JunkyardMcCants
I'm running mastering software on my master bus that shows my RMS at around -9. That should be comparable to commercial music.

Which mastering software?
What peak level does Sonar's Master meter indicate?
What processes are you using with the mastering software?

Anderton
After I have a track that's exactly what I want, I drag it to its final destination.

This one was an eye opener for me, as I often will bounce tracks to mix-down, but have always exported the final track! It never occurred to me to even try drag-dropping, that is almost too simple, but makes me wonder about master bus effects/PC now. I need to delve into this idea more.

JunkyardMcCants
Just to be sure, I took the exported track that I measured at -9, inserted the .wav into a new Sonar file, and measured using the same mastering software. The .wav was playing at -19, had severe distortion and clipping that wasn't present in the mix I created, and ran several BPM slower than what I had produced.
 
Anyone have some ideas?

Humor me...two things.

• Try increasing latency by a substantial amount during mixdown.
• Do you have ASIO4ALL installed on your system? It interacts with some drivers to produce weird sonic degradations that sound like what you're describing. I had to uninstall it from my system. I don't want to sound like I'm pointing fingers ("it's THEIR fault!!"), but it was pretty binary - ASIO4ALL installed, couldn't get low latency, all kinds of problems. ASIO4ALL uninstalled, everything worked great.

mettelus

Anderton
After I have a track that's exactly what I want, I drag it to its final destination.

This one was an eye opener for me, as I often will bounce tracks to mix-down, but have always exported the final track! It never occurred to me to even try drag-dropping, that is almost too simple, but makes me wonder about master bus effects/PC now. I need to delve into this idea more.

It's not too simple, it's just simple :) Remember you can drag the file to the desktop or to a location in the browser.
 
What's even better is that if you drag an acidized file, it remains acidized...one of the many reasons why Sonar is my program of choice when creating sound libraries.

chrisby

John
Chrisby can you post a step by step sequence of exactly what you do when you export? Leave nothing out. 
 
But first I assume you are routing all audio through your master buss and if so what are the meter readings there? 

Sorry, thanks for the offer to help but as above it's really not all worth pursuing further I don't think. If you are really interested though let me know and I'll send you screenshots of the track routing settings, the master bus wav renderings, the resulting file export wav file renderings, and the export settings - that will pretty much sum everything up I think. 

I don't recall ever being asked if I care enough. There is a reason I'm involved and its because I know that export works as it is meant to work. Here you have a situation that doesn't fit my view of this or seems to work. I want to know why. I think it is important. 
 

I don't think you'll find anywhere in any of my posts where I assume it's a bug.

Not directly, no. But you did say:

I'm starting to think that Sonar doesn't produce viable .wavs

That sure sounds like the presumption of a bug. Any DAW that cannot produce viable output clearly has a serious showstopper of a bug. That's what elicited the "it's not a bug" responses, and why I replied as I did, for fear that you'd waste energy barking up the wrong tree. 
 
I can't imagine why you concluded that "it's really not worth pursuing further", without describing a workaround. If it was me, I'd want to know why the problem was occurring so as to avoid it in the future. 
 
 

bitflipper

I don't think you'll find anywhere in any of my posts where I assume it's a bug.

Not directly, no. But you did say:

I'm starting to think that Sonar doesn't produce viable .wavs

That sure sounds like the presumption of a bug. Any DAW that cannot produce viable output clearly has a serious showstopper of a bug. That's what elicited the "it's not a bug" responses, and why I replied as I did, for fear that you'd waste energy barking up the wrong tree. 
 
I can't imagine why you concluded that "it's really not worth pursuing further", without describing a workaround. If it was me, I'd want to know why the problem was occurring so as to avoid it in the future. 
 
 

You seem like you are trying to be helpful and I appreciate your civil tone so please don't take this wrong but... your quote about "viable wavs" is from the OP, not me. I don't think I've said anything that slandered Sonar in any way. As for the workaround it's noted in my first post as "what worked for me" (i.e. just export using "Bus Output" and select only "Master Bus").  
 
As far as my ambivalence, I have a workaround, I've published it here to anyone else that may have the issue in the future (though again, I think someone else may have suggested it before me) and... I barely have time to use the software as is. I respect others right to want to track it down if they want to spend the time, I just don't.

chrisby
No offence, but I write software for a living, and have for about 30 years.... it very well could be a bug.

 

John
Chrisby can you post a step by step sequence of exactly what you do when you export? Leave nothing out. 

chrisby
Sorry, thanks for the offer to help but as above it's really not all worth pursuing further I don't think. If you are really interested though let me know and I'll send you screenshots of the track routing settings, the master bus wav renderings, the resulting file export wav file renderings, and the export settings - that will pretty much sum everything up I think.

 
I'm extremely surprised. As you work in software (although I don't exactly know what you do) you should know that you need to give clear steps to reproduce if you find a bug, and speculation is not at all helpful unless you are prepared to make sure everybody understands what it is. After 30 years in the business you of all people would know the worst thing to do is assume anything... I would hope you would give John the steps here after all.
 

chrisby
Mmmm, great... sage advice. Who knew it was really all so easy and straight forward... all that time wasted getting a computer science degree and years of writing code!!!

 
So that makes two of us.
 
So how about full steps to reproduce like you would normally do when filing any bug report, you must have looked into what QA does? Then maybe we could help, people have deep knowledge on these forums and the chances are you may be overlooking something, and if there IS a bug we would want to know about it.
 
Thanks.. :)

Apologies, chrisby. I confused you with the OP.
 
So Junkyard, have you made any progress?

I'm running mastering software on my master bus that shows my RMS at around -9. That should be comparable to commercial music.

You do know that RMS levels are not a measure of perceived loudness. So saying your song is at a an RMS of -9 doesn't mean its as loud as another song at -9 RMS.  
 
CJ