FX introducing an offset / desync in Pro Studio 8 and 9
Posted: Sun Sep 12, 2021 12:10 pm
I've been experiencing this issue for ages but just recently started doing some troubleshooting to confirm some of the behavior with it. Essentially, adding FX to an instrument track seems to introduce a delay or offset that entire track. I know there's been a couple threads in the past on external sites regarding compressors doing it, but from what I can tell the behavior isn't consistent making it hard to work around - for the past year or two I've just been turning off the grid snap feature after mixdown and manually lining up the audio tracks correctly during mixing. This isn't exclusive to mixing to a new audio track, though - even just playing the track in realtime, not mixed down, still has some kind of per-track delay. Freezing the track doesn't appear to fix it, nor does changing between Wave / WaveRT / ASIO or modifying the bitrate, buffers, etc.
In this example I just mixed down a drum track. The behavior is consistent in both Mixcraft Pro Studio 8 and 9:
Example 1 (blue): Mixing instrument track down to audio with NO FX at all does not have any type of desync
Example 2 (yellow): Mixing down with either all FX disabled (but not removed), or FX that don't appear to affect performance, still introduces an offset roughly equal to (1/64th note / 3) - this offset is consistent
Example 3 (red): Mixing down with select VSTs, ex. the built-in Broadcast Multiband Compressor, introduces a more significant and seemingly randomized offset anywhere from the one seen in Example 2 to an entire 1/32nd note
The examples in red were mixed down using Acoustica Studio Drums and just the Broadcast Multiband Compressor and no changes to anything between mixdowns. Is this a known issue? From what I could tell it only started happening as recently as Pro Studio 8 or Mixcraft 7 - I've been using Mixcraft since version 3 or so and didn't have any issues like this up through 6 or 7.
In this example I just mixed down a drum track. The behavior is consistent in both Mixcraft Pro Studio 8 and 9:
Example 1 (blue): Mixing instrument track down to audio with NO FX at all does not have any type of desync
Example 2 (yellow): Mixing down with either all FX disabled (but not removed), or FX that don't appear to affect performance, still introduces an offset roughly equal to (1/64th note / 3) - this offset is consistent
Example 3 (red): Mixing down with select VSTs, ex. the built-in Broadcast Multiband Compressor, introduces a more significant and seemingly randomized offset anywhere from the one seen in Example 2 to an entire 1/32nd note
The examples in red were mixed down using Acoustica Studio Drums and just the Broadcast Multiband Compressor and no changes to anything between mixdowns. Is this a known issue? From what I could tell it only started happening as recently as Pro Studio 8 or Mixcraft 7 - I've been using Mixcraft since version 3 or so and didn't have any issues like this up through 6 or 7.