Exporting Tracks To Daw

Hi All

There were a few threads regarding summing back in 2005, but I thought this was a bit different, hence new thread. This isn’t about summing as such, anyway.

I have a track that sounds great in Renoise, but I want to arrange it and do a final mix in Samplitude Pro 10. I export all the tracks at 24 bit and stick them in Samplitude.

I expected it to work straight off… but it really doesn’t. The mix is completely different. Not a subtle thing at all. The levels seem to be all over the place. Also the timing on two of the tracks seems to be early - this is easily fixed but quite odd. I’ve A/B’d against the mix from Renoise: it’s not my imagination.

I wonder if anyone else has had the same problem and figured it out? I’m not maxing out the channels or the master or doing anything that should cause Renoise to behave differently.

The mix in Renoise sounds complete, gelled together, completely rocking. The mix in Samplitude sounds sort of empty and boring.

As it stands I’ll just go back to Renoise and try to finish it there…

So perhaps the question isn’t so much about summing as about problems with exporting individual tracks. Anyone else experience this kind of thing?

I don’t know if you have anything on the master channel in Renoise and if these effects are taken into account when exporting to individual tracks? If not this could be the reason for the volume drop.

About the shifts in timing, maybe you can put a sharp click on the first line of the first pattern on every track, so you can manually edit the tracks to remain in sync in samplitude.

Nope - nothing on the master channel. And the exported tracks aren’t quieter, now I listen again I think it might just be subtle timing changes that make some things stick out a lot more, giving the impression of a wonky mix. Weird.

Your idea about the click is very good, I’ll try it, thanks.

I know the debate about different DAWs having different sounds seems to be generally closed, but it seems to me that Samplitude has an incredibly clear sound (which is obviously a good thing) whereas Renoise seems to glue everything together somehow.

The theory seems to suggest that this is BS but nonetheless it seems to work in practice.

Assuming my loose grasp of digital mixing is correct…

You are mixing tracks of a certain (perhaps varying) bit depth in renoise.
In samplitude you are mixing the exported tracks that have been converted to 24bit - hence 2 different mixes.
The 24bit wavs will have a different dynamic range to the original source.
The original mix in renoise, only the master output stage has been mathematically ‘rounded off’ to the bit depth of your soundcard output.
When you convert/export tracks to 24bit, each tracks sample ‘slice’ is rounded off in the conversion from im guessing 32 bit floating point.
So when you mix in samplitude… if you have exported 16 tracks… there are 16 potential errors to accumulate from the rounding off - which is then rounded again to your soundcards bit depth.

Try importing the 24 bit tracks into renoise as samples and see how it sounds - i expect it will sound the same as samplitude when you are mixing the identical sources (your 24 bit wavs).
Renoise has 32 bit integer and floating point export settings that may yeild better results.

renoise keeps 3db headroom, so when you mix to say 0db it really is -3db…

correct me if im wrong… also i don’t know if this would explain the possible placebo effect…