I’m on 10.5 running in widows 11 with a decent computer. The audio processing load is making it impossible to record.
I’ve changed the power settings to high performance, tinkered with all the normal settings in Cubase, turned my buffer size way down and I’m still not having any luck. CPU is staying below 20% while the track is playing, so I don’t think it’s that.
Heres some of what I’m working with
Intel 13th gen i7 1360p 2.20 ghz
16gb of ram
Cubase 10.5
Universal audio volt
64 bit float
Multi processing on
Asio guard on set to high
Steinberg power scheme is on
Buffer is set to 512 (though ive tried that lower with similar results)
Sample rate is at 48000
Power settings on PC are optimized for performance
If I’m missing anything, please let me know. Any advice would be appreciated.
Laptops can sometimes be finicky when it comes to audio performance.
Before suggesting anything else, I recommend that you download and install Latencymon (if you haven’t already) and run it for 15 minutes while your system is idling (i.e. don’t run it while you’re running Cubase or any other 3rd party app. Don’t touch the keyboard or mouse during the 15 minute run).
Just let it do its thing and post the results here so we can have a look.
There’s more possible things to do but let’s see the Latencymon results first.
Before even running latencymon (if the op is indeed on a laptop), I’d first reboot the computer with F2 into setup to completely disable onboard sound, onboard lan, any card readers, and any speedstep etc stuff. Those are traditional killers of daw performance imo.
Then boot up and run latencymon.
If one runs latencymon first, it’s almost guaranteed to show spikes from all the mobo calls to the onboard stuff…which just delays having to disable the items and re-running latencymon tests.
What does that actually mean? Record what? Audio? virtual instruments (all of them?). Are you getting dropouts?
Has this always been like this on your computer or is this something new? Is this with all projects you have or just specific ones? Does this also happen with a fresh project with just one track?
Also, you explicitly mention “average load”. Usually, with recording problems, the realtime peak is the problem. So playback of a project works without problems, but if you try to record, the avg load goes to 100%?
The effect of having only low system CPU usage when the cubase avg meter is already maxed out is usually an issue of having a long chain of plugins that overload a core, ie a vsti track into a group into maybe another group an then the master bus, each with some cpu hungry plugins on them, then on top of that maybe even some plugins in the control room (e.g. headphone correction or similar). If you the record arm the vsti track, all of this goes into the realtime path, and iirc, all on one core. Then it could be the case that the project is just too demanding your CPU.
If this happens with only one track and no plugins, that’s indeed another problem in which case a check with Latencymon would be advisable as a first test.
No and Yes.
Quality will not suffer. You’d need perfect ears and a gawd almighty sound system in a perfect listening space to hear any difference.
Performance should improve because Cubase is working less hard.
It is peaking while I am recording audio, but stays around 75% when idol or playing the track back. Which is why I was thinking that the average processing load is the problem rather than just peaking.
This is a fairly new project with little content. I have about 30 - 60 seconds of midi bass and drum plugins, and two tracks of audio that are about 30 seconds with an amp plugin. All of which I’ve been using for several years.
This seems to be a new problem. Or at least an issue that’s grown over time. I’ve worked on several much larger projects on the same PC and a weaker one. Of course if your pushing it and aren’t freezing/bussing you might get some clips, but this peaks as soon as I switch a track to monitor, which has never happened before.
In this case, there is no busses and nothing is frozen. I was really just getting started with an idea when it started.
Not sure if you have one, but Graphics card update possibly. Also cubase runs better for me when when I utilize the processors graphics, not the Nvidia.
So if you put a track into monitor (or record enable) it gets moved from the ASIO path to the realtime path. This is why you won’t notice much difference with the ASIO guard settings, they don’t apply here, it is only the buffer size that would make a difference. But you wrote that you already set that to 512 without improvement, which shouldn’t really be.
If LatencyMon doesn’t show any bigger problems, I would go on to test systematically, e.g. start a new empty project with just an audio track, then record enable it, see if the meter peaks. If not, successively add other tracks (your instrument/midi), record enable them (only one at a time) and see at which point the issue arises. This is to check whether it is a problem with a plugin you use, maybe you updated one of them, and now they behave differently.
Oh, and just to be sure, if you have some antivirus running, make sure that your Cubase project folder and sample library folder and the Cubase process are excluded from any realtime scanning.
Dude it might actually be the anti virus. That’s the only recent change I can think of. The McAfee trial that came with the computer just ended, and I messed around with a bunch of settings in McAfee trying to disable it so I’d stop getting prompts. Work is making me actually.. work (losers) but I’ll check it once I get a sec.
I would suggest to uninstall the mcAfee and use the standard windows defender… antivirus softwares are debatable at best and a security hole themselves at worst.
