If you have Audio Dropouts try disabling Multi Processing (AMD Ryzen CPU)

Cubase
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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.

Specs:
Lenovo Legion Laptop
AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS
32GB RAM
Nvidia RTX4060
Audient iD4 interface

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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.

M

1 Like
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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.

Maybe that’s what you have. Or not. :slightly_smiling_face: