Occasional audio dropouts during recording

Nuendo
1

Hello RME and Nuendo 14 users,

I’m using:

Nuendo 14 on Windows
RME Digiface
Relatively low track counts (not heavy sessions)

I’m experiencing occasional audio dropouts during recording.
The strange part is:

Recording itself continues normally
Nuendo does not stop
No obvious CPU overload
But parts of the recorded audio contain very short dropouts/glitches/silent interruptions
I often discover them later while editing

Current settings:

ASIO Guard OFF
Multi Processing ON
Buffer size currently testing at 256–512
Disk Preload currently 2 sec (planning to test 4–6 sec)
Considering enabling “Steinberg Audio Power Scheme”
Using rear motherboard USB port directly
Planning to disable USB selective suspend and PCIe power saving

Questions:

Has anyone experienced similar “hidden” recording dropouts where recording continues but audio is interrupted?
In RME systems, is this usually related to:
USB/DPC latency
Windows power management
NVIDIA drivers
storage write hiccups
or something else?
For stable long-form recording in Nuendo 14 + RME, what settings do you recommend?
buffer size
ASIO Guard
Steinberg Audio Power Scheme
Disk Preload
Windows optimization
Are there any known issues with USB4 systems and RME interfaces?

I also checked the recorded WAV files, and the glitches seem more like stream interruptions/dropouts rather than clipping or performance-related issues.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

2

install and run latencymon

3

you definitely want the windows high performance power plan and or the Steinberg power scheme, without it USB will suspend power.

Also I’d plug your Digiface direclty into a back pannel USB 2/3 conector on your Motherboard.

USB 4 ‘could’ be an issue.

I’d check you power plan though first. Major windows update quite often reset power settings to default, so its something i always check after a major update.

M

4

I’ve had ASIO Guard on for years, but used to get dropouts sometimes back before it was introduced (but back then, I was also exporting to mechanical HDDs instead of SSDs). Have you tried re-exporting with it on to see if it helps?