Cubase Drops Audio Tracks at modest playback

Cubase
,
1

Hello good people

Here is my setup.
Mac Pro 6,1 (2013) 3.7 Ghz Quad-Core
64 GB Ram
OSX 10.9.5 (rolled back from 10.10 to try and fix the problem)
Audio Interface = Apogge Duet Firewire with updated drivers
Cubase 8.0.2 64 bit

My template has 87 midi tracks. I’m running 3 instances of Vienna Ensemble Pro hosting 5 instances of Kontakt 5 with libraries from Orchestral Tools and Spitfire Audio on the same computer as Cubase. The VST Performance meter barely moves at idle or playback. The CPU meters in VEPro idle around 10% and never go above 50% during playback. In short, the computer resources never seem stressed at all. However, when anything above 15 or so tracks are playing simultaneously I get audio drop outs.

I have done all of the following and got the same issue:

  • turned Cubase Multi Processing on and off
  • turned ASIO guard on and off (with settings at low, normal, and high)
  • adjusted the core audio buffer size all the way up to 2048
  • assigned various numbers of processing threads to each VEPro
  • decoupled all VEPro instances
  • turned off Mac Wifi
  • got a new computer (yep, upgraded my 2010 Mac Pro to a 2013 Mac Pro)
  • reduced VEPro audio outputs from 8 per instance to 2 per instance.
  • Hosted Kontakt directly in Cubase instead of in VEPro
  • turned multi processing in Kontakt on and off

I know this machine can run this template I just don’t know which magic combinations of configurations will make it happen. I am comfortable with my Cubase workflow and I don’t want to go back to Logic.

Please help.

G

2

Hi,

I’m wondering if you tried flattening the midi tracks? I’m not sure this will work, but you didn’t mention having tried that.

3

Hi Stephen

By “flattening” do you mean freazing to convert them to audio tracks? If I freeze them, they play fine but I still need to edit them as midi tracks. Freezing to playback then unfreezing to edit would seriously cramp my workflow.

Thanks

4

OPen windows task manager in performance tab and look at hard drive activity levels. Me and others are seeing high spikes in access times introducing latency and suspect it might contribute. It doesn’t seem to be a CPU or RAM issue. Someone has tried saving project on programme SSD instead of SATA audio drive with some success. I am going to try tomorrow and post results.

5

I tried today setting up a folder on my C drive (SSD) which is where my programme and VST data is as opposed to my separate audio drive. Do it in the root directory of C, not in the programmes folder as this will cause you to get drive full messages. I ran a project with two instances of Absynth plus FM8 and with waves channel strips an abbey road reverb running. CPU was very low and disc drive activity also. The audio processing bar settles at about 25% up the scale when playing back and recording 3 guitar channels. I left looping on playback as well and over a period of about an hour not a single spike…!! I can’t claim to understand why other than speculating it is something to do with how cubase uses the asio saffire driver and writing both of which are now using the same motherboard link to a common harddrive but it does seem to have worked for me so worth a try…