Lately I started to "print" the finished synth tracks for several songs to audio, so we can keep working on the songs without the need of a Virus TI being available in every home studio. For exactly this purpose, Cubase offers a very nice function called "Render in Place" (AFAIK since verions 8). It does as it's name suggests: Internally render a MIDI track to audio and optionally mute or even replace the MIDI track.
Although this is a great feature, and is a huge time saver and no brainer to use with software synth-plugins, there are some issues with Virus Control which make the whole process quite tiresome. Normally, you'd ne able to start Render in Place for 10 tracks of a 4 minute song and get a perfectly finished result in about 40 minutes. In the mean time you could walk away and do something else. With Virus Control, it took me an average of 4 hours (!) for the same task, doing renderings over and over again, because something went wrong at random.
- Pretty often, a whole sequence, or just the beginning notes of a sequence (!) would be rendered too early by as much as a 1/32 note (@130 - 160 bpm). It happens about 4 out of 5 times for every but the first part, when Render in Place is called in mode "As Separate Events". Sometimes this happens even in the middle of a track after a good part of the song is rendered correctly. What I found to help sometimes is to change the MIDI parts to start 2 bars before the first note. However, it still happens then that the whole rendered sequence is playing too early.
- Some percussive sounds always start 5-8 samples early. This is within an acceptable musical tolerance, but it is odd and requires the resulting audio tracks to be always sliced before the beat to avoid clicks. My observation is that this is the case especially for more complex sounds using FM, the fold distortion modes or recursive Envelope modulation.
- Sometimes, clock synchronized LFOs are completely off. Either the musical time seems to be in "slow motion" or "frozen". In "slow motion", the LFO runs apparently smoothly but much slower than it should. If "frozen", the LFO is stuck to a certain position, and can then either go back to smooth or even do a sudden change to a different value, making it sound as if it was set to S&H instead of sine or triangle. In the examples there's an LFO for the patch going from "slow motion" to "frozen" and back to "slow motion".
All in all that means, that I have to compare the position of every note of a rendered sequence with it's original position in the MIDI part, and that I have to listen to all rendered parts to check for LFO issues. Which is far from what I would expect from Total Integration.
Here are some examples for the LFO issue. I'll post more if I find something which is clearly audible without having a other reference tracks.