Disk Meter Maxing Out

Cubase
1

I’ve done a ton of searching and nothing seems to answer my problems.

I’ve recently gotten a project with 16 stereo tracks (44.1, 16bit) and the DISK Meter stays full almost the entire time the track is playing, causing noise/timing errors/miss parts and just plain sound awful. I often work on songs with 50 to 80 mono tracks plus effects and VSTi without any of these issues. I am not using any effects/VSTi’s etc… I’ve spent the last two days reading and testing things with no solutions, any help would be really appreciated.

Thanks

2

How full is the disk? Defrag?

3

300 gig drive less than 20% full, did a defrag and even re formatted it, no difference. I also tried running the song off another drive, same results.

4

What about a new project? Is the correct ASIO driver selected?

5

Tried creating new projects and moving the data the different drives and starting new projects there, sadly same results.

6

Weird?

Does it play one stereo track normally.

Try rewriting the tracks by using bounce audio?

7

Well I’ve got a sort of fix. If I import all 16 of the tracks at once the disk meter is full all the time, but I imported them in groups of 4 (basically testing to see what would happen) nothing ever peaked and now it runs perfectly with all the tracks. I do not understand why it works but it does and has enabled me to do the work I need to do on this project. I’d love to know why if anyone has any ideas?

8

Are you sure all your audio tracks were at the same sample rate?

Mauri.

9

Yes all 44.1 16bit files, all the same length (just under 3 minutes)

10

What’s your disk preload set to in the cubase device settings? It should be 2. You could try resetting all the audio settings in the VST audio System ‘Set to Deafaults’ That might sort it. Worth a try.

11

This is sounding like an IRQ issue. Check if your HDD controller is sharing with your soundcard.

12

I had read baout IRQ issues but they everything appears to be on it’s own seperate IRQ, including sound/video/DSP and HDD

13

I had this a couple of times before - mostly when opening older projects.

I never found the culprit, it has nothing to do with actual disc-performance, fragementation etc. 16 tracks @ 16/441 is nothing, a modern 300GB sata disc should run 200 tracks with no problems.

14

I found running Cubase 6.5 on system drive, while recording to a separate (internal sata 7200rpm) audio drive was the culprit to my situation. The more tracks or projects on the audio drive the more prevalent the hard disk issue was. So basically I was writing and reading simultaneously (recording / playing back) from my audio drive which maxed out my disk meter and caused audio drop out. WHY? I do not know. I will try to follow up on this.

My fix; I made a folder on my system drive and backed up all my projects to that folder. After doing so, I worked on several projects and did not have any issues at all. So basically I resolved my issue by writing to the same drive Cubase is running on. I hope this helps. I will keep this thread posted. :smiley:

win7 64bit - ADM 6 core, 16g