Loading times for Cubase 6.5.4

Cubase
#1

Hey Guys,

I’ve been experiencing long loading times with Cubase for a while now and was hoping that 6.5.4 would help. It’s not every project, but most – between 30 secs and 1 minute load-times, and about 1 out 10 freezes upon opening.

I can open a multicamera, 2.5 hr HD video project in Sony Vegas with 3 tracks of 16/44 audio with VST plugins in less than 15 secs.

Is this normal? I’m working with fairly short (up to 5min) 1 song projects and no more than 10 tracks.

Mostly midi (HSSE, GA1 and Beat Designer, Steven Slate 4, Kontakt, Miroslav Phil) and some basic acoustic/electric guitar (amplitube) and vocals tracks.

I’ve got an Windows 7 Pro running 64bit (Cubase 64), i7 2600k, with 16GB Ram, two 1TB drives in RAID, and an RME Babyface – this should be no problem for this beast!

I’m using sends to manage resources too!

Any advice would be much appreciated,

Cheers
Steve

#2

That is certainly not normal. With a similar setup but older processor, I open 30-track (all-audio) projects in seconds. You say it is not every project, and I think that’s where your focus should be in finding the culprit. The normally opening project may not use a certain plugin or instrument? Try to systematically note which projects use which elements, and there should be a common denominator… Good luck!

#3

Aloha I,

I use Cubase 6 live on stage every weekend so loading times
are very critical.

IMHO it is 3rd party stuff causing this.

My NI stuff seems to load quickly enough most times but
some of my SampleTank patches can add an additional
15—>30 seconds load time to each song. Not very kool for live work.

I agree with Arjan:

Try to systematically note which projects use which elements, and there should be a common denominator.

Set aside some time in your day and try starting with a blank song.
Then one at a time start to add stuff.
Save. Load. (time it)
Add one more element.
Save. Load. (time it) etc etc.

Or start with an existing song that takes a long time to load.
1-make a copy of it
2-using that copy, strip out everything but audio and MIDI tracks and time the load time.
3- now do the above by one at a time adding stuff back in.
4-Save and time each load (sounds like doing laundry :slight_smile: )

I would call this technique ‘Take the Long Way Home’ but by using it
you get to see and possibly avoid each and every stone in the road.

HTH
{’-’}

#4

The longer load times between Cubase and Vegas in your example is likely due to samples loading in the Cubase peoject. Kontakt, SSD, Miroslav, probably a lot of samples loading right?

When I load large Kontakt + Mach 5 projects in any daw, it takes awhile for all the samples to load up.

I mean, you can load a song with 80 audio tracks and it should come right up. Samples have to be read into memory though, or similar. I’m pretty sure Vegas streams video from a buffer much like audio tracks, so maybe not much actually loading there.

I should also mention that some samplers like Mach 5 don’t even show progress here during load when you’re opening a song, so if it’s reading though 4gb of samples it seems even longer because there’s no progress display. Early on I actually thought the daw had hung up, it was taking so long,

#5

Thanks for the tips!

I tried that last night, and to my surprise, Cubase was hanging on loading a project contained only the following:

  • 1 track of electric guitar through Amplitube (two effects on, delay and tremolo)
  • 1 track of Halion Sonic SE (electric piano with delay and phaser)
  • 1 Padshop track (awesome bass patch :wink:)
  • 1 track of Groove Agent with Beat designer

I’m guessing it might have something to do with Amplitube, but when I switched it to Steinberg VST Amp, it still took very long – waiting at the ‘Loading mixer’ screen.

I appreciate your help thus far and any other advice you can share.

Cheers
Steve

#6

+1

Sounds great. (most IK stuff does)

But sometimes takes forever to load.


{’-’}

#7

In my case, HSE causes long time loading…Same is with HS and HSS. They are just so :confused:

cheers

trito

#8

I notice that in fact it’s taking a long time just to load the Halion Sonic SE as well the Cubase mixer.

Would it help if I inserted just an instrument track (ie., just Elec Piano) in the project window, rather than inserting the full HSSE rack in the VST instrument rack (F11)?

Thanks again for the discussion :slight_smile:

#9

I too am experiencing long load times for the channels in the mixer. I have a large template in Cubase, but all the connections are to preserved decoupled VEPro instances in my VST Instrument Rack returning into 52 VST Channels, so there is no loading of samples. I only have one instance of Stylus RMX as a host plugin. Long load times makes switching between cues (I am a film composer) very costly. Any help on this would be most appreciated.

My rig specs are:
Mac Pro 8-Core Intel Xeon OS 10.6.8 32GB of Ram
Cubase 6.5.4 Build 161 Running in 64-Bit Mode
M-Audio Fast Track Ultra
VE-Pro on 3 PC’s