Nuendo has been a remarkably solid platform for me since it started, and I’ve seldom had cause to doubt it’s ability to record cleanly. Very occasionally, I get a glitch in a recorded file - close examination shows that the waveform has a step in it, as if a few samples have been missed.
I mean very occasionally.
In the past I always put it down to a clocking error (several mic preamps with ADCs wordclocked together) however recently I have been using 2x Focusrite 428s recorded via Fireface 800 analogue inputs.
I had 2 such dropouts on Sunday. Both occurred at the end of a long day’s recording - backing vocal parts - and the projects were fairly busy by then. Also, I was running at fairly low latency because I’d earlier been recording MIDI piano along with the band. The N5 CPU meter was running at about 40-50%. I never heard any spikes at the time of recording, just these dropouts in 2 places on BV files.
I just noticed that Audio Priority is set to Normal - I’ve reset it to Boost. The manual suggests this only arbitrates between audio and MIDI in Nuendo, so with only one MIDI track palying at the time it seems unlikely this would cause a problem.
So what I now always do is to turn of Internet connection and automatically backup when I record. I have not run into the problem after I started doing that.
I have this a LOT in Cubase 6 on the Mac. So bad that I dare not record with it any more. If Nuendo is the same audio engine, it doesn’t seem unreasonable that it might happen in N5 as well (I only mix in Nuendo these days).
There is no warning that it’s about to drop samples, although if you watch out you might see the processor load meter spike, or hear a small click in the monitored audio.
But there’s no warning message as such, so most users will be unaware that anything has gone wrong.
On playback you often don’t realise anything has happened either… until you compare the recording with another recording made simultaneously on another machine (I do a lot of live recording, and there’s always a safety recorder). If you sync the two recordings up, you discover that they go out of sync - not gradually the way they would if running on independent clocks, but in little skips and jumps. The Cubase recording keeps abruptly skipping ahead.
I’ve tried switching off everything I can (e.g. networking, Time Machine, sleep, etc) but it doesn’t seem to help.
I should also note that I never had these problems with Cubase 5 for Mac.
I’m now using anything BUT Cubase to record with. Even an ancient version of Digital Performer has been more reliable.
I should mention that Cubase 6 on PC doesn’t appear to have this problem.
I remember such a thing when I had unknowingly a problem with an occasionally high DC offset.
Took me a while to figure this out since there never was a problem with that before.
I switched and replugged, poked and pulled… also re-installed and wasted some older music software stuff.
It eventually disappeared and never came back. Sorrily, I never found out what the problem actually was…
I know, this is not really helping, but eversince I wonder if this wasn’t hardware-related, somehow.