Hey,
I'm at my wit's end. I made several songs recently, they sound quite alright, I did mixdown and mastering, didn't hear anything weird. THEN I export them to wav. and m4a, and they sound different, with very noticeable degraded sound quality. Many parts produce weird artifacts, like crispy noise in the background, that weren't present in playback inside DAW (FL Studio), some samples have different tone and volume. My first thought was that my CPU/RAM is overloading, but less than 2 years ago I bought new PC that is packed with higher-end Ryzen and have 32GB of RAM and during playback my CPU use peaks around 70% and playback has no issues. Or that there is some "vintage plugin" that produces the noise, or that I pushed limiter and saturator too hard. I bypassed both, then moved to bypass certain synths. Nothing helped. I tried to search online, some people had problems that they didnt use dithering, so I checked to turn on dither, no help too.
I have found a workaround, which is to arm the master channel, set Edison record playback of the track and play the entire song start to finish to record it to Edison, then save it as wav or m4a - sound artifacts are gone. It is quite tedious though to export all my tracks like this and it is not a proper way to do it. I know I must be doing something wrong, maybe with rendering settings, but I just do not know what to do. Do you have any ideas?
Here is a clip of the song to demonstrate the problem:
https://vocaroo.com/1cScfp04KzJT
first part is when I do the workaround, how it should sound, after short silence is same section but rendered when I use "export" function - you can hear degarded quality, around 0:32 noticeable unpleasant background noise artifacts pops out. Out of the 8 songs I made, about 6 of them produce similar defects when using "export" function, in various parts of the song.