When 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.
Superior Drummer 3 version: 3.3.2Operating system: macOS Monterey (12)
