Major bug: Track effects fail to render

There seems to be a persistent and major bug in the Montage in that track effects can fail to render. The plugin in question is Focusrite Red 3 Compressor. This plugin is not set to be bypassed, and Montage Effects in the track inspector are turned on (green). No matter what settings I try, the Montage plays back correctly with the compressor settings but the rendered file is at the original volume, as if no compressor had been used.

Note that the Master Section is set to 0 dB and that loudness is handled directly inside the Montage. Updating to WaveLab 10.0.40 did not help. I’m using macOS 10.15.5.

The following screenshots show all the Montage and render settings.

Thanks in advance for any help. As far as I can tell this appears to be a bug.

Followup: This appears to be a bug with in Red 3 Compressor or in its interaction with WaveLab 10. The first screenshot below shows the render with Red 3 Compressor, while the second was rendered using WaveLab’s built-in compressor on this track:

I’ll switch to Steinberg’s compressor for this work but do hope there’s a way to recognize which plugins are compatible with the latest version of WaveLab and which are not.

I don’t know if it is possible but it would certainly be nice if WL could tell you what plugins are incompatible. Maybe that would solve a lot of problems. Not a programmer so I don’t know if such a thing is possible. FWIW

When I read this post I knew the answer was going to be the plugin being used, not WaveLab. You should contact Focusrite. I highly doubt they have tested their plugins in WaveLab specifically.

Too many plugin developers only test Cubase and then assume the rest of the Steinberg apps will be OK if Cubase is OK which is clearly not true, and in my opinion this is why we see so many 3rd party plugin issues within WaveLab.

It would be very smart for Steinberg to do better outreach to plugin developers to see if they’re testing WaveLab specifically, have NFR licenses for WaveLab, and give them some additional info on how to avoid issues in WaveLab that we so commonly see.

Clearly, there are some challenges and common bug/errors that come up year after year with new or not perfectly coded plugins that I think could be easily avoided and save many headaches with a little effort.

When I decide to introduce a new plugin to my workflow, I put it through some extensive rendering tests before using it on a project. It’s a 50/50 chance that it passes my test or not and if it doesn’t pass the test, it’s no surprise. I then have to decide if it’s worth my time to report the issue to the plugin developer and get it working or just ignore it and not use it.

Thanks for your replies. What I don’t understand is: (1) Why did this plugin render perfectly with past versions of WaveLab? If I’m not mistaken it worked with earlier versions of WL 10.

(2) Why does this plugin play back perfectly in the Montage but not render? This seems to imply that the bug is in WL rather than the plugin.

@PG, could you perhaps offer any insights? If some plugins play back perfectly from within the Montage but don’t render, how are we supposed to work with WL?

Why does this plugin play back perfectly in the Montage but not render? This seems to imply that the bug is in WL rather than the plugin.

Not at all. This rather means the plugin can’t copy safely its parameters from the playback doamain to the render domain.

You don’t meet this problem with serious plugins.

Philippe

This comes down to lack of proper testing by the plugin developer. They probably only tested Cubase which of course doesn’t have Clip FX or Montage Track/Output FX.

It’s way too common and because of this, I think Steinberg really needs to provide better info and tools so we don’t have so many 3rd party plugin issues, and if there is any way to make WaveLab more 3rd party plugin friendly, that would be good too.

To be honest, these days I’m finding Wavelab 10 more plugin friendly and really no more problematic than Cubase in this regard. In my opinion, most recent VST3 plugins from reputable developers could be expected to function with no issues. There’s aways room for improvement though… but most of this improvement looks like it’s on the plugin developer side. If Wavelab had a way of warning the user that a plugin is not functioning correctly during rendering, this would be a great advantage but I doubt this would be feasible.

There used to be a list, but it is now out of date. After a while it turned into a whingeing list. In my opinion, a list is not particularly helpful since it’s really difficult to keep up to date and problems may depend on a wide range of parameters… VST3/VST2, plugin version, circumstances of use, OS and so on.

Yeah, it’s certainly better than WaveLab 8.5 era, but it’s also not too hard to find a plugin that doesn’t work, if it’s a small or not serious company.

I too stick to a solid core group that give me no problems really.

What’s interesting is that the Weiss DS1-MK3 from Softube seems to work fine, but the new Weiss EQ1 has a rendering problem. I made them aware of it and hopefully they can fix it.

The new Toneprojeccts Unisum that is getting a lot of praise right now mostly works, but I think I got a crash from it while quitting. I emailed with the developer and he just sent me a new beta of it that hopefully solves it. So it just goes to show that us WaveLab users just need to make the developers know that they can and should test WaveLab more thoroughly and not just Cubase. Some are responsive, and some are not.

This plugin is from Focusrite, I think the largest manufacturer of audio interfaces—hardly a small or unserious company. Still, this is helpful to know.

Right, definitely a big company but I am not sure how serious they take their plugins compared to a company that only focuses on plugins. They probably test them in Pro Tools, Logic, Cubase, and that’s about it.

You should let them know about the problem so they can fix it since I don’t think it’s a WaveLab fix.

My feeling is that Focusrite provides plugins to help sell their hardware. Period.

Exactly. They don’t depend on the plugins to survive as a company. They simply have them add value to their interfaces, or look more attractive when people are deciding between an interface that comes with plugins and ones that do not.

Indeed. That tendency happens a little too often. Some supposedly ‘reputable’ companies view plugins as throwaway candy to attract customers. Very bad practice.