Offline bouncing w/ an active PT Bridge track = hash

[Eric Lambert]

Today I made an offline bounce (the session was just 3 audio tracks, each playing for about 30 seconds, one after the other) and the resulting WAV file had digital hash throughout. In my session there is also an Aux track set to monitor my Mac's output via a PT Audio Bridge input. Nothing was actually playing from the Mac.

I went back and muted the Aux track, rebounced and the WAV was clean.

I noticed hash in a coworkers bounce last week and we discovered that the culprit was the same. He had a hidden aux track -- an Audio Bridge input. When he muted that track the hash disappeared.

This feels like a bug. At any rate, I'm curious if anyone else has experienced it. You'd only notice once listening back to your bounce, and it seems to be most noticeable during louder material. Quieter music might not even produce the hash (we have yet to test this).

[Eric Lambert]

Adding some context to this, I tested a few things and couldn't reliably recreate the issue. It seems to be a combo of having the Mac's out routed to an Audio Bridge, having some app recently sending audio through that bridge even though it doesn't need to be actively playing anything, having the aux channel open in PT during the offline bounce, and probably some other factor I'm forgetting.

The other odd thing is that those offline bounces which contained the noise completed their bounces very fast. Unusually fast. Without the uber-quick dialogue boxes which say something like "processing the file" or whatever it is.

I'm not sure it's a bug, as in a malfunction, it may just be part of the deal when having an aux track open to the Mac and its many audio apps. Muting the bridge track is the right way to handle this anyway.

[smurfyou]

Maybe a warning popup if you have a bridge track would be good?