The Vienna Synchron Player has performance issues in Cubase,
which manifest themselves as dropouts in the audio signal.
There is also a peak in the Cubase real-time display.
This occurs regardless of whether ASIO Guard is enabled or disabled.
The following conditions must be present:
Instrument track in Cubase (regardless of whether Cubase 12, 14, or 15)
The Synchron Player’s internal room reverb must be active, decay must be > 1.3 s
(This is usually the case with the Studio Special Edition)
There must be a pause between 2 notes.
To test this yourself, simply do the following:
Create an instrument track in Cubase with Vienna Synchron Player
Load a solo violin as an instrument, for example from the Studio Special Edition
Select pizzicato
Open the player’s own CPU meter
Press a key
= An initial peak appears in the player’s own CPU display and, after releasing the key,
a larger decay peak. (see photo)
This also happens with the current player version 1.3.2861.
Workaround:
Turn off the player’s own room reverb.
Use player version 1.3.2164. It has the best performance,
but a small bug. After loading a project in Cubase, you have to open
all Vienna Synchron Player instances in the mixer view once to get the reverb right.
Use Vienna Ensemble Pro. The error does not occur there.
If you are also experiencing this problem, please contact VSL Support.
I contacted Support, but they were unable to reproduce the error.
They also wrote to me saying that I was the only one who had reported this issue so far.
I suspect the majority of users run the Synchron player in VEPro, which is why the problem hasn’t previously been reported. I only have Synchron Prime Edition, which is lighter on CPU, but it doesn’t have solo instruments. Have you only observed this with solo instruments?
I have also observed this with ensemble instruments. As already mentioned, you must have the room reverb active in the mixer.
My specs
Audio PC from Da-X: Intel Core i7-14700K, 64GB RAM, 2 NVMe drives for samples
Audio interface: Steinberg UR 12 + Tascam FW-1883
Windows 11 - 25H2
All drivers up to date
I’ll do some tests on Friday when I get back. My career has been in development and test, I have a knack (and a penchant) for breaking things, in a reproducible way. Challenge accepted.
I’ve tried few different instruments, and I’m getting peaks up to 68%, but after the sound appears to have died away. I just ran one of VSL sample projects, and the entire CPU meter panel flashes red several times, but I don’t hear any dropouts. More testing required.
The audio dropouts only occur when the synchronous player is in multiple tracks.
I have around 40 tracks in my projects. This means that nothing happens with 1 track. Incidentally, you can also see the peak in the Task Manager. There you can see that one CPU has a high deflection.
The VSL project I used (that made the CPU meter panel flash red) is a big orchestral piece. The Studio One version of the same project played perfectly. I’ll check later and pick the “busiest“ of the VSL projects, and run it through several times, because I don’t think the CPU is peaking at the same points each time. Cubase is definitely using way more CPU than REAPER or Studio One with the Synchron player on my setup.
Well I’ve been unable to get audio dropouts even with 50 tracks, but my VSL libraries don’t have the full mic setups, so will not be as CPU-intensive as yours. In general, Cubase seems to be using considerably more CPU than Studio One or REAPER. There is a behaviour in Cubase that is not in the other two, (with Synchron player) as follows. Using a single note on the piano, with reverb: I allow the note to die away so I can’t hear any sound at all, then I release the key. Even though I can’t hear anything, there is burst of high CPU activity on key release that is longer than the activity when the note was struck. If I hold the key indefinitely, this burst of activity occurs after what I presume is a timeout.
