Clicks / Dropouts / Slaves / VEP / Template / Plugins / UAD

Cubase
1

Hi everyone,

This is my first post so I apologise for any inconvenience such as: this topic already exist, you wasted my time, his English is very bad, how do you not know that?? etc…

I want to share with you a big issue I had when setting up my template of around 1800 tracks including midi, groups, vst and audio tracks, when I bought the Apollo and started using UAD plugins.

I have the following:

Master machine: Mac Pro (Late 2013) Processor 3,5Ghz 6 core / Memory 32GB / 1tb SSD (IP address 10.0.0.1) - Apollo 16 - Cubase 9.5
Slave machine 1: PC Intel i7 / Memory 32GB / Windows 7 Pro / 1tb SSD (IP address 10.0.0.2)
Slave machine 2: PC Intel i9 / Memory 128GB / Windows 10 Pro / 1tb SSD (IP address 10.0.0.3)
Slave machine 3: Mac Pro (Mid 2010) Quad Core / Memory 32GB / 1tb SSD (IP address 10.0.0.4)
Slave machine 4: Mac Pro (Mid 2010) Quad Core / Memory 32GB / 1tb SSD (IP address 10.0.0.5)

All machines are connected with a GS108E v3 (Gigabit Switch) with ethernet cables CAT6

On each slave machines I have Vienna Ensemble Pro (last version) installed. I have from 5 to 14 instances on each machine, so the setup from each one of them on VEP are the same, 2 threads, 32 outputs, 2 inputs (I know, this is relative on every setup)

Buffer size on Cubase - 384 samples

If I’m forgetting something please ask.

So this is a setup I have been working on for several months, maybe a year or more. More I work, bigger the setup is. And when I introduce the UAD plugins to my template, I started with pops and clicks, latency, sometimes I couldn’t export because of CPU overload etc…I resisted the idea that my template was very big to handle my computer.

All resumes to ASIO
In Cubase, first I deactivated ASIO-Guard, and my template was way more better than before. But still, I had some clicks and I couldn’t work with specific instruments because they were too heavy on disk (I could see that from Kontakt on the slave machine). The “delay compensation” didn’t help either. So here comes the solution for my problem: I activated Asio-Guard (default option) Then went to /Studio/VST Plugin Manager and deactivated all UAD effects from VST effects and the VEP from VST Instruments.

I can’t explain my happiness.

For years I looked for solutions in this forum so I figured that I had to share my experience on this, maybe it could help somebody.

Cheers
Santiago

2

Thanks! This makes sense! VEP has know issues with asio guard and UAD does not work good with different buffer sizes for their plugins. I have not run into problems with UAD, cause I use the only as master inserts at the moment and I am still on UAD1 (yes really, jbridged cause they are 32bit).
Cheers!
Oh and nice setup!

3

Thanks vinark! Indeed, this “transition” we are living between 32bit to 64bit makes difficult to know what to upgrade and what not. And what I learned sadly is, there will never be the right solution for these kind of problems, but to adapt ourselves on each particular system while their systems don’t change so much. Very philosophical all this is :smiley:
Cheers!