Muted tracks slow down offline render speed

[chmaha]

When I have one track I manage to get over 60x realtime rendering. When I add 3 duplicate tracks and mute them, the render drops down to just over 30x realtime. Shouldn't the render process completely ignore the muted tracks or does it work like this by design?

EDIT: I definitely have "Do not process muted tracks" checked...

[Justin]

If you use a larger rendering blocksize does that difference in speed get reduced?

[schwa]

Not really the point of the post, but if you are actually rendering only one track in a project, it should be faster to render the stem than the entire project.

[chmaha]

Originally Posted by Justin

If you use a larger rendering blocksize does that difference in speed get reduced?

Yes! I thought offline rendering was completely disconnected from the audio device? Is there a sweet spot? I just put in 2048 as a test value and it made the world of difference...

[chmaha]

Originally Posted by schwa

Not really the point of the post, but if you are actually rendering only one track in a project, it should be faster to render the stem than the entire project.

Thanks, I'm running wav+cue renders, DDP etc...

[Justin]

Originally Posted by BethHarmon

Yes! I thought offline rendering was completely disconnected from the audio device? Is there a sweet spot? I just put in 2048 as a test value and it made the world of difference...

2048 or 4096 is usually pretty solid. Caveat is that if you use fx automation that doesn’t support sample accurate automation it will sound different

[chmaha]

Originally Posted by Justin

2048 or 4096 is usually pretty solid. Caveat is that if you use fx automation that doesn’t support sample accurate automation it will sound different

I spoke too soon...the render speeds are now hovering around 40x offline for multiple tracks vs 120x for a single track.

My bad...I had the first folder soloed but the rest were not muted. I wonder if it would be possible to have solo work in the same way?

[Justin]

Looks like we can make muted tracks more fully skipped by rendering (it didn't fully process them but did a bunch of housekeeping).

Re: non-soloed tracks: looking into this (a bit trickier)

[heda]

Originally Posted by Justin

2048 or 4096 is usually pretty solid. Caveat is that if you use fx automation that doesn’t support sample accurate automation it will sound different

I always wondered which things would affect the rendering so I never changed the setting even when the export is faster.

Maybe this parameter could be smarter and set itself to 2048 or 4096 if a quick scan on the project doesn't find fx automation that would cause the issue. This way the user doesn't need to remember if they changed the setting or not, and always have better performance when it is appropriate.