I’m running Cubase 14 Pro (latest update) and the audio playback - on a fairly big project, but not massive - is really glitchy. I have checked over all of the audio settings (out from a Focusrite Clarett 4 Pre USB through an Allen & Heath ZED Sixty 14FX desk to studio monitors). The size of the project definitely has something to do with it as it’s only gotten worse the larger the project has become.
I’m running a DELL XPS 8940 and have just put another 64Gb RAM in so it’s now got 96Gb in total in the vain hope it was something to do with that - but no.
I’m not sure if it’s a Cubase setting that I’m missing, a Focusrite issue or if it’s a Windows thing.
I ran “LatencyMon” and it’s telling me to disable CPU throttling in the System BIOS but I’d rather see if there’s something simpler afoot.
Any advice/help would be gratefully received!
Usually, the first thing to do is to increase the buffer size of the audio interface. I have mine at a quite high 512 - how big (ahem) is yours?
I think most system settings are either set to favour low power or to favour the actual motherboard. Time to roll up those sleeves and dig in!
I have played about with the buffer size and it certainly helps - but it has to be at 1024 - which has a latency round trip of 97.8ms! That’s impossible to record with.
Apart from the buffer size, is there anything else I could be doing - or is there a better audio interface? I thought that the Focusrite was OK but I’m beginning to doubt it. Are there better ones, or will they all need a massive buffer size to handle a fairly large audio project?
Start with these
Set Windows power scheme to high or ultimate performance (Cubase has it’s own power scheme but this will help with fault finding when using latencymon.
Disable USB selective suspend
In device manager open every item labelled as a usb hub and in power management untick allow computer to turn off this device
If you have Nvidia gfx then either make the prefer maximum performance setting or use Studio driver.
Test with latencymon after that and if still failing show drivers tab sorted by highest execution.
Also open windows resource monitor while playing project and view all cores to see if you’re overloading a single core.