A friend of mine ran into a weird issue.
He upgraded from Mountain Lion to El Capitan, and after doing it, his Focusrite USB Scarlett 6i6 interface stopped working, BUT ONLY with Cubase (he is on 7.5). Other apps like Garage Band or Adobe Audition, and even the computer sounds, all run smoothly on this interface. He went to focusrite and they told him: “go to Steinberg”. So here we are.
What happens is, no audio shows on the channels nor stereo output meters, upon playback.
I checked his setup and everything is fine. Sample rate is the same on both interface setup and cubase project setup, VST connections are correct, the control room is disabled, the driver is selected and the busses are also selected on the tracks. Start playback, and the audio just doesnt show on the meters. Change the driver to anything else, and the audio flow works just fine.
I even tried swapping the interface, and plugging in another one of the same generation (Scarlett 18i6). The issue persists. So, it seems there is an incompatibility between focusrite USB 2.0 interfaces and Cubase 7.5 running on El Capitan.
Any ideas on how to solve or troubleshoot this?
He has even reinstalled Cubase 3 times. No luck either.
"Cubase 7.5 is NOT supported/fully compatible with El Capitan - you need Cubase 8.0.30 or later. A temporary workaround which we have seen to get results is to go to Applications > Utilities > Audio MIDI Setup then click the ‘+’ button in the lower left corner of the screen. Create an aggregate device, then select the tickbox next to your Scarlett (and no other devices).
Now, in Cubase, go to Devices > Device Setup and select this aggregate device instead of the 6i6 - this should now produce audio.
Please be advised that this is an untested workaround that isn’t supported either by Focusrite or Steinberg - the best way to ensure compatibility is to either update to Cubase 8, or to roll back to a supported operating system if you wish to continue to use Cubase 7.5."
I havent tested it so I dunno if it actually works. But I hope this helps any folks outthere with the same issue.
I’m sorry to come with a bad news, but Aggregate Device is also not officialy supported by Cubase (in fact by any DAW as far as I know). There could be some clock/sync issues (mainly when you really use it as an Aggregate Device, i.e. multiple devices at once).