Is ARA working great for you?

Wondering how far off the bell curve my experience using ARA is - I have incessant (almost innumerable) crashes requiring uncountable measures and workarounds that don’t prevent them anyway.

My computer is old (specs in profile) so i don’t know if it’s just me, the specific ARA program I use (Revoice Pro), or ARA itself .

I’ve gotten to where I’ve stopped using ARA (choosing standalone instead), still with a lot of crashes, but fewer, so there’s at least a partial answer in there for me.

Here either Cubase or Revoice Pro, or both, will crash.

Thanks for any thoughts!

W10 Pro, C14 Pro latest version

I can’t seem to find your specs in the profile, but ARA has been working flawlessly here, also in an old PC, Win 10 (and, in my case, Nuendo 13.0.50). I regularly use Melodyne, Spectralayers Pro, and I also used Revoice Pro in the past, but always found it a bit cumbersome to use even in ARA, and the alignment in Nuendo provided a good enough starting point for editing, so eventually stopped altogether. But don’t remember, at least in N10 and N12 days, it crashing. Tomorrow I’ll test it for you in current N13. How did it perform for you in C13?

I’ve used Melodyne Studio, VocAlign Pro, and RePitch pretty regularly, without any recent problems. I should note that most of that work was in Cubase 13 as I was finishing up an EP remix project when Cubase 14 came out, and I’ve only recently (since Cubase 14.0.10) gotten back to more Cubase use, and I’m not sure I’ve yet gotten to parts of my workflow where I’d use those three plugins on my recent projects.

I have also recently tried SpectraLayers Pro 11 with ARA for unmixing a song to help me make a chart. It really took over my computer (I’m talking all CPUs pretty nearly maxed out) and took a while, but it did work.

The only crash-type problem I did have was with WaveLab Pro 12, specifically when trying the “make extension permanent” way of rendering (see Cubase 14.0.10 crash attempting to make WaveLab 12 ARA extension permanent). I ended up having to work around that by bouncing the clips (which is my normal practice for uses of the three plugins I use the most anyway, but something I was hoping to delay a bit in the context where I was using WaveLab).

My computer is definitely not state-of-the-art, with the basic build being 10 years old, including the ASUS X-99 Deluxe motherboard, Intel i7 5820k CPU, and 16 GB RAM. I have upgraded it over the years, replacing hard disks with SSDs for the elements that matter to Cubase, and more recently replacing my video card, albeit with one that is still fairly dated (my son gave me his old one when he upgraded) and not applicable to use in some modern contexts such as SpectraLayers’ potential for speeding some of the processing up by processing it on the GPU.

Further back, I have had a few crashes with ARA uses of RePitch (which was likely quite new at the time) and some earlier versions of VocAlign (but those were very rare).

I use Repitch Standard and when using ARA it is very unstable, and will often. no recall properly at all.
Synchroarts support told me it was because they don’t officially support Cubase 14 and to go back to Cubase 13.
When I told them that the same issues were present with Cubase 13, they have asked for evidence of the issues. I will provide them with some video evidence. I would recommend that you do the same.
The whole Cubase GUI becomes unresponsive and sluggish, as if it is operating at 5fps. Regular beachballs and freezing.
If I try to remove the ARA extension from the track, I get an infinite number of pop-ups telling me that files are missing. Then I have to force quit Cubase and reload the project.
The older capture method is a lot more stable, but I am also getting random loud clicks that happen during silence between vocal phrases. If I reset all changes in these silent sections, then the click will go away, but the next time that I reload the project (after saving the changes) the loud clicks return.
The problem seems to be synchroarts and their software being horribly optimized and very buggy/unreliable. Frustrating, as I prefer the results of their software.
Melodyne works a lot better as ARA.
ARA in general does seem to negatively impact the performance of Cubase, even Steinberg’s own products introduce some instability.

M4 pro Macbook Pro. MacOS Sequoia.

Thanks, @Soapmak3r, for such a detailed and helpful response.

Though my dinosaur system is almost certainly contributing, I see by your system specs that a new one is not going to be a panacea in terms of Revoice Pro (constant crashes here used as an ARA extension).

Have you tried the freestanding version of Repitch, any better luck using it in that non-ARA fashion?

Yes, I wondered if the issues I was having were that my previous M1 Macbook Air was just not powerful enough or lacked the GPU resources to run it stably, but unfortunately not.

The standard version of Repitch doesn’t have the standalone application, just the VST insert and ARA. I have resorted to using the VST version as the first insert, and then running in the older ‘capture’ method, where you have to manually play/capture all of the tracks.
It works a lot smoother, with no sluggishness, and no beachballs or freezing, but it does have other issues, like weird clicks that will randomly happen.
These clicks happen in between words or gaps in the vocals. If I highlight any noise in those sections, and then disable any processing for those sections, the loud clicks go away, but even after saving, then will return at the exact same spots the next time that I load the project.
I will make some videos and send them to Synchro arts support, but their initial responses don’t fill me with confidence that they will improve the performance. It seemed more like deflection to me.

Make sure you’re not using the RePitch setup option that stores the ARA data in the Cubase project. I found that, when I did that, every time Cubase would go to do an automatic backup of the project, it would take a long time and interrupt Cubase operations. The reason is that the information RePitch caches can be pretty big (check CPR file size with and without that option), especially if you happen to be using higher sample rates (e.g. I usually do songs with vocals at 96 kHz). Instead of only having to write the ARA cache information to disk when something changes, this option means it gets rewritten on every .BAK file creation.

The alternative is that RePitch (and also VocAlign Pro, and assumedly any other Synchro Arts ARA plugins) store their cache in a system area. This kind of sucks in that RePitch frequently (maybe always???) doesn’t clean up after itself, so, even after you’ve removed a project from your system after archiving, the RePitch ARA cache is still taking up space:

(I obviously haven’t cleaned up this data in a long time. I never leave RePitch active in a project, bouncing results as soon as I’m finished using it. Some of this may have been left behind by Cubase crashes while RePitch was active, but there’s no way that would account for this much data. I really wish they’d put their cache in a subdirectory under the Cubase project so that, at worst case, I’d be deleting the cache after archiving a project.)

I should note that my use of RePitch is only on Windows 10, and with a system I built back in 2024 (but upgraded in some areas since). Early on, RePitch was decidedly buggy, though it has mostly worked reasonably for me recently (I haven’t had occasion to try it in Cubase 14 yet though I probably will in the next week or two – I only use it on lead vocals as Melodyne is much more efficient for background vocals since I can work on multiple parts at once). I say “mostly” because every once in a while there is some weirdness, like playing a specific phrase at the wrong sample rate, that forces me to figure out some workaround.

I’m on Nuendo 13 (but following this thread) and in my rather old system it has been rock solid with melodyne and Spectralayers (processing, making extension permanent, etc). With Revoice it was a mixed bag, and eventually I stopped using it.