Nice to hear a positive story indeed !
Would be even better with some photos of your very cool setup, screenshot of Cubase, or some details of amount of tracks !
There you go. A bit of a mess at the moment as I’ve just finished. I need to tidy up before i start the next project.
Track above has 76 Tracks . I 'm still running at 128 sample buffer even at mix time as the 9950x and RME UFX III are so efficient i haven’t needed to up the buffers from start to finish.
So nice, I love your setup ! Very pro, clean and organised, with some nice pieces of hardware too, yummy
I love when things are setup nicely for a smooth workflow, which is why I’m hoping for workflow enhancements for the next update, rather than new plugins.
Great to hear positive stories, thanks. Been running very solid here for me too – 9950x has been outstanding as well, with the exception of the iLok snafu which was fixed with a BIOS patch (due to AGESA issue which has been updated by AMD).
@uarte Yes It’s a great match for Cubase 14. I waited until the ilok thing was sorted before I upgraded my 7950x so it’s all been plain sailing since the word go.
@Antoine-B , yes I don’t need any new plugins etc and I’d love to see the audio engine and general performace looked at and improved.
With lots of bussing and heavy plugins on mix busses Cubase can still hit 100% asio GUARD with as little as 20% system use… that’s leaving 80% of these powerful CPu unused!!!
The way round it I’ve found, is to use Audio Gridder locally , so the plugin and the slave on the same machine. Loading plugins inside cubse using the AG plugin can litteraly double the amount of plugins used as it somehow can utilise the unused system resources.
Yes I heard about Audio Gridder, insane though that a 3rd party can outperform Cubase …! I hope Steinberg is listening
I’m going to download it following your recommendation.
You projects clearly are busy, lots of tracks !
I’m going to bookmark your hardware parts too for my next upgrade, after 20y doing this I am just as excited as on day one !
Well thanks again and enjoy your session!
Well I am glad I checked your post as I now have installed AG and it works a breeze. Hopefully it’ll help me better manage my songs, typically running some Kontakt and U-HE synths, my guitars with BIAS or Amplitube, lots of delicious delays and reverbs !
So thanks for your positive message, it gave me a nice boost and feeling.
I might even write a song about that
To the best of my understanding, using AudioGridder and some other plugin chainers / sub hosts simply makes a different trade-off than how Cubase is implemented.
And I think in some plugins you can achieve similar results even without adding an extra layer, by a plugin preference setting that allows the use of multiple cores by that plugin.
To the best of my understanding:
Keeping the Cubase architecture of a track/channel using only a single core guarantees sample accurate repeatability of each playback/render of the track and the overall mix. - But the price you pay, is that plugins that overwhelm a single CPU core/thread cause ASIO dropouts - unless you increase the ASIO buffer size, and thus overall latency. And while one thread/core gets overwhelmed, many others may sit relatively idle.
Allowing a track/channel to use multiple CPU threads/cores allows a single plugin to spread out across the entire CPU - but this parallel processing potentially gives up sample accuracy and potentially also introduces audio glitches. This is because not all of the threads/cores for that plugin’s processing may have finished in time while the channel/track is already calculating the result of such unfinished work. - This problem may or may not occur, depending on the exact real time circumstance of the overall CPU load and each thread/core. And that creates a non-repeatable environment.
Bottom line:
I’m fine with Cubase operating in the mode that it does, defaulting to a single thread/core per track, because it creates a highly predictable/repeatable audio playback/rendering environment.
And when I want to override that behaviour I can do so (either via plugin settings or via inserting sub plugin/hosts). But doing that, I’m aware, that I’ve also opened the door for other things to watch out for.
Sometimes using multiple threads/cores per channel/track is just fine and sometimes it’s not. I’ve experienced both. And it depends on the project that I’m working on and the exact plugins I use, which approach I use.
Nice breakdown Nico.
I am curious if the potential sample accuracy / audio glitches would actually be audible. I would personally trade a tiny tiny quality loss for performance upgrade.
I would even see this tiny quality loss as character, akin to the lower sample rates of the 90s, I am a fan of Massive Attack for example, awesome tunes that made great use of technical limitations. I’d rather have some grit than CPU dropouts.
Ultimately if there was a choice, best is if Steinberg let each user decide, with a performance vs accuracy mode switch.
There’s other tricks to even out the load, like using FX more in parallel. Avoiding multi’s where possible, etc.
And if all of that fails AudioGridder and other tricks.
p.s. For the time being, we still need to know some things to operate a DAW environment at full potential. – For people who find that too much, AI is probably in their future. And people who are willing to learn more, get to do things that not everyone can.
Thanks Nico, I will check out those performance tricks with Kontakt and MSoundFactory. Interesting to read your blog too, as I am mulling over updating my Alienware 17 inch laptop setup and could consider going back to tower. As for AI, it will never play the guitar convincingly ;D We still have much room to create cool new real music.
Heck, I just discovered Stephen Wilson a few weeks ago, so far from digital pop, although I suspect he’s using Supermassive on some of his songs !
Good to hear since I use the Dock and S3 as well. When I first downloaded the C14 demo the new drum (?) track of Cubase was not supported. Has that been fixed?
@Major81 No, it won’t show the drum track unless you actually assign separate outs and then it will show those tracks, but as you say just a regular stereo Drum track doesn’t show.
I dont really use the drum track that much but I just assign the elements to separate outs and that works fine, or I just bounce to audio tracks anyway when mixing which is when I use the S3 etc the most.
Been having a similar experience too with C14.
All is running perfect, fast and stable and no crashing since the C14 update.
Maybe its because I decided to start off new in C14 (and W11 24H2).
I setup a new template only with VST3 Plugs.
For the old stuff Im still working on, I just start C13 and continue work with the old projects and plugins.