Cubase 13 pro making my work life a living nightmare

Gentlemen can anyone please tell me what am I doing wrong here??

I have shared these screenshots showing the complete story. My project is empty and Im just tracking vocals. Even if I have a project with 60 tracks and zero plugins ASIO keeps spiking randomly and I cannot even playback a project. Am I doing something wrong here?

Would appreciate the help
Thanks

Hi and welcome to the forum,

Could you test your system by using LatencyMon utility, please?

Hello and welcome to the forum.
While the linked video will not tell you step by step how to resolve the situation at least you can learn a bit about what’s probably going on on your machine:

Thank you for sharing this video. I am well aware of the points he is telling in his video. I belive the problem I am facing is something else. Either its Cubase or my soundcard.

The only reason I upgraded to 13 was because 11 was limiting my projects to 100 tracks max. Im assuming cause it didnt take advantage of the modern Intel Processors [the whole virtual cores thing] but ever since 13 I am facing with bigger problems and cannot even play back a project of 55 tracks after disabling the inserts. The other question I have in my head is if the Intel’s internal graphics is causing any sort of a bug but I doubt thats the case.

Out of curiosity: When you say “layers” do you mean tracks?

Yes tracks. Sorry for the confusion

The three things that stand out to me is first that your buffer is pretty small at 128 samples. You could try to increase it at least to 256. I get that latency will increase when you do that but you should at least try it for trouble shooting purposes.

The other is that the plugins may be resource heavy, and in addition it looks like you have them in series which makes it worse. Not sure which RX plugin you’re using but some of them are really heavy on the CPU.

Lastly I would maybe consider that the interface driver. You’re using the driver supplied by Focusrite, right? Some interfaces and drivers don’t have great latency performance at low buffers.

So these screenshots were taken when I was trying to track a vocal, and the problem is way bigger. When Im editing and mixing my buffer size is set on max i-e 1024 with safe mode on [round trip latency of 99.1ms (4370 samples). I get random ASIO spikes making my project unplayable. The RX plugin was a spectral de-noiser. And yes I know it is really heavy but even after removing that from the list Cubase was giving me spikes.

Ever since the upgrade what I have to do is freeze almost all my tracks and even if I have a total of 15 plugins on my group channels that still makes the project spiked up and unplayable. It wasn’t this bad on Cubase 11 actually only that I couldn’t make heavy projects with over a 100 tracks.

Yes Im using Focusrite’s provided driver. Also I wanna point out is that the Cubase soundcard setup gives me three options Generic ASIO, Focusrite USB and Focusrite Thunderbolt. Im stuck with the Focusrite USB option. Is there a possibility for this to be a soundcard issue? My card is connected via USB 3.0.

Having plugins on groups doesn’t necessarily help you. The thing that will make your project problematic is the total length of the plugin chain. Granted, if you have a wide enough “load”, i.e. many tracks, then that too will add to the “length”. But certainly having a long chain on one or more group tracks doesn’t help if it is too long.

If you took that screenshot when you were literally playing back then it’s odd that the listed CPU speed is only 0.1GHz. Don’t think I’ve ever seen that. And if the spike happened a bit earlier then I do see a spike on one of the cores at about the same time as there was a spike on the GPU.

Maybe look into if there are any issues with your BIOS and OS versions? I wouldn’t know but it might be worth looking into.

Anything is possible I guess. You could maybe try a different USB port?

Also,

Interestingly enough a couple of days ago I have applied this tip and all the ones in the following YouTube video for optimizing PC for audio production in the hopes that it might improve my workflow but nothing has worked for me so far.

Also isnt it technically safe to assume that as per my specs and the fact that all my projects and plugins are stored on an NVMe SSD my performance should be way higher and I shouldn’t be facing ASIO spikes or even Cache spikes at all. Isnt the CPU solely responsible for processing and computing plugins? Alongside CUBASE ofcourse.

I think it is a bit more complicated than that, but sure, I would have guessed you should have been able to get a glitch-free project playable.

Last thing I figured I’d ask: Have you tried this with an absolutely clean project? In other words starting a brand new project with absolutely no plugins even instantiated where you set up input/output and record-tracks from scratch?

I feel like perhaps you need to start again from something completely empty and then add items until you “break” it and then you know that what you just added is a problem.

Another thing I would like to add is that Ive noticed that plugins like UAD spark or Waves studioverse might cause issues since they constantly have to be connected to the net but making the project to be unplayable feels like a Cubase bug. Correct me if Im wrong.

I would think that plugin authorizations would be done either when you start Cubase or more likely when you load the plugin. So once it’s loaded I don’t think it should be “calling home” to check the status.

So ofcourse when I start a fresh project it’ll all be smooth and fine until I get to say 25-35 tracks and then render all the VST, make audio layers and start mixing and wham the bugs start popping in. ASIO glitches and the whole works. Now if I turn off the inserts on that project all of the glitches remain.

But the biggest problem is my average track count is somewhere around 40-65.

I really think you need to start clean though. And probably somehow document what you are adding so you can isolate the problem. Just trust me on this, having a complex mix or system and then trying to isolate a problem can be easy if you get lucky but can be borderline impossible if you aren’t.

How do you “turn off” your inserts? A simple “bypass” or actually turning them off? One thing I noticed when I ran some tests on my system was that when an added plugin ‘tripped’ my system (say plugin #101) it would not get back to playing properly by just deleting that plugin, I also had to save (with 100 plugins, not 101), close, quit, start and load the project again. Go figure.

I just think you need to be more methodical.

What happens if yoy remove them, not just turn them off?

Hippo

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