Impossible to make any recording with CUBASE 15 on my PC

Cubase
1

Hello,

After tons of tries to make Cubase 15 able to record when I play guitar I have decided to make a last try here in the Steinberg forums.

First my configuration:

Laptop Asus ROG G733 ZS with core I9 12900H, 3080 laptop GPU (8 DDR6 dedicated memory, 32 GB of RAM DDR5 and 2 NVMe SSDs with a total of 2 TB.

Windows 11 pro.

My audio card is a Focusrite 18I20 first gen connected to the PC through a USB cable.

The guitar is plugged to a Fractal Audio FM9 connected in analog mode to the Focusrite.

Note that using directly and only the FM9 like audio card does chnage to result/issues

At the begining with this PC it was even not possible to listen a simple MP3 reading on the focusrite without drops or audio artefacts. The first step was then to reach a good behaviour at list for that and I was helped by Focusrite and Latencymon tool to make it.

The biggest improvments were:

  • remove the VMD Intel techno to Improve SSD management (was introducing 40ms latency). Sometimes new technologies are simply out of control and counter productive. I have removed it and do not have noticed any issue or lower performances of the SSDs
  • Change the parameters of power management to at least when the PC is plugged to avoid any processor sleeping or low performance mode, also USB sleep, PCI sleep, etc.
  • Also forbid core parking

This was radically changing the situation regarding simple MP3 reading. But what is the situation in Cubase 15 now. My projects are for the moment very simple with just an audio backtrack track and the guitar one to record. The behaviour is the following: sometimes it works fine and I can record all the day without issues even with an asio buffer at 128 or sometimes 64 samples. Sometimes it fails after some seconds and then even if I try to increase the buffer it fails even with a size of 1024 samples that is the max the ASIO driver of the focusrite allows. Anyway 1024 drives already a big latency not compatible with a serious audio work.

As sometimes latencymon was still complaining with the hard page faults of the antivirus I also removed Norton and moved my NVIDIA driver from game ready to studio but without success.

Latencymon is now happy but Cubase is still in trouble

I have also tried without more success:

  • Remove E_Cores from the BIOS
  • Use the PC in turbo mode (Asus Armoury crate levels)
  • Remove the asio guard (I have tried all the levels Low/Normal/High)
  • Move the precision to 64 bits
  • Run everything at 48Hz that is the speed of the FM9
  • Exclude the directories of Cubase from the analysis of windows defender
  • check the box "activate the optimised mode for Steinberg audio power
  • and probably much more

Well I cannot remember all the changes and tries done but believe me a lot and it is always the same. Cubase sometimes works well and sometimes totally fails to record a simple stereo analog track.

The realtime monitor of Cubase shows the red box that means processor overloaded but either in latencymon of tasks manager there is nothing visible. I do not cross 12% of CPU.

I miss options/tries now so if some of you have good ideas or have faced such issues I would be very grateful for the help.

Thanks in advance

2

Are you using the Focusrite driver (in Cubase Studio Setup)?

Are you able to see any activity on the Cubase guitar track when recording?

3

Yes the Focusrite ASIO driver

4

Yes I can here it and see the viewmeter mooving. The recording always starts but fails after a certain amount of time. Sometime after a few seconds, sometimes more but in general it stops after less than 30 seconds and the time is ASIO buffer size dependant… I have an error message: erreur d’enregistrement: décrochage audio détecté - I have the french version. It could be translated like "recording error: audio break detected or audio stall detected. It records the guitar before stopping.

Just for info, I have the same behaviour if I use the FM9 (my guitar modeler) USB audio card. This somewhere demonstrates that the issue is not on audio card side.

By the way thank you for your efforts to help.

5

Missing some very crucial info on what you did on your first day before any daw installs…ie…first of first of first…c drive completely wiped/erased…and clean install of windows 11 25h2 with zero zero zero trace of Asus apps at all…at all. Even drivers coming direct from Intel (its download assistant, not waiting for their updates to appear on windows downloads).

You did that, right? And then clean installed all your other stuff?

I always do that first, but particularly did that on an asus zenbook I bought new earlier in the year for legal work. I thought I could sneak some music making onto it as was from the factory. haha…that lasted about a week before I realized a clean install is a happy windows install. That asus factory stuff is worthless. I had to update the bios and change settings in the bios as well but all is well now, notwithstanding that computer isn’t my most powerful by a longshot.

6

I bought this laptop 3,5 years ago now and it was completely clean as I bought it without OS. So yes the installation was from scratch with no pre installation by the laptop provider. Anyway this PC is not dedicated to Cubase as the music is just a hobby for me. I’m owning Cubase since a lot of time but the last years I was more or less not doing music anymore or nearly not. By the way, in between several updates of Cubase were taking place. More recently I got much more free time (Im an old guy) and invested again my time playing music. Then I updated to Cubase 15 and the issues were popping up. This laptop is my main one and I’m expecting it to run everything I need correctly as far as the CPU and GPU are enough. It was the case in the past with a very poor (power wise) computer (also an ASUS ROG laptop) compared with this one. Yes there is a lot of applications installed and know the difference between just having CPU available and having real time capability. I discovered also that Intel in particular has opened to many options and technical solutions to save electrical power without thinking about this “real time” requirement. This is somlething I went through already with high improvment but factually not enough for Cubase basic use. It exists something like 100 parameters to tune the behaviour of the CPU. I went through all of them modifying each to improve performance whatever impact on power consumption.

Currently I have a good candidate that is the “Activate multi processing” option. It looks that everything runs much better when deactivated. It is a bit too early to state about it as I was in the past many times believing “Yes I got it” and then disappointed. I need more time/tests to state. I was stupidly believing this could just improve. I say stupidly because I know (Im a real-time embedded SW expert) that such multi core processing can be counter productive if wrongly designed. Let-s see. Thanks for your help.

7

Not every PC is suitable for DAW use, especially laptops can be impossible to get to work properly as you often can’t swap parts for ones that do work.

8

That indicates that the likely obstacle is some background task that starts during the Cubase session and deprives it of the necessary system resources (usually CPU, but it may also be memory, disk, network, or a combination of them). Those times when the background task does not start, you are fine.

When problems strike, immediately open the Task Manager and watch the tasks that draw the most resources.

9

Maybe and I till yesterday I was thinking I would never succeed. Till yesterday evening I was a little bit desperate and believing I was in such case. As mentionned just before there is currently a light still weak but a light that I found the remaining guilty. I have also the possibility to reinstall everything on an old desktop computer but first it is stuck on windows 10 that is no more maintained, second it has only 16GB of RAM (maybe enough) but on top I have no guaranty that after reinstalling everything the same issues or new ones will pop-up. I then try again even after many many tries to succeed.

10

At the beginning windows defender had a strong activity (CPU 5 to 6% but disk 30 to 40%) but this was before I exclude from its scope the steinberg directories. Anyway I always wait to have a stable and low situation and also check when started to verify no other application takes the leads even sporadically one of the ressources you mentionned (with the task manager but also with more complete scanning applications like “Process lasso”). More recently, the last days I was no more meeting sessions that were working. It looks like the the same session can start OK and then after a first fail the situation becomes ugly even increasing the ASIO buffer. I mean by Ugly that it fails even sooner and systematically.

11

New tests results:

As mentionned just before deactivating the multi processing was solving my issue but with more complexe projects (Cubase 12 demo one) I have laq of CPU (announced by the Cubase real time monitor) with audio artefacts even increasing the buffer. If a activate again the multi processing then I see the processor level in the real time monitor somewhere divided by 3 or even more and no more issues. This means that when I will try to record on a lets call it “big” project I will have no solution. I think I need to go to Steinberg support.

12

In my experience, the most common causes of DPC spikes and audio dropouts on gamer laptops are

  • Gamer-optimized GPU driver
  • WiFi / LAN accelerators
  • OEM downloader/update/management software
  • CPU throttling due to heat
  • Gamer lighting / effects drivers (keyboard lighting effects, lid effects, etc.)

As an engineer, I assume you know to back out the tweaks you made which did not help. Otherwise, you can lock yourself in a path where you can never get it working the way you want.

On most devices, all you need to do is go into Windows Settings (not control panel), System > Power > and set to “Best Performance” directly from the drop down in settings.

There are cases where there are laptops which will just never be suitable. I haven’t seen anything like that from the larger brands, but there were some very cheap laptops for a while that had things like massive bus communication lag that would hit audio.

Pete
Microsoft

13

Have you tried disabling your network adapters, including WiFi, while running Cubase?

14

May be the USB port started to sleep.

Do you still see the green light on the Focusrite when the issue happens?

15

First thanks for the help.

Please consider that at the moment latencymon is happy meaning no more DPC spikes able to pollute the Audio flow. Like mentionned I already changed the NVIDIA driver from Game ready to studio one without any perceivable progress. I already tried also to remove all the peripherals including external display without perceivable progress.

I tried also to deactivate the network /BT/Wifi here also without progress.
Regarding USB of course I deactivated from the power management profile the USB and POCIe sleep. I am also deactivating/checking the capability to sleep the different USBs. Sometimes after a windows update I see some coming back. Here also this does not solve the issue.
Regarding OEM SW I’m still using the Armoury crate SW from ASUS. I always position it to Turbo when using Cubase. The option to remove it is not an easy one as many parameters/options are not available from the BIOS but piloted by this Armoury crate. Removing it will let no way to activate or deactivate them.

Currently I’m testing a setup that looks to work. I’m a little bit cautious due to the fact that I already reached in the past one setp that was working before failing again. I’m currently testing and till now succeeding to record with a big project (one cubase 12 demo project) in // with an ASIO buffer of 160 samples, without visible issues and multi processing activated (CPU is somewhere at 25% max from the Steinberg real time monitor).
I’m using the Process Lasso tool that is the more complete I know to tweak in this area. The changes I have done are the following:

  • change the CPU affinity of Cubase to run on performance cores only: Previously I was just deactivating Efficiency cores from the BIOS but this kills their use for all running SW concentrating all on Performance cores. Here Cubase is running on performance cores but the other ones are available for other SW
  • Limit Cubase to the NVIDIA GPU. Such Intel processors (12900H) include a GPU and maybe there was some switching between them involved
  • Apply when Cubase runs the Steinberg power profile. This was already checked from Cubase but I’m not sure that checking it in Cubase overuns what other tools are doing (Armoury crate, …). Note that Process Lasso proposes its “Highest performance profil” that is maybe even better but this could be a next step test if the actual one finally fails.
    Let’s see… Thank you all for your help
16

I forgot in the list of previously done actions the following:

https://helpcenter.steinberg.de/hc/fr/articles/32423049399186-Windows-D%C3%A9connexions-sur-les-processeurs-Intel-%C3%A0-architecture-hybride-lorsque-Cubase-Nuendo-est-ex%C3%A9cut%C3%A9-en-arri%C3%A8re-plan

17

Welcome, Armando!

I did’t read every post in this thread, but first thing that comes to my mind when someone reports erratic, unpredictable performance fluctuations on Windows 11, is some background online activty and updating processes.

So, if possible, I would try to put the Laptop in offline mode (turn off Wifi, Bluetooth, plug off the LAN cable etc), (temporarily) disable Windows Update, and then I would open the Task Manager and review for CPU or RAM-intensive backghround processes.
Next, if you have an Antivirus/Antimalware software installed, try to deactivate it.

If nothing helps, I would try to run a debloating script such as ATLAS OS. This is actually a free MOD for Wiindows 11 that is best run AFTER a fresh Win 11 install. It is extremely popular and said to massively improve latencies on the computer. It is mostly used by the gaming community which report significant gains in gaming performance (fps), but in my optinion this should also be very helpful for audio performance.

Windows 11 is a mess, it is an entirely broken OS. Personally, I wouldn’t hesitate to downgrade it to Windows 10.

18

This POS is known to give problems for realtime audio. You should at least try without it installed to confirm if it’s causing your problems.

19

Armoury crate

That’s exactly the kind of gamer-optimized OEM tool that is usually not compatible with real-time audio, in my experience.

Pete
Microsoft

20

This was my first attempt but I had to stepback because many drivers were even not available for windows 10 :grimacing:. On top more recently, we know windows 10 is no more maintained. If I give up, I will reinstall every music related SW on a dedicated desktop that is on windows 10 (declared like too old for windows 11 despite an Intel core I7 6700K and a 1070GTX GPU)