Bouncing Audio from VST

[NikTheGypsy]

Greetings,
I generally use quite a selection of Virtual instruments in my music, and generally, I never really did too much research about this particular topic, but apparently, there is much debate and I was curious what some of you had to say about it. When recording with virtual instruments, and then bouncing down to audio, is there really a difference in the way in which you bounce the audio? For example, fast bounce, v.s real time v.s. no audio etc. Which way produces the best quality bounces? Thanks, as always.

 

[Nimvi]

If everything is programmed well, there should be no difference that I can think of. But some plugins do/don't use oversampling on certain bouncing methods (which is usually configurable), or they don't detect the offline-bouncing as such (this is usually DAW related). For example: in VCC you can set the oversampling for Real Time and Offline rendering individually. So if you have it set to a lower oversample rate for realtime, and you render realtime, the results would be different from offline rendering.

I've also had occasions where midi-triggered VSTs, like drum samplers, had timing glitches in my offline renders because of buffering issues. If I rendered them real time, even though things sounded completely destroyed from the low bufferrate during the render, the endresult would be perfect.

So I would say: just go with what you like best, but keep the other methods in mind for when you run into issues. And be aware of those on/offline rendering settings in your plugins.