What am I doing wrong with drums? Clipping... Please help.

Hi Fellows.

Must be doing something wrong.
I have 2 tracks of Realdrums...in the mixer. Choruses play-A drums Verses-B drums.
Utilizing "Bar options" (mute/ back to normal)

When listening in BIAB everything sounds great. When exporting, WAV the starting note(s) of drum track are clipped... squashed...sounds bad... Not sure how to describe it. After that first note, sounding good again.

First I thought it is volume, so I lowered it way down in BIAB before exporting.. for testing purposes. Still first note squashed.

Can anybody help?

Thank you.
Mike.

We need more info. Are you using a VSTi? Are you using any plugins?

No, just realdrums, no VST's, no external FX.
I tried exporting Audio "as individual tracks" and through specific channel "save as WAV" file. All other exported tracks sound ok. First notes of drum starts are squashed in WAV, when exported.

Thank you.

Wave level looks proper in DAW, but sound is distorted at first notes.
Audio track looks like this:

B000000000...........B000000000...........B0000000000

Where "B" is bad start note, "0" sound as it should and "." is silence.

Something is happening at rendering...

Does the rendered audio sound bad in another player or DAW as well? Are the two drum tracks A-B patterns of the same kit and located on the single Drum Channel in the BIAB mixer or are you using two drum kits on separate tracks?

Can you "see" the bad note at the beginning of each waveform in your DAW to it being different than the remaining notes or does it only sound distorted?

I would also suggest to open a new BIAB project and load the Drums into the new project to test against corruption of either the Drum audio file or corruption of the BiAB sgu file if you haven't done so already.

In the New project, you may also want to Rt click on the Master Button and select the Set Mix to Flat, Dry and Center and see if that makes a difference when you export the audio.

At the moment, my guess is that because of the short duration of the drum hits, the Mute function may not be catching the first 'hit' each time allowing both initial hits to ring out and cause brief clipping regardless if they are playing on one channel or two.

Mike,

Can you upload a clip of the beginning of the audio in Dropbox (or something similar) and then post the Dropbox link to that clip here in the forum?

We'll be able to hear what you mean, then. It will help fully appreciate your problem.

Regards,
Noel

I can't think of anything, but if you follow Noel's suggestion to post an audio example, that could help us.

Bit/Rate mismatch maybe?
What are you using to audition the resulting WAV file?
Is that player set to 16/44 (which is what BiaB would export at)?
Just a guess.

Guys, thank you for all the help!
Charlie you got it! In your last sentence, that what was happening:

"At the moment, my guess is that because of the short duration of the drum hits, the Mute function may not be catching the first 'hit'..."

It sounded well, not as clipped note, but as somebody stepped on the frog.

I exported whole drum line and everything is fine, those "bad" notes are playing as they should. It will only take me a few minutes to work the mutes in DAW. I guess it is not very common.

Again, thank you!

Mike.

Charlie,

That's very impressive problem solving!

Regards,
Noel

Very good. Glad you got it worked out.

Hi Rustyspoon,

Would you mind freezing the tracks in a song file that has this issue and sending it to support@pgmusic.com? I'm glad you found a workaround, but if this is a bug I'd love to replicate and report it so it can be fixed.

Thanks
Kent
PG Music