The OP is right,if there are any support issues, we are simply buck-passed to Yamaha Australia & the ‘support’ can be very hit and miss, and in all, somewhat unprofessional. We always use to have the choice to raise a support ticket with Steinberg directly (and like so many other DAWs) & surely this is a reasonable expection given the accumulated cost of all this stuff.
I’ve worked in large sacle university installation for decades, Win, Linux & Apple. They have their strengths & weaknesses but far less differentiation these days. The biggest issue with Apple is that they break their own stuff regularly with system updates & the recongintion of ‘pro’ users more recently is virtually non-existent, nor does trouble-shooting, command-line or recovery really allow for anything sensible beyond holding down a key for two minutes & hoping for the best…
In any case, the only real answer Apple support ever has is to reinstall the OS …
In your case here, I would be inclinded to bite the bullet & do the lot. You don’t mention which OS but Sonoma 14.4 has a host of problems now widely documented. you may want to choose other, depending, but latest is not necessarily best when it comes to MacOS (eg, I often boot into Montery for best compatibility, but then mine is an Intel 7,1 MacPro).
Consider: partition your Apple disk; as much as possible put the OS on one of those, use Carbon Copy Cloner to make a clone on the other partition; this allows a complete restore very easy if something goes awry, and/or easily allows booting into one system or the other if you have need, or to test out some new version of the OS before it can break things. Be easily able to ‘roll back’ vs. being suddenly surprised and angry that some Apple update has screwed with your work.
Ensure all plugins, VIs, & apps are at the latest version & also check (in your case) that all of these be Apple Silicon native & avoid and and all Rossetta installs.
Finally, all those sound libraries and other expensive additions: keep it all on a separate disk (and with its own separate back-up). This not only minimises somthing going wrong with the system disk, but of course, all DAW or NLE media runs best on a disk separate to the system, ditto big VI libs etc. YMMV and clearly, one’s budget, but I’ve been using RAID 4 for this for a very long time: not only very fast and also has built-in redundancy.
Hope that helps.
MacPro 7,1, 16 core, 192GB, MacOS 14.4, Vega II Duo. Apollo x8, UAD-2, Antelope Pure 2, Antelope Orion 32+. RAID-4 Thunderbay 6, RAID-0 Sonnet M.2 4x4. MiniMon 4k, Dell U3415W & BenQ SW2700PT. FaderPort 16, NI S61, Nuendo, LIve, Luna, Pro Tools, Resolve Studio.
Thanks so much for all your replies. Been away a few days.
Yes In certain countries Steinberg have decided to not allow support requests and as silly as this is it’s a sad fact.
I should have also said Dom has been a massive help in my cubase journey along with the forum.
I guess it may be hard to find the type of sound design tutorials I am looking for due to how severely limited it is in the modulation dept.
This greatly reduces the capabilities which is why I guess I find videos for this more on Ableton, FL even Logic has better modulation and sound design stock VST’s
Also. Apple is the best. If you’re buying stock.
But if you can spend 30 k on a PC it’s a no contest PC win I’ve heard from industry pro’s
The reason Mac’s dominate is somewhat similar to how pro tools is the standard.
Is it the best…No. But the conditioning process has already happened. It’s hard to retrain a industry.
I have an M2Pro and have not had this behaviour. CB12
As someone who has Apple stock, I can tell you that Apple is not the best for that. Or the worst. It’s just stable. Although if I had bought it in 2003 I’d be rich by now.
And you can spend $30K on a PC? What PC exactly? I’m curious.
But no, Macs don’t dominate the industry, at least the entertainment industry. Music industry, maybe, but there’s a good reason for that. At least nowadays since Apple Silicon became the norm. Sure, for the $5K I spent on my Mac Studio M1 Ultra I could’ve build a faster PC, up to a certain point. It would also be a PC that makes a lot of noise and puts out a lot of heat when I’m rendering video or 3D scenes.
And I’d be forced to use Windows (Linux is still not an option for the creative market), which by now I hate with the passion of a million raging suns, and I would be forced to use Windows shortcuts for copying, cutting and pasting, which would make my hands tired at the end of every day.
And I also wouldn’t have automatic optical character recognition from any photo or video that I have in my computer, allowing me to copy and paste text from any screenshot or photo I take. Unless that finally made it into Windows 11, I don’t know, but I doubt it.
And I would be forced to use a damn ugly OS that still has some dialogs from 30 years ago, where if you want to configure certain things like choose 5.1 audio out of your HDMI port instead of stereo, you have to open the sound config panel from the times of Windows 98 or so.
Also, it comes full of promotional Microsoft crap like Microsoft 365, pushing you to buy buy buy!!! Spend spend spend!!! I’ ve had a friend’s PC here for a month, a PC I built for him in 2019, and he asked me to edit something, but it had to be in Premiere. And I don’t have anything Adobe in my Mac anymore, so he let me use his machine. And I asked him if he wanted me to backup, wipe the internal drive and install Windows 11, he said yes, so I did.
First boot after installing it, I had to go through all these steps saying NO to every goddamn offer from Microsoft. It was Microsoft 365, and I can’t remember what else, I just remember clicking no with a smile while thinking “I won’t buy your crap”. Then last night it showed me an update was available, so I installed it. This is three weeks after installing the OS from scratch. And once again, after it installed the update and booted up, I had to go through the same crap, clicking NO to all the stupid offers.
How many times do you think I have to do that with Apple products? Sure, they have marketing. It’s just not as insidious and a royal pain in the gluteous assemous.
And I have a machine that for the past two months, almost every single night, I have left it all night long rendering a heavy scene in Blender, which will demand everything from any machine, and not only it rendered it fast, it was silent all night long, and the next morning it was hot to the touch, but not burning.
So absolute raw speed is not everything. Comfort, stability, reliability are important as well.
I have dropouts that stop the recording on my Macbook Pro M1. Cubase 12 Pro.
Things that should be very simple to playback or record - just a few tracks and Modo Drum VST.
It is non-functional on my Mac. I have a PC that I built that runs just fine.
I believe I have optimized everything on my Mac. I am going to try running it with Logic and the same kind of session to see what happens and report back.
What are the specs on your Mac? RAM, disk type, OS, Interface and buffer settings?
I’ve got an M2Pro with CB12, 16GB ram, and SSD with a bunch of external HDs for samples and such and a MOTU 4Pre interface.
Haven’t had this issue.
HAve you tried starting up with just the stock plugins? I think there is a key command you use when starting up that gives you an option.
It might be an old VST or corrupted VST that’s causing this,
Just for clarity, the drop-outs I mentioned are when playing a project with around 100 tracks or more that are virtual instrument tracks. And many of those tracks are with the SINE player, which in my experience uses a lot of resources.
I never had any problem when recording or playing back audio, in fact my workaround for this problem is to export a mixdown of all the tracks and choose the option to create a project with them. Then I can apply filters like crazy and never have a hiccup. The problem comes when playing a project with VSTis, because for example, you load the Berlin Strings in SINE, that loads around 5 GB in RAM. Then you load them again in another track for Violins II, then another for Violas, then another for Cellos, then Bass, then you load 20 more tracks with the rest of the OT Berlin Series. Not all those tracks will get up to 5 GB, but when you add up the RAM usage for all the tracks, it gets up to a lot, and goes over the 64 GB of RAM in my Mac Studio.
If the SINE player was better designed, it would be easier to select the few articulations you are using and close the rest, but the only way is to go one by one and close them.
But you export all the tracks to audio tracks and create a new project, and Bob’s your uncle.
Which brings me to the same question as before. How can it be possible that when you open a large project with over 100 VSTi tracks with heavy RAM usage you can’t play without a lot of hiccups, i you can play it at all, but if you open it and do a mixdown, even to over 100 individual audio tracks, it exports in half the time of the timeline, and it does it perfectly? To me that seems a matter of optimization that is not being done when Cubase is in standard playback mode, but it is done when it goes into Mixdown mode.
This may sound weird, but have you checked your USB leads (esp the extension)? A mate of mine using CB13 Pro had a similar issue, more so with audio drop out and CPU over-loads - had a dodgy USB lead which he replaced and has had no problems since. Worth a try.
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What if you freeze some of the tracks or rendered in place?
If you don’t have any more changes, musically, that could help a lot.
I tried different cables I had, plus ordered a couple high quality ones, no difference.
Yes, of course freezing the tracks helps. But it’s not a fast process. When I started freezing all the tracks, Cubase would crash after a few, so I started freezing in sections until they were all frozen. All of that took like 40 minutes. Again, this is on a Mac Studio M1 Ultra with 64 GB of RAM.
And like I said, it doesn’t surprise me that the hiccups happen, because I see the amount of RAM taken by Orchestral Tools instruments, in the case of the Berlin Strings violins 1 and 2, upwards of 5 GB each, so you have about 11 GB there, but I didn’t use them just once, I use them in several tracks. Then you have several other instruments loaded from OT and other companies. So the 64 GB of RAM I have, which when I got the machine I thought would be enough for anything I could throw at it, obviously not enough.
So it doesn’t surprise me that there are hiccups. But my big question mark is what I said earlier. You have over a hundred tracks, with some VSTis that take up to 5 GB of RAM. Then how is it that this 8 minute 22 second project, when it doesn’t have any single track frozen or bounced in any way, exports a mixdown in about 4-5 minutes, and the resulting file is perfect in every way?
It’s like I said, it’s like Popeye opening the can of spinach and swallowing it whole when you do a mixdown. That’s the part that technically speaking is hard for me to understand. If it was a matter of too much loaded in RAM, plus the I/O disk speed (even though it’s all on SSD), then how can the mixdown work so fast and without glitches?
wow - that’s a lot.
There are a ton of controls in the Studio setup that I’ve never really understood. I wonder if some of them would help?
Or, treat it like a real recording session. You have one set up for composition, then once complete. Render every track to mix like they would in the old days.
Be a pain in the butt when the client asks for changes tho.
Sorry, I never saw the notification for this reply.
I went through all of those, reading the manual, and checking this forum and anything I could find online. I changed some things around, but nothing did the trick. I still have to write an email to the Steinberg guys in Germany, unfortunately I have been too busy with other things the past few months and still haven’t gotten a chance to do that. Maybe they will give me some insight.
But I can tell you one thing for sure, whenever I get another Mac Studio, I’m going to wait until I can pay for the largest amount of RAM.
You know, you hit the nail right in the head. I don’t know if I mentioned this before, but what I ended up doing was to do exactly that, treat every track as if it was a recording in a studio, so once I got the MIDI part done, meaning, all the notes are where they should be, and quantizing, and all the other things that are MIDI exclusive, then I used the export option that allows you to create a new project with all those tracks.
When I open the new project there are tons of pros and almost no cons:
Pros:
- It opens in a small fraction of the time a project with over 100 instruments tracks takes to open
- You can pile up audio FX like crazy, and it will still play without hiccups.
- Every time you save, or Cubase-Nuendo saves automatically, it takes less than a second, when saving the one with over 100 instrument tracks takes like ten seconds (on very fast SSDs)
- The project itself is a lot easier to work with, it’s a lot quicker to interact with.
There are probably more, but off the top of my head, those are the pros.
Cons:
-
Like you said, if a customer or you want changes, and those changes are music related rather than sound quality, then you have to open the project with the instrument tracks.
But, the secret is in not changing the order of the tracks, so if you make changes in one track and then export it, they will replace the older versions and when you load the other project, it will load with the new versions. But if you go into the MIDI project and delete tracks, then everything goes to hell. -
If you realize that this or that instrument sounds too low at certain parts in the song, and you’re working with the instrument tracks, you can change usually CC1 and CC11 in the MIDI track. Cubase has excellent features to edit CC automation.
However, if you stick with the exported project and decide to just edit the volume band, then you have to deal with one of the few things in which Cubase and Nuendo are not that good, which is track automation, like when you have two automation points, you select them, and when you move them, they create two extra points.
Regardless of these cons, in my experience, this is the way to go when you have too many instrument tracks.
I’m starting to think that this is the best way of doing things. I’ve always wanted to keep my options open, but I think that just leads to wishy-washy mixes.
All the great tracks I grew up with often had effects printed to the track and often two instruments on one track due to the limitation of their equipment.
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