I edit a ton of audiobooks. When I select a range to delete, especially a half minute or more, the program times out (candy swirl), sometimes for 10-15 seconds, then finally highlights the range. It gets worse the further I get into the project, so it may have something to do with my numerous edits.
My projects are typically 2-3 hours long. For the next set of chapters, I save a new project, delete the previous chapter cuts, import the next set of chapters, and empty the pool of any unneeded audio. Emptying the pool helps some.
I’ve tried increasing the disk load time. Maybe I should be decreasing it? This is very frustrating. I can remember not having this problem on way earlier versions of Nuendo (like maybe 6.5 to 10-ish?). I’m running a healthy system, and even had this problem on my previous Mac Pro.
I do audiobooks as well, and also have had this problem–and still run into occasional macro and range sluggishness even with my M3. But never as lengthy as what you describe.
My projects tend to run 6-20 hours or so. It sounds as if I live a little more dangerously than you– once I’m done editing a chapter I generally bounce to disk, delete the cuts, and move on within the same project file. So… I have to ask:
Do you have Onyx, from Titanium Software? Free, super-useful. It can help with some of the annoying anomalies such as you describe– Nuendo and Cubase have both always lagged when it comes to multitudes of edits, but the 10-15 second thing is out of hand, and I’m wondering if Onyx might bring it back into the tolerability zone. These days, at its worst I have maybe a half-second delay when things start bogging down.
I’ve encountered some iteration of this issue since I started using Nuendo (V2). I don’t know what it would take to tackle this problem–and though these faster processors have made a difference and it doesn’t really bother ME anymore, I do feel your pain, and it would be great to finally get to the bottom of it,
For the record, over the past 20 years or so I’ve brought this up in the forum. First encountered it when doing post sound for a TV show back in ‘07. But I’m wondering if maybe audiobooks, with their extreme length and zillions of cuts, may be an exotic beast to the devs. Or we’re a small enough section of the user base that it might be impractical to deal with this. I do not know. But maybe somebody’s listening!
In any case– try Onyx. Clearly, you should not be having this problem.
Chewy
PS I do batch pre-process my files so that usually at most I’ll have a compressor and an expander, and maybe Soothe II running in real time. So I don’t have a lot of potential processing bottlenecks, latency compensation lags, etc. Good luck!
Thanks Chewy, good to know I’m not imagining it. I also pre-process the files to avoid too much real time processing. I do have Onyx and have tried running that in the past to no avail. I’ll try again. You got me thinking that maybe I should suspend plugins while editing to see if that will help. BTW, Nudendo user since 1.5, so we’ve seen many iterations, and thankfully many rock-solid things stay the same.
We digitize historical audio recordings and often have 100 tapes on a single track, totaling 200 hours of audio. All of this is contained in an audio folder of nearly 1 TB.
We need to cut, edit, remove noise, and restore them.
The total length of the audio is irrelevant. The problem only becomes significant when a large number of edits are made using direct offline processing.
I also do a great deal of audio restoration. Sometimes music, sometimes hideously home-recorded narration. Sounds like my process is not exactly the same as yours, but we’re all chasing the same beast!
My experience is that a lot of DOP is ABSOLUTELY a contributing factor… but not the only one. Have done testing with friends from the Zimmer crowd who were at the time working largely in Nuendo (don’t know if they still are), and they encountered the same. I’ve also encountered the problem with large numbers of simple edits without DOP. Can’t quantify, but I’d estimate it starts once you start getting into the upper hundreds– which can easily happen when cutting down audiobook narration. Bouncing sections as I go is the way I handle it. FWIW, and echoing @Neil_K, it’s been happening like this since before the modern DOP– in my case since Cubase VST 3x, over a number of of computers, OSes and both platforms.
Not to be redundant, but I keep hoping the Nx team will ultimately and permanently tackle and fix this issue. It’s an inconvenience… and it’s a little irritating how it doesn’t occur in DP or PT (the other DAWs with which I’m most familiar), because editing in Nuendo is where I’m gonna stay! Love it.