CPU spikes with Hertz Drums

Hi all,

Did a search on the forum, and I’m not really experiencing the same issues as some others (thankfully!) but I am having some weirdness with certain plugins.

I just bought Hertz drums, and they are outstanding. Started a brand new session to start sketching. The only thing in this session was one instance of Hertz drums and one instance of RealGuitar. MASSIVE spikes. Couldn’t get through one 15 second section without spikes and dropouts. So I did some digging and here’s what I found:

Thought it was likely Hertz drums being a CPU hog, so first I tried setting it to “Low Performance” Didn’t help. Then, opened it in both Ableton and Luna and it worked flawlessly. No CPU problems, no dropouts, all good.

OK, kept searching (Audioguard, buffer, etc) and came across a video for using Audiogridder locally. So when I tried that in Cubase, all good. The only nag is the multi outs with AudioGridder aren’t very elegant, but whatever, it works.

My question is, what could possibly cause this behavior? Since Steinberg CREATED VST3, I would think plugin devs would be following their spec, so how does in it run better in every DAW EXCEPT Cubase? How does an extra CPU/bandwidth addition like AudioGrabber work better in Cubase than in Cubase itself?

I’m running a Mac Studio M1 with 128GB RAM, and regularly run big sessions with crazy amounts of stuff, before I even print the MIDI tracks to audio, and it’s perfect. Then a session with 2 plugins craps out?

Of course I’ll email both Hertz and Steinberg, and watch them point fingers at each other, but I guess I was looking for the off chance someone had an idea for some hidden checkbox, some Mac setting, whatever…

Thanks in advance for any help anyone can share to try and figure out what’s going on here.

Hi and welcome to the forum,

Try to increase the Audio Device’s Buffer Size.

You can also test your system by using LatencyMon utility, and optimize the system.

Hi Martin…

I tried that…didn’t help. And again, this only happens in Cubase.

Also I’m on a Mac so LatencyMon doesn’t seem to be available for me.

Thank you for the response!