User Manual

MASTERING
947
For virtual instrument plug-ins, Digital Performer
provides automatic latency compensation.
External effects compensation
Externally processed tracks can also benefit from
latency compensation. For example, you may
decide to send a drum submix out to a vintage
compressor and feed the result back into Digital
Performer’s mixing board. If the input buffers are
set at 256 samples, for example, you can used the
Shift command (Edit menu) to advance your drum
tracks by 256 samples.
RENDERING AUDIO
Another strategy for finishing your mix is to render
all elements of your mix as audio. This procedure
requires more disk space, but these commodities
are quite affordable these days. One strong
advantage of this approach is complete portability.
For example, you may open up the project in the
future and find that you don’t have access to the
same outboard processing gear or virtual
instruments. If this is a concern for you, it may be a
good idea to render these elements. After all the
elements of your mix are rendered as audio, then
you can perform a normal, non-real time bounce
to disk.
Rendering software MIDI instruments
In most cases, Bounce to Disk can be used to
render your virtual instruments as audio. See
“Virtual Instruments” on page 929 for more
details.
Rendering external MIDI instruments
Recording the audio output of MIDI modules as
audio exactly preserves the performance of that
instrument.
Some MIDI modules include digital outputs which
you may want to take advantage of. If you own
many instruments with digital outputs, it may be a
good idea to consider a MOTU 308 digital
interface. In addition to functioning as a digital
patchbay, it allows you to keep all your digital gear
wired directly into Digital Performer. This means
you can record the output of a sound module
without disconnecting the analog outputs.
If you use multiple MIDI modules, chances are
good that you are already using a mixer to sum the
outputs of these devices. You can render the entire
MIDI submix by recording the output of the mixer.
Another method is to use an alternative set of
outputs or busses to avoid re-patching the outputs
of your mixer.
Under some circumstances, you may want to
record the outputs of your MIDI tracks
individually for more flexibility when mixing in
Digital Performer. If you find yourself doing this
frequently, you may want to dedicate a set of sends
to inputs on your audio interface. Another
technique is to employ a patchbay so you can
quickly route signals from the mixer to the audio
interface. This also eliminates unnecessary
additional gain stages between the output of your
MIDI module and the input of your audio
interface.
Recording individual MIDI tracks presents some
opportunities to enhance your mix. You may own
an outboard processor that has a certain ‘magic’.
Recording individual MIDI tracks through this
processor one at a time effectively multiplies the
number of instances that you have of this
processor.
Rendering external processors
Recording the output of a signal processor does not
require any latency compensation as discussed
earlier because it does not involve real-time
monitoring. This is another advantage to
rendering, as it leaves you with one less thing to
worry about.