Clicks and pops in frozen tracks and exports

Cubase
,
1

So this is a major issue I have had for a long time, and steinberg refuses to answer my support tickets or provide any sort of help, or to even acknowledge that this problem exists. I’m on the verge of switching off cubase because of this, as it makes it unusable.

Whenever I freeze tracks with virtual instruments, the frozen tracks will have random clicks and pops in them. If I re-freeze them, the pops appear at different places, so its completely random. This sounds like a normal “cant read a file from hard drive” sound, but isn’t the whole point of freezing stuff to avoid this? The same thing happens if I just render out the project. Almost every single render with any instrument or plugin creates these issues everywhere, and I have now tried for days to export a single track without issues.

I am running all of the instruments from SSD-drives, and everything runs smoothly on the normal project playback. I have a very high-end PC and don’t have any performance issues even with larger projects, it is just the renders and freezes that are completely not working.

I have also tried real-time export and all the settings there, but nothing makes any difference. I am at a loss here.

2

Which VSTis?

3

Does this also happen if you create a completely empty new project and use just one of the included Steinberg instruments like Halion Sonic SE or GrooveAgent?

4

Various. Mostly Spitfire and NI stuff in kontakt, but occasionally with the spitfire sampler too.

5

Have not tried, but I suspect not, as it happens mostly with very heavy libraries, or it might be a Kontakt issue too. Might experiment a bit later on.

6

I just started experience this issue too (in Cubase 13 Pro). Also on a very powerful PC with fast disks. Were you ever able to find any underlying cause?

7

I concluded that it is mostly caused from using external HDD hard drives that are too slow to keep up. I never run into this issue with a library thats installed on an SSD drive.
For some reason, even during the freeze track, it cannot read the instrument files quick enough to not cause clicks and pops.

8

Thank you for your feedback. I suspect I’ve run into a different issue then because my libraries are installed on internal SSD disks in some cases they are even NV2 Gen 4 M.2. Still get random pops and clicks when I freeze a track. Really odd. Think it only affects Kontakt instruments for me but am not 100% sure. Found a similar thread regarding this.
Crackling/Popping, Notes cutting off at random while rendering Kontakt tracks - Cubase - Steinberg Forums