I’ve experienced that behaviour many times in the past with older systems, even so that if i had to do live or recording i often had to let the entire track play at least once before going in performance mode. It is indeed only when you load a song and play it back for the first time. The first notes allmost explode and then the system goes on like nothing has happened. The next time the system seems to remember how to spread the data and everything goes well.
Never got the culprit for that but what i noted that gluing the parts together could help reducing the problem, reducing massive amounts of continious controller data could help, and even very litte shuffling back and forward on the timeline could reduce the behaviour. As i understand this, it is a complete overload of the system when having it’s initial read of the data. Also: inserting a measure with a littlebit of data could prevent it from happening.
Normally you should expect that cubase does some form of prereading before it has to playback the tracks, and for some reason it isn’t doing this in certain conditions. It’s also, imho, not on every project.
You need to find the specific condition that provoces the behaviour.
But for me it wasn’t neither a dealbreacker. Just took it in to account, since it seems system specific.
With the new computer this hasn’t happened any time untill now.
Happens regularly here too on a mac using WD Black HDs. Often use some form of Halion though I’m not sure if that is the culprit. My speculation was much like yours. That Cubase is waiting to load resources until some critical moment when it overtaxes the system, after which it is properly prepared to play them without grinding.
So do members of the Steinberg dev team troll this forum or do we have to bring a formal request to them to investigate a potential bug?
Is anybody familiar with how Steinberg does this?
Have you tried optimizing the buffers/disk streaming in Halion ?
I had to adjust a little, to let it use more Ram, else it would stutter on the first playback.
I revised this reply. At first I did not see the settings described below.
I was unaware that Halion had its own exclusive buffer settings. I just found them. Before this discussion I thought Halion was treated like an “Audio Track” and was relying on the buffer settings found in the ASIO control panel. I will give this a go and see if makes any improvement in performance.
By default, I believe Win 10 defrags once weekly.
I don’t turn my computer off so it does this on a regular basis, at odd hours of the night.
As for the samples, I have not loaded any of my own yet. This is a new install of Cubase and I am using the stock sounds. Are you suggesting moving some of those to test? What about all the other folks who may not have another drive, yet experience this problem?
Personally, I think these habits are contributing to your problems, if not causing them altogether - that is if it’s not Windows 10 related.
In my experiences, the seemingly necessary step in all electronics is the eventual restart/reboot. It resets the circuitry.
I know you mentioned that there is the occasional reboot, but I think letting your computer run constantly is just asking for troubles.
Also, I’d completely disable the monitor sleep function.
When my rig is on, it never sleeps, but then I shut it down once my session is over.
I also keep it off the internet other than to download or authorize something and turn off the antvirus after that as well.
And in the rare event that I do ever have any troubles, a restart fixes it 99 times out of 100.
I also do a restart after I install or uninstall anything. Half the items I install seem to require that anyway.