While using Cubase Pro 8 on OS X Mavericks and Yosemite I noticed that if I leave my song playing and open a browser window or check my email that, after about 30 seconds, various random tracks would drop out and stop playing and my CC121 would go offline and stop working. If I focussed back to Cubase 8 everything returned to normal.
After checking in OS X’s ‘Activity Monitor’ it transpired that Cubase was switching into ‘App Nap’ mode, which is a power-saving feature of OS X 10.9 and 10.10. Apps in the background get ‘put to sleep’ in favour of those in front to save power.
Cubase 7.5 had the option to ‘Prevent App nap’ by right clicking on the app in ‘Applications’ selecting ‘Get Info’ and ticking the ‘Prevent App Nap’ box, just under the ‘run in 32 bit mode’ box. It appears that when compiling Cubase 8 Steinberg devs have forgotten to include this option so that Cubase cannot run in the background without half shutting down.
I’m not sure where to submit this omission - if anyone can point me to the right place I’d be grateful.
I found a solution though, and it involves globally disabling ‘App Nap’ using ‘Terminal’.
It is described here:
In case you cannot access that link for any reason, it just involves inputting the following string into a Terminal window:
defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAppSleepDisabled -bool YES
To re-enable it globally input this string into Terminal:
defaults delete NSGlobalDomain NSAppSleepDisabled
There is a way of adapting this method so that it just affects Cubase but as I’m working on a desktop Mac the requirement to save power is less than if I was working on a laptop so I have disabled it globally until Steinberg address this issue. It is described lower down the page here:
I hope this info helps somebody. I searched this forum for any other mentions of this issue and found none but I doubt I’m the only person who has encountered this.