Latency very weird behaviour problem

I’d be really grateful for any advise or help with this problem…

For the last few years, when ever I’ve been working on a project involving a number of audio tracks and maybe one or two midi tracks, after about half hours work (adding plugins and effect to audio parts and general editing) my latency starts to get progressively worse. It starts out at a fast 6ms then slows down to what feels like about 60ms + making it near impossible to play the piano samples when any feel of realism.
Changing the latency in the control panel at this point has no effect, it’s set to 6ms (Steinberg UR22 mkII), neither does switching of fx or muting channels, reloading Cubase, restarting PC etc … all makes no difference, the project is just caught up in this low latency thing.

Now here’s the weird thing, if I create a new project then copy and paste everything into it, the latency returns to normal, low and manageable again, but switching back to the project I copied and pasted from the latency is messed up.
This has happened with two previous soundcards, different midi keyboards, Cubase 7,8 and 9 Pro and Windows 8 and 10 over a long period of time, so any ideas what could be going on here would be most appreciated as I’d love to get this sorted?

thanks :slight_smile:

This is a problem that is probably the result of using plugins that require a reasonable amount of processing power. The more plugins you add the longer the round trip the audio has to make. Some plugins add considerably to the latency. I feel sure that if you disable all your plugins things will speed up considerably. There is no free lunch here. Keep the plugins light until you are ready to mix.

Thanks for your reply Silhouette, I’m sure you are right and multiple plugins does have an affect on latency, I’ve also experienced that.
However, I don’t think that’s what’s happening here. I’m just working on a project now for instance with no plugins used at all, only 8 stereo audio channels where I’m creating a mix. I’ve added an VST instrument (piano) and after half hour or so the latency is already starting to lag. So, I’ve just copied all the audio parts and tracks into a new project, re-connected the midi input routing for the Piano and ‘voila’ all ok! How do you explain that!!?