Ableton Forum

Hello! Few days ago some kind of mix was rendered on the typical workstation with sound card on board. and after listening em on the speakers i noticed a low quality sound. very poor, a way worse than original recordings have. so a question appeared - can it be because of that pc had a bad sound card, e.g. do sound card affects a "render" process ?

The soundcard does not affect the render process, afaik.

It wouldn't affect it that much, just extremely super subtle effects.

some guy said me that sound card used in any sound operations including writing wav file. but as can be prospected it is no in kind of hardware playing and signal pick-up. more like a calculation with cpu, because in first situation render process supposed to take the whole mix time, a hour.
that is so confusing and second-hand info is terrible. is there a technical primary source on subj?

I'd say it's not involved, no more than your monitor is involved in rendering a 3d scene or applying effects to a photoshop image.

i would also say the soundcard is not involved in rendering, but not 100% sure

but if instead of "render to disk" i record on another track it should.....

am i right?

i hear a pop everytime my render process is finished.

theoretically the sound card should not be involved.. but then why would live access my soundcard during that time? unless it's to turn it off.. but i doubt it.

the rendering process is not real time, so can't sync with the sound card's clock.

No the soundcard is not used. As an experiment, go to the preferences and change the audio to "no audio". Live will no longer have a connection to your soundcard. You can still render and the results are as you'd expect.