Hi. Working in Cubase 12 on Windows 11, with 32gigs of RAM. I’ve noticed that in large projects RAM usage almost reaches saturation while the VST instruments are loading, around 98 or 99%. I get the message recommending to abort loading because memory is low, and once even got the ‘serious problem’ message, obliging me to restart. But if I can get over this hurdle and start working, the memory usage after say 15 minutes or so drops to around 60 - 70%, a perfectly workable value. If this is all the RAM the system needs to work, why does it use up so much when loading? And is there a way to reduce this memory usage?
Any help appreciated!
Steve
Hello
The best way is to use NVMe SSDs to read samples from the disks, which significantly reduces RAM usage and loading speed.
However, 32GB seems a bit limited for large projects, especially orchestral ones.
Thanks for your suggestions. I’m already using SSDs for my libraries.
Can Cubase access and make use of larger RAM sizes?
I’m curious as to why Cubase uses so much more RAM when loading than it seems to need when running a project.
Yes Cubase can utilize larger RAM sizes very well.
Many Sample Players give you the option to control how much of each sample is preloaded into RAM, and how much is read from Disk. In Halion Sonic the option looks like this:
Since you’re already using SSDs, you can set this option to more DISK loading, to ease up the RAM usage of each instrument.
Other than that, you can freeze instrument Tracks, which completely unloads all the samples and only keeps the rendered audio, massively reducing the RAM usage. But you have to unfreeze it if you want to make any edits on that particular Track.
More advanced sample players like Kontakt, even give you the option to purge, which unloads all samples and then only loads those samples that are actually used into memory, which also frees up often up 90%+ of used RAM. Check if the Sample Players you use have such an option.
Thanks for these suggestions. I don’t think I’m short of RAM: I’m using a full-sized symphony orchestra which is running sweetly at 67% of RAM capacity. What I really don’t get is why, upon loading, the same project takes RAM almost up to 100% before it ‘settles down’ to 67%. Somehow it behaves differently on loading to how it behaves when everything is loaded and the project is running. It would be crazy to buy more RAM if I only need it when loading. Perhaps this is normal behaviour, the reason too technical for me to grasp, but it would be something just to know that this is what happens and there’s nothing to be done about it.
Meanwhile, I’ll try your suggestion of setting the instruments to higher disk loading. In East West instruments, this seems to be done by lowering the cache level.
I think you should contact the developer of the plugin that is causing the problem because it does not look to be directly related to the DAW itself. On the other hand, my projects barely hit 14GB.
