Exporting Audio by sound skips group FX??

OrenJellow

I am trying to export my song for mixing and mastering (by someone else). I exported my song by sound to have each instrument and one hit on their own tracks. This worked but during playback, I found that any FX I had on the group track for drums did not export. How was this overlooked?

Do I have to break out each individual drum sound to its own group to remedy this?

darkwaves

It's not "skipping" group effects. You're exporting before the signal routes through group effects. If you want to export effects on each sound, then put your effects on the sound.

Imagine you had a compressor on a drum group. You have kick, snare and hats. The kick hits, triggers the compressor and the other sounds duck for a few milliseconds. You mute the snare and kick and export just the hats. Do you expect them to have the same sound they'd have if you exported the entire group?

Or imagine you had some sort of lofi plugin that's adding "dirt"; maybe vinyl noise. You export each sound slot one by one through the group effects. Now you have that same dirt x16.

My point: Even if maschine (or literally any software that routes audio in a logical way) had some sort of automated system to export group/buss effects on every individual track going into the group/buss; the result wouldn't be the same as the original group/buss. Don't use group effects if you're planning to export individual sounds.

OrenJellow

Maschine expansions (which are wonderful) come with group effects in place on pretty much every kit.

D-One

Yes, Maschine bypasses the Group FX when you Export Pads individually, just like it bypasses the Master when you Export Groups. The hierarchy is Pads>Group>Master.

@darkwaves is correct, if Group FX is applied to individual sounds, the result is everything will sound very different... Depends a bit on the FX tho. Most music software does this, if there's a Bus/Group all tracks inside it bypass it's FX when exported but you also get the full bus exported as a stereo track out.

If you still want the Group FX applied then your only option is to solo each Pad and export the Group, one time per each Pad, it's time-consuming and will change how things sound but it achieves what you want.

OrenJellow

I appreciate the feedback but it doesn’t change the sound (beyond what I’m expecting). Maschine expansions use group effects. By tediously duplicating the group for the number of sounds used, deleting the duplicate sounds in the newly created groups, I achieve what I need but the workflow is not user friendly. If I didn’t use the expansions, this wouldn’t be an issue for me as I never use group effects.

To sum this up, I wish expansions didn’t use group effects and just applied them to the sounds individually. Sure it will take up slightly more processing but I’d be willing to bet that the average user won’t understand what to do when things sound different when they export their stems for mixing and find that it doesn’t sound the same.

D-One

Personally, I'd prefer no Groups FX on Groups/kits too, I always remove them as most times it's just a Maximizer/Limiter to make people go "wow, it's so loud its slapping" which doesn't interest me.

That solution sounds 5x more time-consuming than what I suggested, but if it makes sense to you do it I guess..

Note that in Mixing there's a reason people use some fx individually and others on a 'Mix Bus', especially for drums, there's a "glue" logic to it. I dare you to find a DAW that doesn't do the same as Maschine when dealing with Group Exports, Ableton does it, Logic does it, Cubase does it, etc... I wouldn't mind an option to export Pads automatically with Groups FX tho, as occasionally it may be an fx where it's fine but since I saw that before I doubt Maschine would be the first.

Kaldosh

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/121073#Comment_121073

The way I do it is by saving the group fx chain and reload it in my dDAW eventually through Maschine fx plugin in the corresponding group bus .

OrenJellow

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/121078#Comment_121078

I totally get the reason for group processing. Thanks for the insight.