Nate LanxonWhen choosing to bounce a song as an audio file, I find that Superior Drummer 3 gets stuck on certain microphone channels and the export goes no further. In my current project, I’m trying to bounce a sequence that’s about 11-12 minutes long. I’m bouncing the entire track in 16 bit and as output channels, not as individual mic channels.
I can see it first export the track before moving to bass drum mics, then snare, toms, overheads and it seems to progress fine. Then it hits a mic channel – Chamber, in my current project – and then hangs. The application is still responding, so I can click cancel. I can also see the playhead is at the end of the loop area, having successfully progressed through the previous microphone. It’s almost as if it gets stuck loading necessary samples for the Chamber channel and then doesn’t know what to do.
Sometimes it never makes it as far as Chamber, and gets stuck on an earlier mic. Sometimes on other projects it gets a bit further down the chain before hanging. And sometimes it’s absolutely fine.
Has anyone else experienced this and, if so, found a solution?
My working theory is that it’s something to do with the length of the file. I find this problem occurs most often on long (10-min+) recordings, and rarely on short (under 5-min) recordings. This would be fine if I was only producing punk rock, but progressive rockers love writing 30-minute epics…
I’ve tried the obvious stuff – update to latest versions / restart application / restart system / export to internal disk or external disk / copy loop area to new track and export that / export at 24-bit rather than 16-bit – but nothing works. I’ve tried switching to using only 1 CPU core or using 8 cores. That didn’t work either. This happened on my old Intel Core i7 Mac and still happens on the brand new $3,500 Mac Studio.
I’m running on the latest Apple Mac Studio, which has an Apple Silicon M1 Max and 32GB of unified memory. Plenty of disk space and very fast I/O. SD3 runs in standalone mode and as the only active application (I don’t use any other software such as Logic or Reaper for this particular work).
Thanks for listening to my TED talk and please, if anyone has any suggestions I’d be grateful to hear them, no matter how small or left-field.
drumjack52What TED talk?
With only 32 gig of ram this suggestion might be dicey but can you load your entire kit to ram? Where are your samples stored? If external is the drive going into sleep mode? One of my external clone system drives does that on me every once in a while. I don’t have any drives set to sleep. Which library has a Chamber channel?
Jack
aka musicman691 on other forums
Superior Drummer 3.4.0
Area 33 1.0.0
Death and Darkness 1.0.1
PT 2021.6
OSX 10.13.6
3.46 GHz hex core 2012 MacPro 48 gig ram
Nate LanxonThanks. Yeah the whole kit is loaded into RAM. It’s about 14GB in total. What’s interesting though is that during export the RAM empties and seems to load each instrument being exported. I’m not sure if that’s how it’s meant to be? All the drives are SSDs and don’t go to sleep. The Chamber channel I think is Metal Foundry or possibly one of the New York ones, but it’s not Chamber specifically that’s the problem as it seems random. Sometimes it’s overheads, sometimes the hats. There’s no consistency.
drumjack52Do you use a daw at all in your work? If so why not have SD3 on an insert and instead of bouncing in SD3 use multichannel output in SD3 and record to daw audio tracks? That’s what I do here except I have the drum MIDI in my daw (ProTools) which feeds SD3 but it should work fine with the MIDI in SD3.
Jack
aka musicman691 on other forums
Superior Drummer 3.4.0
Area 33 1.0.0
Death and Darkness 1.0.1
PT 2021.6
OSX 10.13.6
3.46 GHz hex core 2012 MacPro 48 gig ram
1
Thanked by: Nate LanxonNate LanxonOkay this is interesting. I’ve always used SD3 in standalone mode because 98% of what I use it for is live triggering of my TD-50. I fired up Logic Pro, loaded SD3 as a plugin and exported the song problem-free. I also noticed that during this, the RAM usage of SD3 stayed the same at around 12GB. Normally, when I export tracks directly out of SD3, it’ll load each channel or mic into memory, export that as a file, then move onto the next. That’s how it gets stuck, or seems to get stuck. Maybe I should just stick to using Logic with SD3 as a plugin. I’ll see if it impacts live latency.
Olof HermanssonHi,
When it gets stuck, please use Activity Monitor (in Applications > Utilities) to save a sample of the SD3 process, then wait a few seconds and save another sample. Those may give us some clues what is going on.
If you can somewhat reliably reproduce it with a certain project, it may also help if you could send it to us (either here or in a support ticket) and we could try to reproduce it.
Olof Hermansson - Toontrack
Coder
drumjack52Okay this is interesting. I’ve always used SD3 in standalone mode because 98% of what I use it for is live triggering of my TD-50. I fired up Logic Pro, loaded SD3 as a plugin and exported the song problem-free. I also noticed that during this, the RAM usage of SD3 stayed the same at around 12GB. Normally, when I export tracks directly out of SD3, it’ll load each channel or mic into memory, export that as a file, then move onto the next. That’s how it gets stuck, or seems to get stuck. Maybe I should just stick to using Logic with SD3 as a plugin. I’ll see if it impacts live latency.
I’m a little confused – in the first post you mention about exporting from SD3 and that leads me to think you’re not working live. And now you mention live work with your drum controller. Are you working both ways at different times? If so I’d suggest working with SD3 in your daw as it gives you a smoother operation. I don’t do export from SD3 – is that in realtime or faster than realtime? As I mentioned I render the audio in Pro Tools by recording in realtime to separate tracks and mix in PT. That way if there’s an issue I can stop and fix the issue.
As to the memory load staying the same whole working in your daw that’s because SD3 really does load everything if you select that option. I don’t know if bouncing from SD3 in standalone truly loads the whole kit.
Jack
aka musicman691 on other forums
Superior Drummer 3.4.0
Area 33 1.0.0
Death and Darkness 1.0.1
PT 2021.6
OSX 10.13.6
3.46 GHz hex core 2012 MacPro 48 gig ram
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