Issue on initial playback skipping

Cubase
#1

Hi All,

I’m currently running Cubase Pro 8.5.10 but this problem has been around for several versions. I think it’s in my setup but I can’t figure out where it would be. It has something to do with pre-loading the VST sounds before it plays back.

Everything I start a fresh playback of my project it skips when it hits the first track it hasn’t loaded yet. I can’t figure out where I can go to solve this. I have plenty of memory and CPU on my Mac (OSX Yosemite, 12 GB RAM and Hexacore 3.33).

I must be missing a project setup setting somewhere? I should note that these are all VST sounds and no Audio. Actually any recorded audio works fine when I have it.

Thanks for any help!

-Matt

#2

Hi,

What do you mean by “skips”? The playback cursor jumps? And how do you “the track hasn’t loaded yet”? How do you know, the track is not loaded already?

What Audio Device do you use? What is your Buffer Size? Could you try to switch the ASIO Guard Off (for testing), please?

#3

Hi Martin,

Sorry this is a hard one to explain. Let me try it in steps.

  1. I open Cubase and load a project initially.
  2. When I hit play to play the project every time it hits a new track with a VST that has not yet been played in that track it stops/stutters for a second until it’s been played or loaded into memory.
  3. If I rewind before this point and play through that point again it then plays fine.
  4. If it comes to yet another track with a VST that hasn’t played yet it will do the same thing. Once it plays it doesn’t happen again on this project.

I hope thats a little clearer. To answer your question about my Audio Device I’m using the Focusrite Saffire Pro 40 Firewire device. Granted the Firewire is 400 I believe and not 800.

#4

Hi,

OK, it’s clear, now. Try to increase the Buffer Size. And try to change the ASIO Guard settings. In your case, I would recommend to increase it, in fact.

#5

Thanks, Martin. I will try this. To be clear, you aren’t talking about the Latency rate, correct? I will play with that anyway and also look into the ASIO Guard setting. I’ve seen that before.

#6

I occasionally get this same thing as well. Only happens on the first playback after loading.
Then it doesn’t happen again. This affects VST Instruments only. Seems like the samples aren’t getting loaded before the track starts to play. When the cursor hits the track, then you get a small glitch and playback resumes as normal. It doesn’t really bother me or stop the work process, just a little unprofessional in front of clients. I would like to find a cure for this but no luck yet and it has been several years.

#7

Yes! I’ve been using Cubase since version 3 and back then I didn’t have a powerful PC. I finally switched over to a Mac Pro a few years ago and a lot of professional hardware and I figured that would solve the problem. Unfortunately not. :open_mouth:
It does suck when you’re playing it back to people for the first time if you don’t remember to run it through once.

#8

Well @Rotund, Kudos to @Martin because I just adjusted my ASIO Guard down to low which reduced that latency to 16ms. It was much higher as set to medium. I never really knew what that was for but to my surprise it actually just solved the problem! At least it didn’t skip. I will have to research on that and try a few other things to see if it continues to work smoothly.

#9

I’m not using ASIO Guard, never have.

#10

Counterintuitive but maybe set it to low and see what happens. :wink: