I’ve recently updated Cubase 7.5 to the most recent available version.
Ever since, strangely enough, songprojects take much longer to load and there’s even one recent project that often doesn’t want to open at all. Most of the time when I want to open it, Cubase gets stuck somewhere in the start up process, saying: Cubase has stopped working, there’s no solution for the problem at the moment.
Yesterday the troubled project did start up (after restarting the PC) a couple of times, but some audiofiles were missing in the project, that were still in the audiofolder after all.
So strange. Cubase 7 has been working absolutely flawlessly before, without any crashes at all.
I’m using Windows 7, 64 bit, 6 GB of RAM.
I do notice however that my PC/Windows seems to be busier after start up than before, downloading updates and giving me notifications about Windows 10 being available.
Could it be (I’m not a computer geek) that windows is downloading data/updates (for windows 10 perhaps ?) and storing these in my RAM, thus taking up precious working space for Cubase.
By the way, the “problem-project” is not that big at all. About 12 audio tracks and one VST track.
I do realize that I might have to provide more information for sufficient judgement, but perhaps there’s somebody who recognizes this issue.
Very often, if you cannot open any project, it is plug-in issue. Make sure, you update all of your plug-ins, please.
Sometimes, it helps, if you open the project on different computer (very often, there is different set of plug-ins, which solves the issue), save it on the foreign computer, and then open it again back on your computer.
I follow your advice and checked the status of my plug-ins. It appeared that they were all up to date except for one, but that wasn’t crucial.
I discovered something else however. I used to be rather careful whenever I used my studio PC to run Cubase (and that’s the main use of the machine), meaning: I wouldn’t have any other programs opened while working with my daw.
Lately I’ve had Google Chrome opened, with multiple tabs (sometime up to 10), because I was working with students and needed the internet for several projects.
I found out that Cubase doesn’t want to open certain projects, whenever I have these Chrome tabs opened.
After I close them, it works fine, or so it seemed yesterday when experimenting with it repeatedly.
So apparently (I didn’t realize this) multiple browser tabs take up a lot of RAM.
And then Cubase projects utilizing several ‘heavy’ plugins can’t start up.
I have 6 GB of RAM installed. Perhaps I should go for 8. Or just don’t have my browser opened when starting up Cubase, of course.
Anyway, I think I tracked down the cause of ‘the issue’.
I can confirm, especially Chrome is RAM consuming a lot. THanks to this, it could be fast browser, then (because lots of info is cached). Btw: a new browser in Win 10 (Edge) is very CPU consuming. It uses all computer cores (common, for web-browsing?)!
These days 6 GB of RAM is almost ‘under’ the bare minimum.
The absolute best thing you can do is invest in as much RAM as you can possibly cram into your computer if you have the slots for it and your Motherboard will take it.
RAM is so affordable now, and the cheapest and quickest way to help boost your computer’s performance.
When I built my rig, I put 16 GB in, which is the max my Motherboard can take, but it seems to be enough for me.
A lot of guys have 32 GB now or even 64.
It’s also best to just go for the most RAM all at once, instead of swapping a few RAM modules here and then a few others later on.
For instance, if a store bought computer comes with 2 slots of 2 GBs of RAM and 2 slots of 1 GB totaling 6 GB, some might be tempted to just bump up the 2 - 1 GB modules to something higher and see how it goes, but my advice would be to just buy 4 of the highest amount of RAM your Motherboard can take and put them in all at once.
In my case, I just bought 4 sticks of 4 GB each. It was cheaper to purchase all 4 this way as well.
This offers more ‘processing headroom’ to run more VST Instruments & Effects, some of which can be a bit CPU intensive.
If you install these yourself, just make sure you practice anti-static methods before and during the RAM swap.
