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Hey Ya'll

Hope everyone is doing well. I have a question for some of ya:

I have a session with a zillion tracks and many with all sorts of fader volume automation.

Im running into some red in my master bus and am concerned about too many peaks when I bounce down the session.

Is there any way to notch down all faders globally, say a couple of db, without having to manually rewrite all the automation for all tracks?

I'm in Cubase sx3. I can't seem to figure it out.

Thanks...and hope everyone is revved up for audiokid's new contest.:tongue:

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bouldersound Sun, 05/15/2011 - 00:37

If my thinking is right (no guarantee there), with floating point processing you should be able to lower the main fader to solve that problem.

In Pro Tools (7LE in my case) you could select the "All Tracks" control group, switch to volume envelope view and lower one of the envelopes after the last point.

In Sony Vegas 6 you could Ctrl-A (select all) and lower one fader and all the others will follow.

Adjusting at the track level will mess with any level-sensitive processing on buses.

Mo Facta Sun, 05/22/2011 - 05:50

There are a couple other ways.

1. Go to your mixer window and select all of your audio tracks. Then right click and select the "link tracks" option. Once engaged you can control all channel faders by simply moving one of them. You can then unlink them when you're done to restore independence.

2. Highlight all audio events in the project window. In the info line above the timebase ruler you'll see a clip volume parameter where you can simultaneously change the gain of all selected tracks in real time. This is one of the great features of Cubase that other DAWs do not have.

I'd just like to point out that I feel merely lowering the master fader is not a good idea if you're using any plugin processing. All the stereo bus floating point gain operation does is lower the post fader output level of all the tracks for summing at the master bus. It does not lower clip volume and will not remedy any distortion or clipping that you may be experiencing internally within plugins. And I really don't care if the plugin is 64-bit bazillion times oversampled. Most plugins introduce distortion well before you approach full scale (0dBfs).

Cheers :)

MadMax Tue, 05/24/2011 - 04:47

I'm not at all familiar with cuebase, but in SloStools, there is a "volume trim" setting. You can select all tracks (or a group(s)), switch the control to "volume trim", and simply pull back the trim on all the tracks by as much as you want - leaving all the automation in place.

IIRC, there is a trim setting in Reaper, so I would imagine that there should be an equivalent setting in cuebase.

[edit]

You might also try putting a limiter on the 2-bus, and holding back the over's... as long as they're not too hard of overages and you're not slammin' the compression too hard, it might be a decent alternative.

I generally don't ever touch the master fader unless I'm fading in/out of the front/end of a song... otherwise, it sits @ 0db.