Muted notes cause duplicated vocal track to lose synchronization

Synthesizer V Studio
1

Hi,

My normal workflow when creating harmony vocals is as follows:

  1. I finish the main vocal track.

  2. I duplicate the entire track.

  3. Sometimes I change the voice database or tweak the voice settings.

  4. I only want the harmony to sing in certain sections of the song.

The obvious way to do this is to mute all notes on the duplicated track, then unmute only the sections where the harmony should be heard.

However, this produces unexpected behavior.

As soon as I mute the unwanted notes, the duplicated track is no longer synchronized with the original. The harmony sections start several measures too early, as if Synthesizer V ignores the timing of the muted notes.

Here are the results I get:

  • All notes active: Both tracks stay perfectly synchronized.

  • Notes muted: The duplicated track shifts forward by several measures.

  • Muted notes deleted instead: Everything stays perfectly synchronized again.

This makes muting unusable for this workflow, even though it seems like the ideal feature for selectively enabling harmony parts.

Deleting the unused notes is a workaround, but it defeats the purpose of duplicating the entire vocal track in the first place, since I lose all the material I may want to use later or modify.

To me, it appears that muted notes are not being counted correctly in the timeline during playback, causing the duplicated track to lose synchronization.

Can anyone reproduce this behavior? If so, is this a known issue, or am I overlooking a setting?

Thanks!

2

is the duplicated track “unlinked”? i’m essentially doing the same thing (in the standalone app) HOWEVER i duplicate the track as unlinked. then my workflow varies - i delete groups i don’t need, then merge all rest of the groups on the duplicated track. then tweak from there. so far it seems to all be in sync.

3

Yep, the track is duplicated as unlinked and no groups used, just one long track.

This has happened to me every now and then but I never had time to really find out why but rather just deleted the notes instead of having them muted and everything was back in sync again.

Last time was just a few days ago (v2.2.1 running as plugin in FL Studio).

This evening I have been trying to replicate the issue but everything works as it should.

I’m quite sure I will run into the issue again and next time I will try do get to the bottom of it.

It might be that it has to do with “Pause between notes”. Maybe these small gaps gets messed up when notes are muted and this cause forthcoming unmuted notes to play to early.

If any one run in to this problem or anything similar in relation to muted notes causing sync issues please reply here.

4

Update: I have now isolated and replicated the rendering offset bug. (.svp file attached)

It would be great if others checked the attached .svp file so we can confirm if this is a bug or something that I do wrong.

Maybe it’s fixed in the latest beta, maybe it’s just my computers, I have exactly the same behaviour on both Mac as well as PC.

Maybe note muting is not intended for the purpose that I want to use it.

I guess I could use workarounds like bringing the loudness to zero on selected notes, but then I wonder what’s is note muting intended for?

Any help solving this would be appreciated.

It has nothing to do with the DAW cache or host integration, as the bug persists identically even when opening the project in Synthesizer V Studio Standalone.

Furthermore, changing the internal cache settings or completely disabling the render cache inside Synthesizer V has no effect on the issue.

The bug is entirely tied to the “Mute Note” logic on tracks, which corrupts the timeline data structure when combined with rests/pauses of certain lengths between phrases.

How to reproduce using the attached .svp file (Alan Walker - Faded):

  1. Open the attached project.

  2. Look at the duplicated harmony track during the Pre-Chorus section.

  3. The first two lines of “Where are you now?” are muted.

  4. Look at the third “Where are you now?” line. You will visually see a ghost waveform drawn underneath it, and when playing it back, you will hear the word “Atlantis” from the upcoming Chorus.

  5. The rendering engine is completely skipping the required duration between the phrases, causing the subsequent unmuted phrases to shift backward and play several measures/seconds too early.

  6. If you unmute the notes, the phrase “Atlantis” immediately snaps back to its correct position in the Chorus.

Further testing and findings from this specific trigger:

  • Context-Specific Triggering (Works in some places, breaks in others): In the very beginning of the song (Verse 1), there is another muted section that works perfectly fine without causing any sync issues for the unmuted notes directly following it. Unmuting Verse 1 does not affect the bug later in the song. This proves that the bug isn’t a global cumulative error from the start, but is instead triggered locally by specific timeline layouts (like the longer rests/pauses found in the Pre-Chorus).

  • It is NOT a phoneme/lyric cache bug: I tested changing the repeated phrases from “Where are you now?” to unique words (“Where are you one/two/three”). This had absolutely no effect and the offset remained identical, proving it is a pure timing/buffer bug.

  • The 4-Measure Buffer Threshold: I experimented with the length of the pauses between the phrases. There is a clear threshold around the 4-measure (4 bars) mark. If the pause/rest between the muted sections is longer or shorter than 4 measures, the bug changes behavior or becomes inconsistent. This strongly points toward a buffer block size miscalculation inside the rendering engine.

  • The breaking point: If you eliminate the pauses entirely by stretching the muted notes until they touch each other, the ghost waveform of “Atlantis” disappears from the Pre-Chorus. However, the timeline data structure becomes so corrupted that the word “Atlantis” is completely lost by the engine and never renders or plays back at all later in the song.

  • Changing Re-Render Thresholds has no effect: I tested changing both “Max number of notes to trigger re-render” and “Max number of quarters to trigger re-render” in the Rendering Settings to various high and low values. It had absolutely no effect. This proves that the issue is not a failure to trigger an update, but rather that the rendering engine generates the wrong timeline offset every single time it recalculates a muted section.

It seems that under certain conditions, the engine drops either the muted notes, the adjacent rests, or the timing intervals between them instead of treating everything as solid timeline placeholders, causing these severe offset bugs in longer projects.

Hope the development team can look into this code discrepancy!

5

I tested it with your svp project and didn’t notice any timing offset. I also exported it to an external WAV file, and the lyrics “I’m faded” at bar 29 are perfectly synchronized.
I am using the 2.3.0tp1 version.

1 Like
6

if you turn off the top track totally and just listen to the second that that has muted notes, what do you then hear the third time the muted “where are you three“ comes in between bar 16 and 17?

Since it’s muted you should not hear anything but if the bug is there it will sing “atlantis” where it actually should a muted “where are you three”. that part is the first main bug part. “atlantis” comes later in the lyrics. so just to be clear the top of the two tracks has no bug since it has no muted notes. the bug is only present in the second track below thats contains some harmony notes and some muted notes.

7

No, in my side, the “altantis” is played correctly after the bar 22 (56,91 s).

1 Like
8

thanx for testing, that should hopefully mean that the bug will be fixed in upcoming stable v2.3.0.

how much i really do want to try out the new languages i don’t dare installing the beta since i have a feeling its a bit unstable.

if any one that is stil on v2.2.1 would be so kind to test the file we can at least confirm it as a bug in the current stable version.

it seems unlikely i should be alone having this issue on both my machines.

it would be nice if a dev could confirm it, so i can get it out of my head. : )

9

i noted that you assigned voices to the notes, not the track. that said, i assigned Sheena2 to the notes in both, and it all worked as expected. then i deleted the track 2 and copied the track one onto track 2 and unlinked them. then assigned a new voice Hayden and dropped the notes an octave - all working as expected.

however, not unlinking the group and then selecting the groups in track 2 and dropping a third, they are all muted - so i think there is a bug there. when i use a voice assigned to a track vs individual notes, there are no issues.

maybe while waiting on your support ticket with the Synth V support, a workaround would be to not assign voices to notes, but rather to the track. this seems to always work correctly.

10

hmm… what version are you on fossile. 2.2.1 or 2.3.0 beta?

I don’t get what you mean by “voices assigned to notes”.

I noticed that I had Sheena assigned as default voice in the two tracks and then I had at some point changed to Aurielle in the voice tab but that does not affect or cause the bug.

The bug is there for me no matter if I have any voices loaded at all, just playing the sinus tone, on all my computers in stand alone as well as vst plug.

Just to be clear, the top track has nothing bugged since it has no muted notes.

The bug occurs in the second track where parts of the notes are muted.

I can move the part where bug occurs by changing length of the last notes in “where are you one” “where are you two” and “where are you three” shortening the pausen between those phrases.

I’m out of idéas.

11

i’m on 2.2.1

what i mean - i think you selected the notes in the group and then assigned the voice. whereas if you try to simply change it at the track level, it doesn’t change the voice assigned to the notes themselves. i only figured this out because i didn’t have Aurielle and changing it on the track did nothing. only going into the group and selecting the notes.

sadly, i could not find a way to unassign a voice to the notes but i did not spend a lot of time with it.

12

You mean, selecting the group and updating the voice ?

You can only update the voice on a group of notes. If you select the same voice than the track, the voice name is cleared on the group of notes.
But when I do this in the second track in this project, my SynthV 2.3.0tp1 is crashing.

13

This happened to me recently as well. The muted notes threw everything off. As soon as I deleted the muted notes everything went back to normal. Windows 11. Ableton Live 12.

14

I had same problem and solved by deleting muted notes. But this is not the right solution, in my opinion.