A bit of background here: I use Cubase Pro to run the backing tracks for my livestream music performances where I play guitar + keyboards along to backing tracks of my own original material. My MO is to preload the tracks and then use the window drop-down and activation button [upper left corner] to switch quickly between tracks.
I have been doing this for well over 10 years and generally have found Cubase to be very reliable. However with the release of cubase 13, I began to run into stability issues which, by and large, have been addressed.
So I took the plunge and bought the upgrade to Cubase 14 and boy oh boy is it a can of worms.
First off, it’s stable and that’s a good point. Also, it appears to be OK when working on a single piece of music BUT it has issues with track dropouts. Here is a typical example:
A] Song ‘X’ has 20 audio tracks + Groove Agent 5 for drums. The cpr file saved as a Cubase 13.041 or Cubase 13.05 plays just fine in Cubase 13.05.
B] I load the same Cubase 13.05 cpr file into Cubase 14.05 and it will have dropouts and cutouts on various tracks.
C] If I save the track as a Cubase 14.05 file it has the same dropouts and cutouts when I run it in Cubase 14.05 or Cubase 13.05 [they appear to get baked in somewhere along the way].
The bottom line is that after a fraught performance with the bass guitar part and other parts disappearing at random, I’ll have to roll everything back to Cubase 13.05 and use the older Cubase 13.05 cpr files for live work.
I hope Steinberg can address this issue sometime in the near future.
Yes, some parts of it seem like an advanced beta: lots of people reported modulators not working for them and I’ve seen some weird behaviors on my own, drum machine is 2/3 there (clunky workflow when you get down into it), pattern editor even less (it’s really not suited for melodic stuff and there’s no reason it shouldn’t).
At least the Underwater is as good as it can ever be
Hopefully we’ll see those being improved in 14.x versions, rather than in 15 next year.
I would definitely hold off until the first update comes along and hopefully addresses a lot of the problems. I stopped being an early adopter a couple of years ago.
Well, 14 leaves the previous versions alone. So you can see if it does what you want it to do without losing access to older working versions. With Logic and Bitwig you have to take care, otherwise your previous versions gets overwritten.
You need to list your equipment here. Computer, OS, audio interface, amount of things running in the background, antivirus programs, plugins used, third party plugins, etc. I’ve never seen any of these issues. That doesn’t mean you’re not having them, but I suspect other culprits responsible outside of Cubase.
OK, I think I see what has happened in my case. A lot of my tracks were originally recorded at 44.1khz and I drew in fades, etc., on the audio clips. A few years back I converted all my tracks to 48kHz and, because the fades played OK, I thought nothing of it as the tracks played OK in Cubase 10, 10.5, 11, 12 & 13… Today I had a look at some of the clips and the fades and cuts are shown in earlier and earlier depending on the length of the clip. You can see it in the attached image. I have no idea why the tracks played correctly with the fade lines in the wrong place but they did until I loaded them into Cubase 14.05 which would explain the ‘baked in’ nature of the dropouts. You can see the fade lines that I drew coming in earlier than the actual fades they’re meant to describe on the wav file clips. When I attempt to redraw the fade lines to the actual end of the audio clip, it’s impossible. It would appear the the fade lines never scaled to the audio clip after they were converted to 48khz although they did play correctly until Cubase 14.05
I’ve got the original 44.1khz versions stored on an external drive which I can check.
Here’s a track I wrote and recorded at 48kHz. As you can see, the drawn fade lines are in the correct positions and align with the wav clip fades. Not so with other tracks where they not only end early but cannot be redrawn to the full length of the audio clip.
The math holds up: the length of the drawn lines in the wav clips is always 44.1/48 = 0.91875 of the length of the wav clip. Any attempt to redraw the fade / volume lines in the clip fails because you hit a brick wall at the 0.91875 point and cannot extend the volume lines any further and, believe me, I’ve tried.
I went back and converted one of my old 44.1kHz projects to 48kHz in Cubase 14.05 and was able to manually redraw the volume / fade lines in each audio clip and it played correctly with no baked-in dropouts. After the conversion to 48kHz, the volume / fade lines were all shortened by the 0.91875 ratio and had to be manually redrawn for each audio clip. Clunky but entirely doable. I’m not looking forward to rebuilding my entire set of material this way as it’s likely to be months of work ahead of me If only there was some sort of macro that you could apply to the audio clips that would rescale the volume / fade lines after they’ve been converted to 48kHz [or any other file resolution for that matter].
Ohai, Ted! Ye olde computer specs:
Windows 11 Pro 23H2
Intel i5 14500 CPU with liquid cooling
Asus PRIME H770-PLUS D4 motherboard
64GB Corsair RAM
Zotac RTX3050 grafix card
Behringer X-18 audio interface / mixer + Behringer UMC202HD audio interface [yes, both]
Windows Defender anti-virus.
Background tasks? Not much as I’ve got into the habit of disabling the pesky ‘start with Windows’ option that programs like Skype, Spotify and all the usual suspects try to slip in.
However when I do my livestream shows I do have 3 or 4 instances of the Second Life viewer running at low resolution because I present my work in my livestream shows through a virtual band of Second Life avatars in a 3d virtual environment stage because… well it looks a lot cooler than some old aging git noodling away in their living room trying hard not to gawp into a webcam.
FWIW, the issue presents itself whether I’m doing my livestream shows or not. Full details in my other posts on this thread.
On the tracks in question I only use the stock Steinberg plugins that come with Cubase
If all you’re doing is playing back backing tracks, why not just export them into a WAV file and use a WAV file player to play them back? You’d avoid all the complications of trying to render them in real-time in Cubase… either way, glad you figured out what was wrong
Hello Tim! I did sorta try the file player thing a few years back but seeing how I use Cubase to also spit out patch change commands for my synths [yes, I really am that lazy] and the fact that I’m constantly fiddling around with the volume levels, FX and other aspects of the audio clips in each backing track, it felt like just making unneccesay extra work for myself.
But, yes, I might revisit that workplan sometime in the future.
Ah, that makes sense. I’m in a similar position - for our live shows, I also trigger external MIDI gear, and mess around with the mix, so I ended up exporting group stems and MIDI tracks from Cubase, and loaded it all up into Cubasis on an iPad. That way I can still do everything I need to do, but don’t need a computer on stage, and Cubasis has been rock-solid!
As a sort of conclusion to this saga: I went through all 46 of the backing tracks to my livestream set and redrew the volume envelopes in the audio clips. It was slow at first but after a while I worked out ways of speeding things up [such as selecting multiple volume points on the curve and dragging them to the right further along the audio clip].
Long story short: it’s all done now and hopefully won’t be a problem again but it took the best part of a week to get it all done.
If only there was some sort of macro that you could apply to the audio clips that would rescale the volume / fade lines after they’ve been converted to 48kHz [or any other file resolution for that matter].