User Manual

MASTERING
946
MOTU Audio System effects. One way to do this is
to raise the buffer settings for your audio system.
1024 is a good setting at which to mix.
Higher buffer settings free up more processing
power for mixing at the expense of increased input
monitoring latency. This may or may not be an
issue for you, depending on how go about mixing
and mastering your project. In many cases, input
monitoring latency only comes into play at the
beginning of a recording project when you are first
laying down tracks. While monitoring live input
during recording, you can reduce the buffer size to
eliminate monitoring delay and afterwards raise it
again for increased processing power during
mixing and mastering.
While mastering, however, your mix may include
real-time elements (software synths or MIDI
triggered effects, for example) that require that you
maintain low buffer settings. In this case, you need
to do the best you can to balance your system
resources with the demands of these real-time
elements of your mix.
If your project contains only audio and MIDI
assigned to virtual instruments (e.g. no real-time
input from aux tracks from external sources), then
you are ready to bounce your project to disk. If
your project contains any external real-time
sources (MIDI tracks assigned to hardware MIDI
Instruments, external processing, virtual
instruments, etc.) you have two strategies for
finishing your mix:
■ Real-time bounce to disk
■ Rendering
These techniques are discussed in the next few
sections.
REAL-TIME BOUNCE TO DISK
Let’s say you have a fairly complex project with
MIDI tracks submixed externally and their
combined audio signal entering Digital Performer
via an aux track. You may also have some external
virtual instruments (like Propellerhead’s Reason)
coming into some aux tracks as well. If your mix
sounds good at this point, you can perform a real
time bounce to disk as follows:
1 Reassign the outputs of all your audio and aux
tracks to an unused stereo bus. You may have to
create one if one does not exist. It might help to use
an audio bundle and give it a name such as ‘my mix
bus’.
2 Create a new stereo audio track and set the input
of the audio track to the newly created bus (‘my
mix bus’). You may also set the output of your
audio track to your original monitor outs so you
can monitor the progress.
3 One final touch: rename the new audio track
‘final mix’. When Digital Performer writes the new
file to disk, the file will assume the track name.
If you open up the Audio Monitor and hit play in
the transport, you should see level representing
your mix on your mix bus. Now you can rewind to
the beginning, and record the entire mix.
External virtual instrument compensation
If you are using a virtual instrument that runs as a
stand-alone application alongside Digital
Performer (like Propellerhead’s Reason), you may
wish to compensate for latency by pushing the
MIDI tracks assigned to that instrument ahead in
time. This can easily be accomplished with the
non-destructive Time Shift MIDI plug-in. If your
virtual instrument MIDI track has data starting at
1|1|000, you can shift your entire project later by
one measure to avoid having the first note of that
track disappear.