Dtblkfx Render Output Differs From The Output In Renoise

I was going to post this in the same topic, but I thought this needed a little more attention…

How come this plugin doesn’t render the same audio, as when I play it in Renoise?

Can you be (a lot) more specific? :)

What settings are you using? Is it a preset in the plugin that we can easily test ourselves? What exactly sounds different? Are you rendering at a different sample rate than when playing? Do you have PDC (plugin delay compensation) enabled in Renoise? Etc.

I was fiddling with the Delay parameter in the VST.

It seems when you put the Delay on 0 beats your render will be different from what you originally heard.
When you put the Delay back to 1 beats, your render and what you hear will stay the same.

An xrns file to make things clear. (I think…hope.)

http://www.mediafire.com/?bbepeu75obh9fb4

If I set the delay to 0.01 beats, then it sounds distorted due to the very small block size. It sounds distorted when played in realtime, and it sounds distorted when rendered.

If I set the delay to a higher value (such as 1 beat, in your example), then it sounds much smoother. It sounds smoother when played in realtime, and it sounds smoother when rendered.

This is just how the effect is designed to work, so I don’t think there’s anything weird going on in that respect. Some amount of delay is required in order to process the FFT based stuff. A smaller delay = smaller internal buffer sizes, which gives less accurate but faster results. A higher delay = high buffer sizes, which gives more accurate but slower results.

Here’s a quote from the manual:

Your sample rate will have a pretty big effect on things here also. For example, a delay of 0.01 beats @ 48kHz will sound pretty different to 0.01 beats @ 96kHz, and so on. Even 48kHz vs 44.1kHz gives a dramatically different sound here on my system. So are you perhaps playing in realtime at one sample rate and then rendering at another different rate?

Apart from that, I can’t seem to reproduce any other weirdness with the plugin. Whatever delay setting I use, it sounds identical when played in realtime or when rendered, so long as the same sample rate remains the same in each case.

And apart from a delay setting under 1 beats? Strange you get the distortion in realtime when using 0 beats delay.

I both used 44.1kHz for listening and rendering…

I do need to say I’m working on a laptop, which just has an onboard soundcard… maybe it has something to do with that too? :unsure:

Me too.

Me too. IBM Thinkpad 1.7GHz, 2GB RAM, SoundMAX Digital Audio card.

I just loaded Renoise to experiment with your example song again, and this is really strange, but I can’t seem to get the exact same sound I was getting last night. It still sounds bad when played in realtime at 0.01 beats, but it’s not an exact match to the rendered result. I had already been using the plugin myself in an earlier session last night before trying your song, so I don’t know if that had any effect on things. I think the plug-in is still rather unstable anyway, because when I was adjusting some of its parameters just a few moments ago, it actually caused my computer to bluescreen! Very weird stuff indeed.

Anyway… bottom line: I think you just need a moderate amount of delay for this thing to sound good and be useful. :(