I am currently working on a song with 9 MIDI tracks. Eight of the tracks are routed to the Motif XF VST. One of them (the sax) is routed to Halion (I like its sax voices better than the ones on the XF).

Now I want to make an audio mixdown of the song into an MP3 file. I thought I could do this by checking Channel Batch Export in the Export Audio Mixdown dialog and then check both of the VST instruments. But this results in 2 separate audio files: one for the audio coming from the Motif XF, the other for the audio coming from Halion. Without checking Channel Batch Export, I can only export one VST instrument at a time.

I looked around and found some confusing descriptions of using a Group Track, but I don’t know if this is the right way to go.

I’m sure there must be a way to do this. I just don’t know what it is. Hopefully someone around here does…

You aren’t trying to export multiple VST instruments to an audio file.  You’re trying to export one VST instrument (Halion) and one Motif XF routed through its VST Editor, to one audio file at the same time.

Channel Batch Export isn’t for making one file out of multiple channels, it’s for making individual files for each channel in your project. 

An example of when to use that function would be if your project is going to be mixed by someone else in a different DAW and you want to give them all the parts of it as separate consolidated audio files.

Halion is a VST instrument with it’s own sound engine, so it will export nicely, even if it is not rendered to an audio track first.  The Motif XF Editor does not have a built in sound engine and so all the audio comes from the Motif XF itself.

You also may have noticed that DAWs can export audio offline several times faster than real time, but in this case, if there is a function that will allow you to export the audio coming in from your Motif XF AND audio from other tracks and VSTs at the same time, down to one file, then it will be a real time export function and not an offline one.

You are only monitoring the audio, through Cubase, from the Motif XF, in the hope that it will behave in the same way as Halion and so a ‘workaround’ is to record the audio from your Motif XF to an audio track first, before exporting all of the tracks in your project to one file.

Like I’ve said many times, I am hazy on Cubase matters, so I might be wrong!  You certainly don’t need to check Channel Batch Export, though.  Look for real time export functions.

Turns out that a Group Track was the way to do it. You can route as many audio outputs as you want (2 in my case) to a group track and then do an Audio Mixdown from that track to an MP3, WAV, etc.

That’s handy to know.

Have you had any improvement on your audio levels?

philwoodmusic - 01 December 2015 08:33 PM

Have you had any improvement on your audio levels?

I finally figured out the problem with my audio levels.

It turns out there are many different places in Cubase where you can set the volume level:

* The Motif XF VST Editor. The Volume control at the top right
controls the Tone Generator level. And there is a Volume
control for each of the 16 parts.

* Each Cubase track, including MIDI tracks, audio tracks,
group channel tracks.

* Each VST audio lane.

Many of these volume controls are in series with each other. My problem was that at different times two or more of these controls would have been inadvertently set too low, so that if I increased the level on one of them, the other one (further downstream or upstream) was still creating the problem. This made it really difficult to isolate the cause of the low levels.

I finally figured this out and got all of the controls set properly, and all of a sudden I got decent levels of recorded audio. In the process, I learned to use the MixConsole, which pulls most of this information together in one window.

It all seems reasonably simple to me now, but this is after around eight months working hard to climb the Cubase learning curve. These things can be really opaque until you figure them out.

Thanks to this learning curve, it took me about a year to complete the song I just finished. But I think the next one will go a lot quicker…

I also am trying to make a stereo mix of several XS tracks PLUS an internal VST grand piano.  I am able to get all the XS tracks (assigned to a group) thru the mixing console to record to an audio track.  BUT, even though I have assigned the XLN “addictive Keys” piano to the same “group”, I can’t get it to record (added to) the audio track.

Cubase Artist 8.5
Win 7 64
Tascam 144 USB
XS6

I might be wrong, but if I understand what you are trying to I don’t believe Cubase Artist allows routing audio from a VST instrument track anywhere except the master.

I’d love to be corrected about this.

I know this is true for Cubase Elements and Cubase AI. Audio routing restrictions is what annoys me the most about the less expensive versions of Cubase.