Here is my monthly update regarding my misadventures trying to use Nuendo 10.3.
It doesn’t work. I have tried all the settings on or off, etc. This version of Nuendo causes the CPU meter to grow bigger and bigger, and then spikes occur that stop playback. Lot of fun. I’ve tried it with my Apollo Twin Duo, my Focusrite Scarlett, even two inexpensive Behringer travel interfaces. Even using the built in audio on my MacBook Pro.
However, Nuendo 10.2.20 works perfectly and is what I use daily for my recording & mixing production work. No spikes, and I can actually finish my work and (cough) get paid without having to tell people that “their project is late because I’m having some issues with my software”.
I’m sure when Steinberg releases Nuendo 10.4, 5, or 6, etc. I will try again and see if I get different results.
I use Onyx. about every three months. It clears caches, and other stuff. Keeps mine running well.
Been using it for over ten years. Keeps all my macs happy. We have 6 of them, of different ages.
Since these macs are Intel, they seem to have this need. The old PPCs were easier, but also less processing power.
For my audio / video drives, I use iDefrag. Only if I see performance issues with a drive though, or if I have
been heavily editing audio on them.
Some users have probs like you, others do not & so this points to local OS setup. No amount of clearing system caches & OS junk is really going to respond to that [though Disk Warrior is well worthwhile for File system problems on HFS+ disks, but Catalina of course is APFS]. You could also try booting into Recovery, disk check the OS volumes, and reinstall the OS from Recovery. All of which may needlessly waste time. I suggest:
Run a clean install of Catalina on an external boot disk, install Nuendo clean (no other third party etc). See how that goes.
I’m betting that will be as it should be. If so, then next the usual sleghammer macOS fix: clean install the system and apps on the main boot disk (and maybe keep the external for a Carbon Copy Cloner bootable backup).
I’m with you, unfortunately – Whenever I can carve out the day to really get into some work I seem to always wind up here. Nuendo 10.3 has been & still is an unusable hog for me:
I’m on a mac mini, 32gig, 10.14.6, SSD’s in a BlackMagic Multidock.
best of luck.
I am a user of Nuendo 10.3. It works perfectly for me. I do think it’s performance is variable and dependent on the systems it’s running on. I was having the same experience as you two months ago until I changed my PC. I currently have an HP Desktop, 32 GB RAM, about 3.5ghz speed, 2 Terabytes hard drive (1 terabyte Solid State as system drive and the other as storage), Focusrite 6i6 soundcard, and Steinberg USB Driver too. Since I changed my system, Nuendo has not crashed one bit, nor has its CPU meter spiked ever since.
Given the perfect conditions, Nuendo will crank up on you so you probably need to do the following:
(1) Check your audio input levels when recording your tracks. If they are too hot, you can push your levels too much and you get clipping and then Nuendo will respond in unpredictable ways…might crash, freeze or do some crazy things
(2) Check the volume of your clips…make sure before you process them (when they are raw) their volume hits your meters at -18db, cos once you start slapping plugins on those channels/tracks, your volume will hit like -6db and that’s very close to clipping.
(3) Check the volume knob on your soundcard…if they are too hot, you are feeding Nuendo with too much volume and it might clip.
(4) Check the space on your hard drive and ensure you have at least 300 GB free on your system drive
(5) Do not save your working files/session files on the system drive…do so on your extra drive.
(6) Archive all your old files you don’t need currently and put them on an external hard drive and free up memory for Nuendo
(7) Check the plugins you process with…also scan your system for viruses and malware as they can contribute to system malfunctions. It might not be Nuendo, but an inhibiting malware.
(8) Don’t run Nuendo at the same time with another DAW…if you have different DAWs…also some other CPU intensive applications should be close. If possible don’t surf the internet at the same time as you are running Nuendo except absolutely necessary, as web resources consume CPU unless you have big CPU.
To sum up, the problem is definitely not Nuendo, as all of us here downloaded from the same source…its the same software. I’m not experiencing any issues, but I was while using my former system. Once I upgraded to a better system, problem disappeared. So now I know what it was. I hope this helps you.
Cheers.
I appreciate your suggestions. Without being disrespectful, your post is one of the funniest ones I have ever read here. If all of those “facts” you state were true, then why does Nuendo 10.2.20 (and Cubase 10.0.60) run perfectly? Those factors would affect any release of a program if they were in fact issues.
Anyway, I stopped using ASIO guard and all my versions of Nuendo and Cubase are running better.
"Nuendo 10.2.20 could run uninhibited and Cubase could run too depending on fundamentals…that these programmes ran successfully on your PC doesnt mean Nuendo 10.3 would run same as well. I had Cubase 9.5 at the same time as Nuendo and my old system was running 9.5 pretty well without CPU issues and dropouts…but Nuendo 10.3 was definitely not running well until I changed my PC. Let’s flip the coin on your question "if Nuendo 10.3 is running so well and effortlessly on my PC, why is it giving up on you? I could tell you are a pro, and been here for much longer than I have, and obviously compared to you, am a newbie, but all am doing is deductive inference. I use the same thing as you do and it’s not giving up on me, then check your other fundamentals. Apologies if my trouble-shooting checklist came across as condescending, especially to a Pro…am aware many others here too are reading and that checklist might just be enough to sort their issues too…just based on what I saw from my challenges few months ago with Nuendo.
