Cubasis 3 overloading the processor on Android

Cubasis
,
1

Hi.

Could someone from Steinberg support help with this issue please.

I’ve recently bought Cubasis 3 for my Galaxy A90 5G and I’m running into processor overloading very quickly.

I’m using short test projects that are shared from my Cubasis 3 on my iPad Air 2 and while the projects are all fine on the iPad, they overload the processor on the Galaxy A90 5G almost immediately.

The projects are only using two instances of synths, both duplicated resulting in four instances in total with no effects or channel processing.

On the iPad the processing is around 50% but it maxes out on the phone resulting in complete failure of real-time ability.

The phone has a Snapdragon 855 processor which is more powerful than the A8x in the Air 2 and the phone also has 6GB of RAM which is three times that of the iPad, although I doubt RAM has any bearing on the problem.

Even if I do a simple mastering setup of a stereo file using only two plugins, the bus master and a channel EQ, the phone will hit maximum processing every now and then and fail to maintain real-time processing. The iPad doing the exact same thing isn’t even near half its processing limit.

Interestingly, there are no background running tasks on the phone but the iPad will still carry on working with a number of apps open but not running in the background.

Increasing the equivalent of the buffer on the phone will help to a degree but not completely but will also have an effect on latency. The iPad can be set to its lowest/fastest setting and still be fine.

I’ve also noticed that the iOS version of Cubasis 3 is listing CPU and DSP as the sources for processing, while the Android version is only referencing a DSP as the source for processing. It’s this DSP utilization that’s maxing out on the phone. What is this DSP that’s being used on each device? Are these true independent DSPs and why would it appear that there’s no CPU utilisation under Android?

Is there anything that I’m missing here? Like I said, these tests are only short light weight projects that I’ve tried for compatibility testing, nothing close to a full production with the mixer using any channel processing and the phone is failing very quickly and is, at the moment, unusable.

I’ve used Cubasis for some time now on iOS, it’s an awesome DAW in its own right and is also a great addition to my extended Cubase workflow on PC. So far, I’d have to say that I’m very disappointed with the performance of Cubasis on Android and it appears to be unworkable by comparison. Hopefully this is user error on my part.

Any help would be really appreciated.

Cheers,
Dave.

2

Hi David_Harry,

Please have a look if our dedicated Cubasis 3 performance article is of help.

Thanks
Lars

3

Hi Lars.

That article you linked to was of no use at all. To be honest, after supplying the detail I have with this post I’m a little surprised at your very brief and generic response.

Given the complete lack of response to a number of my questions and looking around at other Cubasis 3 Android issues on this forum, it would appear that there’s no user error on my part. It would also appear that Cubasis 3 is simply never going to be as good or as un-problematic on Android compared to iOS, even on comparably powered systems.

As I said in the previous post, Cubasis 3 on my system isn’t working properly and I’m on a phone with last years flagship Snapragon 855 CPU and my much older iPad with a much older and weaker CPU is having no issues with the same test projects.

I have also tried my phone in airplane mode and various other states with alternating wifi and bluetooth off and on but it has made no difference and have done the same with various power modes and profiles with no results that help the situation, in fact, things can actually worsen depending on your power modes.

I really don’t have any more time to put into this and believe I’ve applied enough effort and detail to this situation to know that at this point in time it is un-resolvable and I don’t want to be waiting to see if updates will sort this all out. Plus, I can’t just let the best part of £50 slip either, so will be needing a refund of my purchase of Cubasis 3 for Android.

As it’s now gone past the few hours of being able to automatically request a refund from Google and the Play Store, who do I get in touch with at Steinberg for a refund of my purchase of Cubasis 3 for Android?

Cheers,
Dave.

4

Hi Dave,

Thank you for your message.

I’ve exchanged with our engineers to have your case reviewed more in-depth, with the following outcome.

Our engineers tried to recreate the project that you described on a Samsung Galaxy Tab S6, which has the same CPU, since we are not equipped with the A90 5G. Indeed, 4 Micrologue tracks playing polyphonic melodies already max out the DSP meter and result in crackling with Engine Buffering set to 20ms in the Audio Setup. The workaround is to reduce the number of voices (the setting is on Micrologue’s first page) to 2-3, or to freeze some tracks.

Mobile devices don’t have real DSPs, the DSP meter in Cubasis just indicates how much time it takes to render a buffer, compared to the duration of the buffer. On iOS, the CPU meter indicates the total CPU usage of the system and all apps. On Android, it’s very different engineering-wise and why we had to omit it for now.

From the help (chapter “Inspector”):
"DSP: Shows the time consumption of the audio rendering process (Digital Signal Processing) in real-time. If rendering takes longer than the buffer duration (which can be configured under Setup / Audio), audible glitches occur. Factors that negatively impact the DSP usage are the number and sophistication of instrument and effect plug-ins, the number of of simultaneous notes and events, higher polyphony, lower latency, and other apps running in the background.”

There are two reasons why 4 Micrologue tracks already max out the audio rendering performance on Android:

  1. Micrologue, as a fully-fledged synthesizer, requires way more processing power than the other instruments in Cubasis (Microsonic, MiniSampler, Classic Machines).

We are already working on optimizing multicore rendering of Micrologue, which means tha a performance improvement when using multiple Micrologue instances in a future update is likely.

  1. During development, we too were wondering why iOS devices offer way more audio rendering performance compared to Android devices with comparable or even faster CPUs. Simply put, the answer is that iOS gives audio rendering a high priority and allocates CPU resources (cores, threads) for it if an app like Cubasis requests it.

However, Android tries to save energy / battery all the time, it constantly tries to move threads to slower low-power CPU cores, and it simply isn’t as efficient in distributing rendering tasks to CPU cores for fast, stutter-free audio rendering.

For the initial release of Cubasis 3.1 on Android, we already put a lot of effort into optimizing Cubasis’ audio engine for Android. We identified various areas where further improvement is possible with the current Android hardware so we will continue to implement performance improvements in future updates.

As it’s now gone past the few hours of being able to automatically request a refund from Google and the Play Store, who do I get in touch with at Steinberg for a refund of my purchase of Cubasis 3 for Android?

Please have a look at my private message.

Best wishes,
Lars