Hi, I am just bouncing down a project, ready to listen on various devices prior to making adjustments before mastering and putting on the Songs forum. 

Here's my problem. When I select all tracks and bounce down , the resultant stereo track waveform visualisation in the track actually looks biased towards the left channel, and then plays like that too. Yet if I archive it, un-archive all the original project tracks, and play the project back, all sounds well again as I tracked and set it. I have some volume automation but I have checked every track and there is no pan automation, accidental or otherwise.
I am bouncing down to a new stereo track, selecting 'Entire Mix' as the source category and Pow-r 1 dithering.

Whats going on there? any suggestions would be really helpful as I am stuck right now...

Regards

Garry 

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

if your mix sounds good before you export it,send it to wave or mp3(where your having the problem)
id set it for "what you hear" at export.

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....

chuckebaby


if your mix sounds good before you export it,send it to wave or mp3(where your having the problem)
id set it for "what you hear" at export.

Charlie, thanks, but I want to bounce to a stereo track into my project, so I can a/b changes to my mix by archiving the originals source tracks and soloing each mix stereo track in turn. 'What you hear' is an option for exporting but not for bouncing to tracks...


Still scratching my head on this...

So Gary, have you tried just doing an export?

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

No I haven't Jonesey. Will have a go at this though. I have just been through the project track by track and bus too. I have an acoustic guitar bus interleaved to stereo fed by two tracks of acoustic guitar, one panned hard left and one hard right. Is that the correct interleave for that bus? Still cant see how that would cause the whole mix to bias to the left on a bounce to tracks however.....


Also, when I bounce to tracks, I select all the tracks, and none of the busses, and yet my bounced stereo track lead guitar has my sound preset from Guitar Rig which is placed in the bus not the track. Is that normal?

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.

I've often seen waveforms which are tilted to one side. I'd be interested to know the cause of that. In some cases it's due to DC offset, but I doubt it's that in this case. If there's a DC offset the whole innermost "coreline" of the waveform should be above or below the 0-line.

It can't be due to phase-problems either, can it, if it sounds normal?

Waveforms you see on many music sites are also out of balance.

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 ! ....