MIDI delay - latency?

Cubase
1

I never had this problem with cubase 8 under windows 7 - but now under windows 10, with cubase 11, it becomes increasingly difficult to play instruments to click - because the delay in timing between playing a note on my keyboard and the subsequent sound is too long. Outside of Cubase, if I just run say Play Engine - there is no significant latency when I play instruments - inside cubase - the light of MIDI input seems to flash when I press the key - but the sound comes out much later. at least 300-500 ms I would guess. There is nothing active in the processing chain in the mixer which could account for the delay other than the channel being routed to a group before going to the output. However I notice that the problem increases due to the number of audio tracks I have in the mixer.

Assuming this is a simple CPU / Processing issue (although I had just as complex layouts before in Cubase 8 / Win 7) - what can I do to increase the power of the system. Clearly there is no point increasing RAM now to accommodate more instruments, because the system chokes with only 8 instances of Play - but not from RAM or Disk Reading.

So what about processor cores? Or can certain sound cards, like the Apollo range, take over some of the load from multiple audio channels / VST instruments?

2

do you have asio guard on, what’s your buffer at?

3

If you mean playing vst instruments then that is audio latency not midi latency. As the above answer you need to look at your audio interface buffer settings

4

Yes - ASIO guard is on - which is a new feature to me. It’s on Normal setting. For the card (RME HDSP 9632) it has a guard latency of 21 ms (buffer is set to 1024).

The problem begins when I load several VST instances I think. At first, there is no problem.

5

I have turned off ASIO Guard to test - it improves the situation a little - but clearly Cubase is adding a lot of latency to my system - because there is no such issue loading the VST instruments outside of Cubase - using the same sound card - same buffer

6

are you using any high latency plugins? try turning on Latency Compensation. How high is your buffer?

7

Yes - I think that was an issue - I tried removing all the VST instruments - without much effect - but then started removing some Cubase dynamics EQ plugins I had on some channels - and suddenly the latency cleared.

8

Good to hear. You had me scratching my head there. I’ve done that myself in the past.