In part I forgot of my series of griping about Cubase’s terrible CPU-thrashing habits, I’d like to focus on the Mix Console, specifically opening and closing it with F3, which I do a lot. I can pretty predictably cause a VST meter spike/overload doing this a few times in rapid succession.
Why? Why is Cubase’s audio engine so bloody temperamental? Shouldn’t this be cached in memory after the first time and left there? I have gobs of memory. Why does it have to reload everything each time?
Very annoying. Among my pet peeves with this program, and there are many now, having to constantly and unexpectedly reset the VST Performance meter after it has peaked has to be at the very top of the list. Very distracting and incredibly workflow-killing. Saps the fun right out of making music hearing it pop and seeing that meter go red again. In this current project, I have very little going on yet: just a few reverbs and compressors & such running.
I have put my mind into the setting that the performance overload light does not matter until I am finalizing a project. Or if I record audio. And even then, my recordings don’t have any dropouts even if the red light goes on for a brief moment. It seems to me the recording area of Cubase is better insulated then the playback area.
For rendering it does not matter at all, too. Only if I need to render the final piece in real-time (maybe because I use outboard gear) do I worry about the red light again.
1 Like
I wish I could get myself to think that way, but when it’s bad enough to be one of those clumsy, loud, poppy overloads with dropout, I can’t ignore it. Just pulls me right out of the moment, especially when I’ve gotten used to ‘being’ in a lush reverb space. Kills the illusion and really frustrates. If it were more predictable, that’d be one thing, but I’m in a situation where the meter is barely past 10% sometimes and I’ll get an errant overload out of seemingly nowhere. Super irritating.
I’m really suspecting it may have something to do with Intel RST at this point: I have it managing a couple of HDD RAID volumes and it took it upon itself to manage all my other drives without me asking (four M.2 NVMe SSDs). I can’t say for certain, but it’s one of many hunches I have. Of course, I’m paranoid about many parts of my computer at this point, enough so to have yanked out all the cords to a card reader & USB port 5.25" caddy-thing on the front of my tower, just to eliminate everything I can think of.
But just getting so tired of this “did you update your drivers?” schtick: that’s all we ever do, it seems. Mess with drivers, tweak settings, download esoteric tools to do arcane things to Windows… that’s my life with Cubase.