Hi, I just wanted to share something that made me suffer for quite some time - if you have random “Audio Dropout” errors while recording, try disabling Multi Processing
(Studio Setup>Audio System>Uncheck “Activate Multi Processing”
Full story:
I bought a new laptop with AMD Ryzen processor (after having a desktop PC with Intel CPU).
After I reinstalled Cubase and my plugins setup, I started experiencing random stuttering, even under low load, which I never encountered on my old PC.
Recently it became worse with “Audio Dropout” messages that would interrupt recording, even in empty projects!
I started troubleshooting thoroughly, looked at guides and tips, nothing helped.
Just out of interest I opened another DAW I have - Bitwig - to see how this issue manifest itself there.
To my surprise I managed to record live guitar with Neural DSP plugin (being monitored) in a template project I downloaded (of a full song) with a Buffer size of 32 Samples (lowest possible) with no stuttering!!!
This made me confident that the problem is not in my hardware.
So I started messing with Cubase settings and once I disabled Multi Processing I stopped receiving the error messages while recording.
Though doing this also disables ASIO Guard and you lose the added performance that it gives (I get occasional click sound at the lower Buffer sizes that I used before).
As a long time Cubase user, this really disappoints me, and the performance of Bitwig really impressed me, espeacially as a recording guitar player.
I hope this thread will pop up in Google searches for other people because I couldn’t find this mentioned in any result.
I think you should change your thread title though to say you’re using a Laptop.
Dissabling Multi Processing is generally a bad idea with a modern CPU.
Laptops are a special case and there are other methods to use to get dropout free performance that don’t have the performance impact dissabling Multi Processing does.
Hi @yunitiv ,
Your experience with Ryzen Lenovo is interesting.
I have a slightly older Legion Pro with Ryzen 7 5800H, 32 GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 3050, which I use as a mobile complement to the desktop with Ryzen 9 5900X.
Overall it handles large desktop Cubase Pro sessions successfully, and I have no problems with it when recording multitracks in the rehearsal room, which is where I use it every time.
Several times I forgot to connect it to the power supply and recorded with it normally unaware of it until it notified me about the critical battery level - no probs with performance.
Activate multiprocessing and 64 bit float processing precision in Cubase (12, 13) are active.
However,
I remember that when I bought it and started with Cubase , I had some serious performance issues with Cubase - to make a long story short, it was because I copied Cubase preferences … from my desktop to this laptop (probably an unwise thing to do - copying the entire “…/AppData/Roaming/Steinberg/Cubase x_version” folder).
When I deleted the copied prefs and let Cubase create them from scratch, copying only some individual custom things like key commands, projects templates and the like, Cubase on Legion started working perfectly. No more overloading by e.g. SSL Reverb or something.
This is the first time I hear laptops might have issues compared to desktops when using Cubase.
Could you point me please to those methods you are speaking about?
Although what you are saying makes sense, the talk everywhere online is that the advantage of a desktop is just that you get more raw power for your money.
The problem I encountered is critical and I would expect this point to be brought up much more frequently.
Also - like I wrote in the original post, I have great experience while using other DAWs.
I would be glad if you got more specific about the methods you mentioned for dropout free performance in laptops.
Just wanted to chime in here: I’m getting similar issues in Cubase 13 (and Dorico), on my desktop Ryzen 9 5900X. I’ve got one VST in the project (Organteq 2).
With Multicore Processing enabled, I get a dropout every couple minutes or so, and the Processing Overload red light in the Audio Performance window turns on when that happens. Doesn’t matter whether ASIO-Guard is on or off, doesn’t matter if my buffer size is 64 or 1024.
With Multicore Processing disabled, I don’t get any such dropouts, but I get a very small glitch now and then. The overall performance is much better.
I should also mention that I only seem to experience these problems in Steinberg programs — I don’t run into these issues when running the VST standalone or inside another DAW.
I have a Ryzen Laptop, and it has no issues in Cubase.
I also use a Ryzen Desktop and haven’t seen this issue, however, I tend to keep my machines completely up-to-date.
So, it’s within the realm of possibility (due primarily to the lack of complete information given) that some may be running a non-patched setup exhibiting problems that have already been addressed by Microsoft and/or AMD.
In some cases, updating their OS is the only way to get around this, as Microsoft has had to patch Windows multiple times to fix issues with AMD Ryzen CPUs (going back to Windows 10). Same with AMD and their chipset drivers.
DSP Latency issues with GPU drivers on Laptops were addressed by both AMD and NVIDIA about 1.5-2 years ago, if not longer (at this point in time).
I’m far from fully knowledgeable about these matters, but in my limited experience one big difference between desktops and laptops for realtime audio is that the latter have a lot of power management overhead. If you search online with terms like “windows laptop audio dropouts” along with acpi.sys you can find a lot about this. It’s still happening in Win11 it appears.
I personally had a beefy Dell laptop that was giving me fits with dropouts. My solution was to use the program below and set Cubase’s CPU affinity to avoid CPU 0 where the laptop’s ACPI.SYS power management driver was causing a bunch of problems. Software:
