When I bounce stems, they come out off-beat/time... What's wrong?

Question

When I bounce stems, they come out off-beat/time... What's wrong?

Hey all,

This has always been something I've noticed, but it never bothered me until now. I've recently started mixing my own stuff (not just other people's tracks) in stems to utilize more CPU during a mixdown... But, when I bounce stems in Logic (Export Tracks function) they come out off-time. It wouldn't be a huge deal, but I make groovy music, so the very, very minute placements of a drum hit or vocal are extremely important and a lot of that groove gets lost when I have to manually move the stems. Can anyone offer some advice? I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong, but I have been told by other people that they experience this. I can't work this way, unfortunately, so I'd really like to find a workaround (although, it should just not happen lol). Thanks in advance for your help. 🙂

Posted on Dec 30, 2012 8:07 AM

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Answer 1

Dec 30, 2012 10:18 AM in response to Pancenter

Umm... they're just out of time... with each other, with other tracks, and with the grid. Let's say the kick is hitting on the 1,2,3,4... when I load the stem in, it hits on fractions of each of those beats, not actually on the beat... some things are even 1 whole beat off the grid. You would assume when bouncing stems, like any other DAW, that they would be on the same grid... The tempo is the same in the new project and everything.

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Answer 2

Pancenter

Level 6

14,788 points

Dec 30, 2012 11:55 AM in response to BrandonScrushy

When you export the stems from the original project do you have plugins on the Master Bus?

I suspect it has to do with how the Preferences/Audio/GeneralTab-Plug-in-Latency Compensation is set and that you probably have latency inducing plugins on the master bus and or other tracks.

Latency causing plugins Plugins on the Master bus will cause the entire project to be offset from realtime.

Troubleshooting order:

1. Export stems with pan/volume automation and overload protection set to off, that will eliminate any of those factors.

2. In the original Project, Preferences/Audio/GeneralTab Enable Low-Latency Mode, set the limit to 0ms. Try bouncing the stems with Low-Latency mode enabled.

3. Experiment with the Preferences/Audio/General Plug-in-Latency Compensation settings... All/Off/...etc when exporting

This looks like a lot of work but should only take an hour and if one of the methods works.. you won't have to worry about it anymore.. and yes, this should not happen but Logic doesn't have a fully compensated bus, almost but not quite, probably due to some of the older audio architecture.

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