Audio Event Silence After Changing Tempo

My system info is in my signature.

When I change the project tempo, I’ve found that certain audio events suddenly become silent during playback, as if they contain no audio data. This happens to certain audio events which are in musical mode and for which the time-stretching algorithm is any of the elastique Pro varieties. I have no way of knowing which audio events fitting this description will be affected, but I can say that I’ve personally seen this happen with some 32 bit/44.1 kHz audio which I’d bounced from Maschine 2.1.2 in standalone mode. This issue also appeared in Cubase 7.5.30.

The first couple of seconds play fine, then it goes silent, with no activity showing on the channel meter despite there being no visible changes to the audio event itself or to the mute and volume automation for the channel. Upon stopping and starting playback again from any point, the event will play as normal before suddenly going silent once more. The same phenomenon occurs with playback in the Sample Editor. Changing the time-stretching algorithm to a standard variety eliminates the problem.

Steps to reproduce:

  1. Create a new project or open an existing project.
  2. Import a 32 bit/44.1 kHz audio file to the project that shares the project’s current tempo.
  3. Activate Musical Mode for the imported audio event.
  4. Change the project tempo.
  5. Observe the unexpected silence issue with the imported audio event.
  6. Change the time-stretching alogrithm to any of the standard varieties or change the tempo back to the original tempo.
  7. Observe the audio event play as expected.

Again, I cannot confirm that the issue will appear with every audio event, but if it does appear, it will be a consistent problem with said event.

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So, is not happening to anyone else? This effectively makes using one of the most convenient things about Cubase inoperable, so it would be great if no one else was experiencing it…kind of.

I’m a film composer who has recently switched to Cubase 8 Pro. I’m also having problems with audio dropping out when there is a tempo change. This happens mostly to virtual instruments but can also occur on normal audio tracks. It seems to be related to a CPU spike and gets worse if there are several tempo changes close together, say several small changes over a bar. After experimenting the best settings seem to be ( Device Settings>VST Audio System) ASIO Guard at ‘High’ and audio priority at ‘Boost’. Unfortunately this induces massive latency but I’ve found that ASIO Guard at ‘normal’ will get me past a single tempo change without a glitch. Steinberg has said that it may be a Kontakt issue related to it’s internal clock. If that’s the case I should be able to recreate the problem in Logic and will post results.

OSX10.10.4
Cubase 8.0.30
Mac Pro 6 core (late2013) 32G ram
Ensemble thunderbolt interface