I think I’ve narrowed it down to Autosave being the culprit for laggy performance. I’m on a Macbook Pro M4 with Tahoe.
I have a decent amount of tracks in my session; nothing crazy, and I’m using Melodyne on a handful of tracks and or numerous events per track, and have two instances of Kontakt.
Is open Melodyne on a handful of tracks really slowing down an M4 Pro, or is something else potentially the culprit?
I have Autosave every 5 minutes and 100 max saving. This didn’t really seem to be an issue until all of a sudden it was. Any ideas?
I haven’t tried disabling Autosave, but, I watch the clock, and every time the beach ball comes up for about 4 seconds, it’s every 5 minutes. It also takes several seconds to save manually. Any ideas why things are lagging on an M4?
In the meantime, I’ll try disabling Autosave after it happens again.
Turn Autosave off and try using Save for things that are keepers and Save As for things that are experiments. Name the Save As with a distinguishing reminder like if the file is called Beach Ball call the Save As Beach Ball EQ Lift or such…I never understood the use of Autosave
The strange thing is that this didn’t hold up like this until it just started doing it.
Also, Autosave is super useful if you have a crash. If you forget to save and did 30 minutes of important work, the furthest back you’ll lose is 5 minutes if it’s set to that. Super useful.
True, but if you can remember to save after major changes you won’t have any problems and Save As let’s you try different things without mucking up the main project. I rarely crash…Nuendo 15 was a crash zone when I first installed it but after an uninstall and reinstall it’s been solid
It’s not always that easy haha Also, if the feature works, why not use it. Also, the save as isn’t really applicable in this scenario. What I think it really is, is saving in general. Any time I hit Command + S to save, it takes several seconds to save; maybe 5 or so.
I’m wondering if anything in the session would be causing this? Melodyne on a bunch of events? Kontakt (although, there are only two instances)?
If the slowness on autosave just started happening, and on the same size project, is it possible the disk your project is on is degrading? Maybe run some sort of disk diagnostic to check it out. (If you were on a PC, I’d suggest CrystalDiskInfo, which helped me diagnose failing disks on my old Windows PC, but I have no clue what options are available for Mac.) You need to be sure you’re talking apples-to-apples, though – maybe earlier projects were significantly smaller, so there was less data to write to disk every 5 minutes.
Hi,
I’ve noticed that autosave does cause issues. I do a lot of live performance, and I will turn it off, and I don’t have issues. Sometimes if you perform an action at the same time as autosave, you can run into lags and possible crashes. I just have to remember to turn it on if I am working on a project.
@Return_On_High Autosave always causes temporary halts in Cubase. 5 seconds is a lot, though. After ruling out a degrading disk like @rickpaul suggested, Melodyne would be on top of my suspect list, too. Have you tried to make Melodyne’s changes permanant and bounce the tracks related to Melodyne? This way you’ll know for sure
How about reducing the Autosave interval? 5 minutes seems like a rather tight schedule to me.
BTW, I misread your initial post. I thought you were referring to a constant reduction in performance. My bad, of course that’s not what you were referring to.
This is good info! Thank you! I’m on a Mac, so I have to figure out how to check the health of the drive. Although any drive can fail, it is a relatively new Samsung T7 Shield. If you know any options for checking that, that would be appreciated!
It does seem like a lot, right? I’ll try to commit the Melodyne and see what happens. Speaking of that, if I select all of the split up events on a track (that’s essentially using an instance of melodyne per event, no?), if I bounce the selection, does that disable the melodyne extension thus not needing to do any processing?
Further, does disabling the track make the melodyne extension and resources temporarily disabled?
Also, if I freeze a track with Kontakt on it, does that take away the processing as well?I’m trying to learn about what disabling tracks and bouncing selections really achieves.
Also, I like having the 5 minute interval just in case of crashes
Also, I’m not sure what you mean with a constant reduction in performance
I notice that if I simply just play the session, or move the cursor, or select an event, etc., there is never a hangup. However, if I just move a clip, be it audio or midi, that’s when it will have a hangup on autosave. It makes sense that auto save happens because a clip got moved, which I assume tells me autosave doesn’t do anything until a change happens, regardless of autosave time.
This being said, I disabled every track (right clicked and chose disable track) that had melodyne on it. I also did the same to the two instances of Kontakt I have, and this still happens. If I move the midi on the Kontakt tracks that are disabled, that will trigger autosave and have a hangup. Would committing/rendering/bouncing these files be different from disabling them for test purposes?
EDIT: As of now, it would APPEAR that it was Melodyne! I had melodyne on a few tracks, and even though they were disabled, I was getting hangups on Autosave. Once I made backups of those with the Melodyne extensions and took off the extensions, then bounced the selection of my Melodyne, now there are no hangups with Autosave at the moment. I have to admit, the lead vocal was edited so that all the space in between was cut out, so it was a lot of events on the one track, which I then selected all of them and turned on the melodyne extension. So the extension being on multiple separate events must be the hangup?
Autosave is only triggered whenever a change in the project has occured during the autosave interval. The documentation is rather sparse with details, here’s a more comprehensive overview.
Freezing Kontakt tracks should do the trick for this kind of test scenario. When it comes to ARA extensions I am not so sure. You might have to get rid of the extensions altogether. You could save the project and then save it again for test purposes (Save As). Now, you could render your Melodyne tracks and delete the tracks with ARA extensions to be on the safe side. I tend to avoid ARA extensions so there might be a faster way to rule out Melodyne. Thinking about it, you might as well check if freezing Melodyne tracks changes anything first before you do anything else.
That’s a great idea about freezing the Melodyne tracks as well!
So far, it seems to be the Melodyne Extensions. Bouncing the selection stops the hangups on Autosave. I did have melodyne on numerous events within the same track, and I assume I could peel back any of those events and reveal the full event on any of them since I stripped the silence, so I would GUESS that Melodyne was redundantly looking at the same thing across numerous events on numerous tracks and that’s why the hangup was happening, if I had to guess, but so far, it’s smoother with Autosaves, praise God!
EDIT: Just for reference, there were 54-56 events on the lead vocal alone that ALL had Melodyne extensions on them… So I’m ASSUMING that’s probably the reason why the hangup was happening. haha
I don’t know of options on a Mac, but maybe a Samsung utility can do some basic check?
The one thing I noted here, though, is you’re talking an external USB drive, rather than a built-in drive. This may inherently make for slower saves than, for example, I would have with NVME SSD drives in my custom-built Windows tower, where my NVME SSD drives are connected directly to the motherboard. I only use external USB drives for backup and archival, not for performance-critical needs like the Windows system drive (NVME SSD), my audio drive for projects (NVME SSD), and my sample libraries drive (SATA SSD).
Yikes!!! When I use Melodyne on a lead vocal, I’ll have exactly one audio clip per song section. So a song that has verse 1, chorus 1, verse 2, chorus 2, bridge, chorus 3, tag, would have 7 clips.
. My bad, of course that’s not what you were referring to.