Audio gets quiet during mixing

Cubase
1

I don’t know whether to call it a drop out. Sometimes when I start up a project with MIDI, there are crackling sounds when I try to play it. If I close Cubase and open it again, that usually fixes it. Also, tonight when I was mixing a different project, one with no MIDI, the sound wouldn’t dropout completely, but the audio would get really quiet at some points. Is this because of a CPU overload? The project has 26 tracks with a crapload of plug-ins on pretty much every track.

My computer has a 3rd gen Intel i5, 12 GB of RAM, and I’m running the OS and Cubase Artist 6 on a 128 GB SSD. I checked that the audio drivers are up to date. When I looked at the processing power being used, the CPU was hitting about 50% and the memory was hardly being used at all, not even 3 GB.

2

When I looked at the processing power being used, the CPU was hitting about 50% and the memory was hardly being used at all, not even 3 GB

I would imagine if the cpu is showing 50% then the asio load will be much higher?? What does Cubase perf meter show?

If not that then you need to give some more details of your system…what soundcard/driver, buffer size?

3

I have windows 7 64-bit, amd 7570, and whatever stock audio is on this dell xps 8500, which is wavemaxx 7.1. I’m not sure about buffering (how do you check that?) and I didn’t look at the asio performance in cubase. will do that tonight.

I do find the problems seem to go away after I shut down cubase and restart it. could it be related to small edits done in the project getting backed up in the temporary memory?

4

… A decent audio interface would be my first port of call i think…

Onboard is fine for games, DVD/BD etc but woeful for music production unfortunately!

5

I have an audio interface, but I was hoping for mixing purposes I could just use some headphones or speakers directly plugged into the computer. I think I got it to work now. I just increased the buffer size. I done fixed 'er real good. Thanks for the tips.