7.3.1 cs5 (upgrade from cs3) breaks Bounce To Disk

[robert_kennedy]

I just downloaded 7.3.1cs5 a couple of nights ago and started using it.

Tonight I went to bounce some rough mixes to disk and noticed a couple of things. I'm not sure whether they're related:

1. During Bounce To Disk operation, the audio is sometimes distorted. If I play the same audio back from the open PTLE session, there is no distortion.

2. The file that results from Bounce To Disk doesn't sound anything like the audio during playback from the session. It is recognizably the same take of the same instruments playing the same tune, but the relative levels of the instruments sound slightly different, the effects of all or nearly all the plug-ins (like reverb) are missing(!), and the output level is far lower than it should be (maybe because the plug-ins aren't getting printed to the output file).

I've always heard some people speculate that recording to a new track would give better output in some way than Bounce to Disk, but in those conversations the differences -- if any -- are acknowledged to be subtle. In this case the differences are NOT subtle.

Just to make sure I'm not crazy, I recorded the same mixdowns to a new stereo track in PTLE and then exported that track to a new file. It sounds just fine, no problems. And it sounds very different from the result of "Bounce to Disk." Very different indeed.

I'm not in a panic because there is a workaround, but man, what an ugly and egregious problem. I sure hope Digi will fix it. Anybody else hearing the same thing?

-- Robert

iMac Core2 duo
10.4.9
PTLE 7.3.1cs5

[robert_kennedy]

Oh, how embarassing. My bounce source somehow got set to one of my reverb send busses instead of the final mixdown interface. My bad. I still don't know about the distortion. More experimentation will reveal whether the distortion is still there, and whether it's there in the output file or only in the audio signal during bounce.

[Phil Jeffers]

Phewww... I was about to race into the studio to check this just after reading the heading of this post!!!