Cubase audio engine suddenly becoming clogged

Cubase
1

HI was wondering if anyone is experiencing any sudden malfunction / slow down / hyperactivity of the Cubase Audio Engine.

Apologies for the lack of technical wording, I do not mean crashes or bugs.

Quite regularly the project, after working perfectly with no drop outs, or slows down, suddenly sees a spike in the audio engine that never goes away and each time I press play the project stutters and is unplayable / unworkable (to give am example, imagine to run a heavy project with the lowest buffer size available - except my buffer size is the maximum).

The only way to keep working is close and restart CUBASE 14.

Anyone experienced this?

This happens without even adding any extra VIRTUAL INSTRUMENT.

I have SSDS, 192GB RAM and an Intel(R) Core™ Ultra 9 285K (3.69 GHz)

Thanks in adavance

2

Hi,

Does increasing of the Buffer Size help?

What kind of Audio Device do you use?

3

HI,

I have a FOCURISTE Clarett+. The BUFFER is already at MAX (1040) and the project works absolutely fine for hours.

After I restart CUBASE, same project, same buffer, it is all back to normal.

4

This is what happens when the project is not even playing (see video)

5

Not sure why, but the metering tells me that most of your workload is in realtime rather than under ASIOGuard. Do you have a lot of tracks record enabled or with monitoring turned on?

6

HI, not at all. Only one track enables (automatically) when selecting it and no monitoring on.

7

Okay.

You have a pretty hot machine so it shouldn’t be struggling under normal circumstances.

Is this only happening with one project or is the behaviour consistent with any project?

8

It started happening after the last update, but I seem to remember it was an on and off issue with Cubase.

Here, even without project no playing, ASIO Guard seems to randomly spike, even if nothing is playing. I am trying to understand why, as if I restart the project it goes back to normal.

9

I don’t know if this helps, but in my experience, opening the Supervision plugin in the Control Room inserts caused Cubase to consume a lot of resources, evidently due to its intensive use of graphics resources.

Perhaps there’s something in your project that’s similarly demanding on the GPU.

10

Thanks, but you didn’t answer my question. Does this only happen on one project or is it general across all projects?

11

Sorry, I did but not very clearly ha ha

I meant, it might have happened before, I cannot recall, but not with this new machine.

Also, I was not using Cubase 14 for a while as I found it too unstable.

I only started in the last few months and before the update, I did not encounter this issue.

So, in answer to your question, as far as I now, this is the first time, I can recall.

I am wondering how it is possible that asio guard is so active even when the project is not playing anything.

12

The easy fix to just roll back to 14.0.32. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if Cubase was using the .4 update as a beta testing for Cubase 15. The forum is the lab and we are the guinea pigs. Why else would they push such a horrendous update right around the time they release a new version.

13

OK, thanks. What is your ASIO Guard setting? (low, medium, high).

The Cubase meter is a representation of the resources used / available for the project you’re currently running. It’s not a CPU meter. So it’s giving you an estimate of what load is being or will be imposed on the system by that project, whether you’ve hit play or not.

The reason the load is showing up on ASIO Guard is because (as you mentioned before) most or all of your tracks are not armed and therefore do not require realtime buffering, which means they’re being processed within ASIO Guard buffering.

14

Do you have any proof of this, or did you just make it up?

1 Like
15

ASIOGUARD is set to MEDIUM

16

I experienced the same sort of things when I updated to 14.0.4. Just roll it back to 14.0.32 and see if the problem persists. You can always update again if nothing changes.

17

How would I have any proof? The term “I wouldn’t be surprised” means it’s a suggestion. Possibly a theory considering so many Windows users are having issues both on Cubase and the Nuendo, myself-included.

18

Here is another of those bizarre moment. To be noted, the projects plays and performs perfectly for a while, which I suppose is a sign that the processor and the computer have no issues in running it.

19

For anyone interested…it looks like disabling and then reenabling KONTAKT 8 with MODERN SCORING STRINGS does the trick. I wonder if it is an issue with Kontakt or the plugin.

20

Every version of Kontakt seems to have one issue or another that affects some people and not others. I have no idea why, but it’s probably a combination of specific system configurations and types of libraries used.
If disabling and re-enabling worked for you then I’m glad to hear it.
Keep an eye out for NI updates.