Hi! New around here, I’ve been lurking around for some time but I think this is my first post.
I’ve been wanting to switch to Nuendo from ProTools for some time, and after two or three failed attempts before over the years, I finally jumped in, and think I’m starting to get comfortable and like the program.
My big concern after some days of working and head-scratching is that I can’t understand the awful performance of it when starting to load some plugins. Not even a big session, or a big plugin amount. Audio stutters with very few tracks. With some finished songs I can’t even play them until I start deactivating some stuff. Tried all buffer/ASIO guard combinations, freezing, hyperthreading, you name it… it always ends up underperforning. I’ve been investigating and reading in forums, doing some tests, and found out that the culprit may have to do with both Group and FX tracks (or master) heavily loading the ASIO meter when adding any process to them, while you can throw whatever you want to the audio/instrument tracks and it will handle it. It seems it doesn’t work very well with tracks treated as realtime by the software.
Some solutions that I have been given (hola Antonio!) is to limit the use of Groups/FX tracks, or use something like Audiogridder installed on the same machine to offload all group processes outside Nuendo. But I find this quite annoying, a top notch DAW like this (and probably Cubase might have the same issues) shouldn’t be that weak in this department. They’ve improved from previous versions, but any other DAW can handle double or triple the load easily. Why does it treat Group/FX tracks differently? Also, no disabling tracks for them.
I guess I’m probably not the only one with this issue, any hope Steinberg addresses this sometime soon? Any other suggestions? This makes Nuendo highly unreliable for me to use for mixing, as I rely on a bunch of sends, busses and parallel routings.
MBP Pro 16" i9 Late 2019, OS 11.6.1, Nuendo 11.0.41
In the same boat here, I’m running Nuendo on a ridiculous amount of PC power (Ryzen 32 core/256MB ram) in order to get it to perform anywhere near my old ProTools HD3 with those nice AAX DSP plugins! However, I just pickup a MacBook Pro 2021 and going through early testing with Nuendo on it.
I have a few 32 core and one 64 core all with 256gb 3400 ram. All running windows 10 x64 with waves, fab, TC plugins. I too have random issues with basic recording 48 tracks at once.
Hi! I have 32Gb. I don’t think it’s memory related, nothing like that happens in Protools or Logic in the same machine.
It’s very obvious that it has something to do on how Nuendo works with groups or effects tracks, or the master bus, anything that considers realtime. I can heavily load a session with plugins on audio tracks and behaves nicely even on low buffer sizes. But strap a couple of things into some groups for parallel processing for example and you see cpu rising fast.
I tried offloading group and master bus processing to an Audiogridder server running on the same machine and it works great. It would be a reasonable solution for some set and forget stuff (a fixed template, or a preset that doesn’t need much adjusting), but it’s quite tedious to use if you need to tweak and change plugins looking for something, multiplied by every instance of it on every group. Also jumping thru hoops for preset handling and automation, no plugin drag and drop between tracks, etc…
Btw, UAD plugins also work fine. So it specifically has to do with the way the engine processes plugins on those tracks.
Another partial solution would be to be able to freeze group tracks, but there’s no option and that would be matter for another thread. Although I guess they’re both related as they’re a consequence on how Nuendo handles that stuff.
I wish Steinberg is aware of the issue and has some plans for addressing that sometime soon, but reading about other important requests that have been consistently asked for years and are still unattended doesn’t give me much hope on this one either.