Export Audio Mixdown

Cubase
1

I changed platforms, from PC back to Mac, I purchased the new Mac Pro (trash can), changed my audio interface from Motu hd192 pci system to the Apollo, with the Thunderbolt connection. All my software, firmware is up to date, but my Export Audio Mixdown has quadrooooooopled. It previously (on my pc) took 4 minutes to bounce down a 30 minute audio file down to an mp3.

What happened?

Other processes (like analyzing for pitch correction) are much improved on the amount of time it now takes, compared to the old mac or even the hefty pc we built for Cubase.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,

Rich

2

Is there any external processing?

Does it say it has to do it in realtime?

That’s the only thing I can think of unless something is going on with the uad stuff.

3

FWIW - as Tacman hinted, I notice that if I have any UAD plugs in the project, the offline render takes significantly longer. I won’t pretend to know why, but I would try removing them from the session and trying it without them, if this is possible.

4

Yes, If theres some sort of dsp processing going on such as UAD or TC this will increase export.

5

It takes an enormous amount of time to mixdown on my Mac as well. So much so, that I quit using that feature and just started recording audio tracks via audio groups. From watching memory use on the activity monitor my surmise is that Cubase is loading the whole project in again before it starts the mixdown. The great majority of the time it was taking was before the progress bar appeared (or started progressing, I don’t remember) so it was taking a lot more time to start the mixdown than to do it. If you don’t have enough memory to load the project again after loading it the first time, a lot of swapping will occur so it could take a lot more time to do the mixdown than to load the project when you opened it. I never got confirmation on this but that’s my suspicion. I have not been a Cubase user for a long time so maybe it did not do this in previous versions.

[Edit]

I did not make it clear that I think this reloading of the whole project on mixdown happens in OSX but not in Windows. Others have reported considerably longer times for mixdown on the Mac vs Windows.

6

As mentioned, UAD will slow your exports down considerably.
I’ve done tests to see what the difference actually is.
Same song, all native processing, takes a little less then 1/3 the time to export.
Big difference but I don’t think this is your issue.

Good luck fixing this.