I have Cubase and Logic Pro X. On Logic, a good, 50-instrument project (with East West VSTs loaded) plays perfectly fine (my Logic Pro audio buffer size has always been 128, and I’ve never needed to boost it).
In Cubase, with a nearly identical project, I can’t get a sound at a buffer size of 128 apart from laggy stutters. Boosting to 256 doesn’t help. Nor 512. In fact, I usually have to set Cubase to a 2048 buffer size to get a playback that I can work with. Meanwhile, in Logic, everything is flawless at 128.
The load time for PLAY is also lightning fast in Logic, while it is several times slower in Cubase, and gets slower and slower the more I load into the project.
So, clearly, there is something terribly wrong with Cubase when it comes to using PLAY on a mac. Again, everything is fine in Logic, so my computer can handle it. Cubase, for whatever reason, cannot. Any ideas? Am I missing something here?
Your lucky! Unable to use Play 4 at all in projects here! Just one instance of play 4.2 loaded (without any midi data or tracks) in an empty new project grinds the whole system to a halt with massive asio overload as soon as any mouse movements are made.
These problems became apparent just after the release of play 4. Play 3 works ok, the problem there though is, libraries updated to the new play 4 engine will not load or are seen as not licensed rendering them all utterly useless at this point in time.
There is discussion in threads on this forum and some on the east west forum though, the moderators on that forum choose not to post lots of threads questioning this behaviour.
It’s not unique to Cubase though, it manifests itself in all the daws installed here. Advice from east west has been scant to say the least and has ranged from working on a fix to be released next week (that was eight months ago) to changing graphics card through to building a system or consider changing to a different daw until the problems have been resolved!
The only regret here is that newer libraries purchased since the release of play 4 were by download which means there are no boxes to use as bookends.
Thanks for the reply! So, if I get this straight, downgrading to PLAY 3 would usually fix the problem, but will render all my libraries useless as they’ve been using PLAY 4?
Same problems here, but only with Cubase 7.5 because 6.5.5 works great with Play. The buffer size issue is connected with the 2 different plugin platform VST vs AU where logic works amazing. Until now, I’m using play 4 under osx mouton lion and Cubase 6.5 without problems. I hope this helps.
It sucks but there is a weird workaround until either Cubase, Intel or EastWest fix their software… Change your mouse to “Inverted” Start–>Control Panel → Mouse → Pointers → Scheme —> set to Windows Inverted. Who knows why, but it works.
Play is a terrible piece of software and most EastWest libraries are now hopelessly outdated and outclassed. I invested quite a lot of money in those products until 5-6 years ago, then I started getting better libraries and usually at better prices too… (Spitfire Audio, Berlin, Symphobia etc.) Very rarely I use any of my EW libraries nowadays.
I’ve heard that PLAY in VE Pro should fix everything, but I don’t think I’ll be able to get it, and the fact that everything works fine in Logic on the same computer gives me hope that someday Cubase or East West will come out with an update that includes a fix. Whatever Logic is doing to get East West to work, Cubase should do it, too.
Thought the days of problematic video card handling was long gone but, that seems to be the cause of problems. Trying a huge amount of older drivers has proved fruitless and time consuming. The inverted mouse trap fix don’t work here either.
Have managed to get a few instances running by taking the latency down to 25ms, ok for slow attack pads and the like but not so clever for keyboards and drums and especially no good for earlier projects that were saved with lots of instances of play Play 3.
It’s obviously going take a fair deal of collaberation between East West, Steinberg and GPU hardware houses to resolve. Its a shame that differing versions of play cant be installed at the same time as with kontakt.
I had all sorts of problems with Play. Then all of a sudden it started working very reliably, including very fast load times from SSD. I’m not sure what I did, but apart from Windows updates I only installed a new trackpad driver. UVI Workstation also started working properly for the first time, but I put that down to the latest version being better.
Other than that all I can think of is that I installed a demo version of Spaces. Maybe the installation of that shook things up a bit. I had all but abandoned Play because of the load times (even from SSD), and it will take a long time for me to trust it enough to base a project around it again. I’m thinking of moving entirely to VSL if I can ever afford it -it just works.
Apparently East West say that Steinberg are working on a fix for Cubase 7.x. Apparently. I can confirm though that Play 4.1.8 is working really well in VE Pro 5.
The loading times with Play are and old issue and when you say that in their forums you are banned !!! It´s a shame and I dońt no want to buy any of their software anymore !!
Maybe it’s time for them to ditch Play, and move back to Kontakt -and stop treating users as the enemy. I know of no other VSTi company that creates such bad feelong amongst users.
