Number of Tracks limit?

Cubase
1

Hello Steinberg team,

This is a Sound Design assignment.

I’m halfway on a, 10 episodes Program and already at about 700 tracks… (Audio/VCAs/groups/fxs/pre-masters…)
I use Steinberg’s fat channel strip for most of the work because it’s awesome, I am thrifty in my filtering and only trust very few other sound designer’s plugins… and finally, for the Heavy lifting, I use UAD’s

So, you get the gist… Now, when should I expect Cubase to say, NO MORE?

2

Hi and welcome to the forum,

Sorry, no one can tell you. It highly depends at your system and several components of it, same as your operating system and its shape, your BIOS settings, etc. Sorry…

Theoretically, there is no limit for the Audio, Instrument, MIDI, FX and Group tracks in Cubase Pro. There is a limit for the VCAs.

1 Like
3

and there is a limit for the simultaneous recorded inputs (256)

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4

Thank you, Martin!

I had read in the past that Cubase was limited to 999 tracks regardless of your CPU…

It turns out that at the end of the project I was working on (a 10 episodes zombie/slasher with tons of locations and actors) My PC was still going strong after I reached over 1300 tracks!!! Bearing in mind that I’d been working on this series all in one Cubase Pro 10.04 session!

Happyt Easter,
JMB

5

Would you mind letting us know what your computer specs are ?
1300 tracks is pretty impressive

R

6

The only limitation I have found is the number of VST rack instruments that can be loaded. It is either 32 or 64, but I’ve come up against this in a >1000 track projects with many hundreds of VSTi’s. Have to switch to instrument tracks when this happens, instead of instrument racks.

7

Hi,

Here you can find Cubase editions comparison, where you can see the limits per track type.

8

Sure,

I still work on Windows 7 pro 64 pack1
Core i7, 32GB of ram
1 UAD2 PCIe card + 1 UAD2 Satelite (USB3) 4 core
Cubase 10.04

The Rig exclusively works with Cubase

My session was very folder intensive per episodes and scenes as well as a normal set-up for film post-prod with folders for dialogues, sound design, foley, outdoors, room tones, impact, fx, Music tracks, Score, etc - The whole thing being routed to 12 subgroups (Minimum processing - Mostly UAD’s or Core plugins - All EQuing on the fat channel (Great), routed themselves to 4 pre-master groups DX, EFX, MX (with just one or two inserts per group: Mostly UAD’s for comp and limiting and Wave mastering plugins) - Mixed down to the last Pre-Master with just one insert (Izotop Ozone for mastering) - Finaly going to the MASTER (Completely clean).

All audio tracks or group faders were kept at zero and each items’ gain would be dealt with independently… Level kept bet -18db and -23db from the beginning so it was easy to manage as the track counts were growing…
At mixdown, I only exported the 3 Pre-Master DX, EFX, and MX groups which I sent to another Cubase session for final mastering…

Voila

This allowed me to keep a very consistent sound for the 10 episodes!

1 Like
9

Thanks JMB for the detailed response. . very informative

R