Question

The bouncing/transform to audio or realtime audio track /stem export is quite slow compared to other DAWs.

This also applies to stem export of raw WAV files with all plugins disabled. Exporting 30 stems took me an hour today and there was no processing required - only saving WAV files. In the past I used Ableton Live and it never took more than 15 minutes to do something like this.

So, it can be done faster and I hope Studio One will be improved in this regard.

It seems like all plugins stay active when rendering a single track and this unnessecarily slows down the bouncing.

Answer 1

The answer here is, when you have the dialog box open for bouncing or exporting, uncheck the realtime option. Also, if you want to render without plugins, turn off the plugins in the mixer first. I can export a mixdown of a 3 minute song, with 40 channels and a fair few plugins, in about 35 seconds in Studio One on a Windows 7, i5 3.2GHz machine with 8GB RAM. My computer does not even break a sweat.

To summarise, this feature is already there in Studio One. I believe you are just not using it correctly.

Answer 2

Thank you for your answer Jonny!

Now, I'm a bit confused. My computer is new and is more powerful than yours and my plugins were disabled as I wanted to export the unprocessed stems for use in Pro Tools. There was also no sample rate conversion involved and for the whole time the CPU was utilized at around 30%. For you it seems to work way better.

I was also surprised that the bounce times when transforming tracks did not improve much compared to my old machine which had much less processing power. The speed is still around 3-4x realtime, compared to around 2x on my old computer. When I globally disable plugins rendering speed goes up to 10-12x realtime. My CPU is a Intel i7 8700K and I have 32GB of RAM and a very fast SSD.

Sometimes I also use Pro Tools and there I saw speeds of 50x or even up to 70x realtime when committing a track with one or two plugins on it - on a less powerful computer.

Another thing is, that I am on Mac OS and I remember reading an article that claimed that DAWs are generally faster/less CPU intensive on Windows platforms. Unfortunately ASIO can't handle two different audio devices like Mac OS can, so I had to go with Mac OS.

Still, I think that Studio One can and should be improved in this regard. Disabling all plugins for faster rendering is just a workaround. This also doesn't work so well if the track to be transformed has plugins on it, because afterwards the global activation of all the other plugins won't work anymore. Everytime I did this I had to activate them in another way. Studio One should at least deactivate all unnecessary plugins or tracks automatically while bouncing. Maybe stem export could also be done in parallel thereby using all available CPU resources. Stem export in Ableton never took me more than 15 minutes and I really hoped that with a new computer everything would be much faster.

Answer 3

In addition to my original post:

It seems like the exceptionally long export time was caused by a bug. When I wanted to use the stems in Pro Tools I had to realize that Studio One did not give me my 30 stems but 30 times the whole mix (and the mix in mono for all mono tracks). This ruined my day as I wanted to mix the track on Neve console that I was allowed to use on this day. Later on, I could replicate the behaviour and it happens when I choose 'tracks' instead of 'channels' in the stem export dialog. This bug was probably introduced with one the latest updates.

Besides that, I still think that rendering is too slow in Studio One and could be improved significantly.

Answer 4

Ah interesting, I hadn't noticed that bug yet- I'll have to test that one a bit myself. If you haven't already, you might wanna file a Support ticket to report the bug to the dev team- they're pretty good about fixing stuff like that.

Answer 5

Ignore JonnyLipsham, he thinks you're rendering it in realtime, doesn't have a clue about the real issue.

I also have the same FAST CPU as the OP 8700k overclocked to 5ghz on all six cores, and a 970 evo NVME SSD + 32GB fast ram!

PT's flies by at these tasks in the blink of an eye, takes forever on S1.

I concur with the you OP, the bounce or track transform times in Studio One are abysmal. Slowest in class. I also work with Pro Tools and it's very fast there, because using bounce or commit (esp the latter) does what you say, it intelligently knows to dedicate all CPU to just that track and is often 10x for me with some heavy plugs on the track I'm freezing (track transform) or committed (bouncing to another track with plugs embeeded). On S1 I'm lucky to hit 2x with the exact same project/plugs! THIS is a bug.

If you turn off all plugs then yes, S1 can work fast (10x even with 3 heavy plugs on the track in question) but is not good because you loose the status of you global insert bypass IF you also want to keep the plugs enabled on the track being bounced.

Studio One needs a much more elegant freezing process to, like pro tools, one button on the edit window without having to open up the track inspector, and a greyed out plugs/track that can't be moved so show it's frozen. At the moment, track transform isn't really the same at all as it never leaves a clear state of what you've done, it's essentially a bounce not a 'freeze' even if you CAN retransform back the track shows no indication, and can also be transformed further losing the original state/plugs.

S1 is sorely lacking here and stops it from professional workflow.

Answer 6

I switched from Pro Tools. But I still go back to PT to mix post projects. Because S1 is like 10 times slower when mixing down. This is RIDICULOUS!