Random Beachballs on MacOS Catalina

I am getting random (have not correlated to specific action or plugin) beachball delays (a few seconds) or outright hangs requiring force quit of Cubase 11 Pro. I am on an iMac Pro with MacOS 10.15.7. Cubase 10.5 does not have this issue. THis is happening every several minutes.

UPDATE: On further observation, it appears this happens upon interacting with the UI (mouse action). I have not experienced it while Cubase is just sitting idle or playing a project (although the playhead has frozen a couple times while the tracks are playing - no beach ball though).

I did have one instance of a indefinite freeze requiring force-quitting Cubase while creating a new track with Omnisphere. Not repeatable with Omnisphere so far.

IMac Pro with Vega 56 graphics, 10.15.7

I’m getting this as well on an iMac Pro except running Mojave.

Just came to post this same issue. Really slowing me down and annoying. I get a spinning beach ball constantly non stop every two minutes. It spins for around five seconds sometimes longer. I thought it had something to do with save preferences but when I made the save time longer to 10 minutes it made no difference. Plus there shouldn’t be a beach ball anyway. Grrr

Am on latest Catalina cubase pro 11. Plenty of ram. Mac Pro 2019

I believe it has something to do with Cubase 11 using macOS Metal. Hopefully this is the case and Steinberg can smooth out these issues.

So steinberg already know about this ?

I’m getting this too on iMac Pro on Catalina.

It’s absolutely driving me nuts! Nuendo 10.3 doesn’t have this problem on the same computer…

It’s making it unusable :frowning:

Will someone from steinberg chime in?

I don’t think steinberg monitor this forum or maybe only randomly

Really, how do we get them to fix it?

I’m not sure if they know.

Seems to be happening mostly to us iMac Pro users by the look of it, strange.

Geez, I hope not. It’s never going to get fixed then. Not sure Steinberg will fix something limited to an extremely small set of users.

I’m on a Mac Pro.

My project today was beachball free for around 3 hours. Then came back. Trying to figure out a connection with what I’m doing and when it happens. Might be completely wrong but I wonder if it had anything to do with using kontakt or komplete. If it’s simply a general cubase bug. Of which I have now found many in cubase 11

Happened to me this evening just selecting a different preset in Omnisphere, so it is not a Kontakt thing. I wonder if it is a Vega GPU thing with the the new Metal UI code. What GPU do you have in your MP?

Happens to me too, Mojave on Mac Mini. 10.5 didn’t do this.

I’m using a w5700x module. They’re supposed to be super reliable. But anyway I’m a creative so this techie side is beyond me. It’s a steinberg thing. But yeah it might have something to do with the new metal UI. I wonder why it’s intermittent though. Having said that it happens more often than not. How do you submit reports to steinberg on this thing. I might give them a call on Monday I’m just so busy. They should make reporting bugs super easy.

Hi, we are listening, but we need more information as we cannot reproduce this.
Does this happen without 3rd party plug-in editors open?

  • if not please write down the plug-ins that are open while this happens
    Please add your system specs to your posts and especially add if you have multiple screens connected and which screen resolution they have.
    Thanks.

Arne,

Thanks for the feedback. Speaking for myself:

10 core iMac Pro, 64GB, Vega 56, no external screens.

I know I have noticed it with Kontakt, Spitfire Audio or Omnisphere windows open, but I can’t be 100% certain it ONLY happens with those open. I will try to run a test with no plugin windows open and see what happens.

FYI, I have tried running without my Roland SYSTEM 8 USB driver installed amd with my Faderport 8 removed as a Mackie Control device in Cubase - no change.

OK - launched Cubase, loaded my default piano template (VSL Synchron Piano + Liquidsonics 7th Heaven Pro), removed instrument and FX tracks and loaded one track with Padshop. Just started randomly selecting patches in the browser, playing a few notes and then moving on to another. Within a few minutes, got a 2 second beachball. I then continued to select patches without any pauses for several minutes.

I have only experienced this pause or freeze (only once have I had to force quit Cubase - others seem to have this happen more frequently) when selecting or moving a control with the mouse. I have not noticed it occurring with Cubase just sitting idle or while playing except for the playhead pausing (audio was unaffected, no beachball).

So I don’t think it has anything to do with 3rd party content.

What version of Kontakt are you using? Are you using Kontakt Memory server and how many cores are enabled for Kontakt?

Kontakt 6 (latest version), multicore engine is OFF for plugin. I think the memory server was back when Kontakt was a 32 bit app.