is running, the master out has an audio buffer running and keeps the last 15 seconds of it. I have not seen any issue from this, since it is essentially just a slice of the master out audio.

You can try sound radix pi, waves in phase, or even vocalign if you bounce the outputs first.

precisionguided
You can try sound radix pi, waves in phase, or even vocalign if you bounce the outputs first.

When bounced it's phase aligned anyway ... just while working with it as a VSTi it's not ...
 
Anyway, it's not critical because I usually don't apply the parallel compression until I get down to mix the project and by then all synths are frozen/bounced ...  I just noticed this issue when pulling AD2 into a "standard" song template of mine, which has the drum compression bus setup already ...

so this has been reproduced by bundlefly (http://forum.cakewalk.com/FindPost/3195458) and I reckon should be aofficially reported

bump...
 
any update on this issue?  I noticed this happening yesterday when using AD2 and sending to a bus trying to use parallel compression.  I don't want to have to bounce down to audio tracks to see how the compression sounds as I will usually need to tinker with things in AD2 (room, OH, snare, kick) to get the sound I want.
 
Is the (hopefully temporary) solution to add PDC to the send bus to line things up? Is the amount of samples verified to be 64 or is this dependent on how your soundcard ASIO is setup?
 
Thanks,
-Brian.

Not yet fixed. And there is no variation with ASIO buffer latency or any other setting. As posted in the other thread:
 
- I've found that if any other audio track is also sending to the parallel bus along with AD, then there's no problem. This can be a track with a recorded or bounced drum part, another soft synth output or even an audio track that just has input echo enabled with no signal on it.
 
- The phase error seems always to be exactly 64 samples, so in lieu of adding some other audio track sending to the parallel bus, the phase error can be compensated by adding a 64-sample delay to the parallel bus using Channel Tools or some other sample-delay plugin.