keeping projects and samples on a mapped network drive.

I have always done this. I have kept all my studio projects for the past 10 years on a network drive mapped to my Qnap. It has never been an issue before this newer version of Cubase. I haven’t used 8 or 9 so I’m not sure if the issue exists there. Whenever I move an audio event on the timeline the GUI hangs for a few seconds. This does not happen if I save the project to my local SSD. This has never been an issue with any other DAW i’ve used and I’m not sure if anyone else uses mapped network drives with cubase?

THere are tons of possible reasons why the connection “stutters” or lags. There is no guaranteed transfer-speed between a network drive and your main computer. I suspect this is not cubase-related.

Just my 2 cents .

Hi,

I did a quick Test with my Laptop and Cubase10 Elements.

Very small Project with only 1min Audio,and some virtual Instruments.

Project and audio recording on a mapped Network drive (Synology in this case), Samples for the VSTi on lokal drive.

I had no issues dragging the audio parts around in the timeline, even with being connected with WIFI only.

Even if this is no complex project, it might help to sort out your problem?
I don’t have a large project available at the moment, maybe the problem comes around when Cubase cannot put everything into the RAM?

Cheers,Dirx

Interesting. I have 24 gigs of RAM so I know that’s not a problem. I was using procmon and i see cubase making hundreds of calls to the directory the samples are in even when just moving or deleting an event. When i move everything to the local SSD it does the same things just works faster. Cubase should not be calling the sample files so much just to move an audio event in my opinion.

Could you explain a little bit more in detail what your project consists of?
In which way does it use samples? What event are you moving on the timeline?
Are you aware of how cubase handles audio files, audio clips, audio events, etc. - could that be a reason for what is going on?

HTH Ernst

Has the network traffic on your LAN changed?

If the audio you are moving is set to Musical Mode and you’ve got tempo changes in your song I’d guess Cubase would need to talk to the file a bunch during the move.

I can remove everything from the project except for the 3 audio channels of drums with kick, snare, hat, and shakers events. There is literally just the same one shot sample layed out in the timeline in 4/4 kick, 16th’s for the hats and shakers etc. So there are very few (4) samples being used. but they are layed out across the timeline quite a bit. The issue is occurring currently and the project extends to the 32nd bar.

I just ordered an internal SSD for my computer. I’ll just cache my studio drive on there and call it a day. hack the planet!

Unless you buy a special, expensive NAS with iSCSI drivers and proprietary extensions, networked storage is not ideal for a DAW. There’s too much communication going on between computer and NAS, which leads to latency. (Hello? Are you there Nas? Can I send data #1? Hello, yes, I’m there. How may bytes are you going to send? Can I have a checksum?..) etc

Playing big video files from a NAS works OK, but lots of tiny files(audio/fades/samples/hitpoints) is going to stress the setup.

Point in case: I had to remove a sparse image backup from my QNAP the other day(at least a million fragmented files). Doing this from the finder took a whopping hour or so. Doing this from the NAS took 5 minutes or even less. This goes to show the software overhead involved with network storage.

Get SSD’s for audio work and samples, use a NAS for backups. SSD’s are cheap nowadays.

Best decision, discjockeyjoey… the investment in SSDs is realy worth it!

True. I’m down to using only one internal hard drive, named Bulkstorage (which tells you everything about its lot in life). Everything else is SSD.