Session very slow when using sliced quantized drums

Cubase
1

I’m quantizing drums in Cubase since version 5 and everytime the live recorded multitrack drums are sliced at almost every hit (for instance a 3:00 min song) the project response on for ex. zooming in and out is veeeery slow. Only when it is seeing sliced drums. In the past I was thinking that this could be slow PC, but later I bought very expensive PC with great graphics, cpu, etc and it didn’t help.

It is not a big deal for me, cause I always bounce the tracks, but it is a little disturbing when editing drums. I waited couple years and finally decided to start a thread about it. I googled it, but can’t find anything. Or I just used wrong key words.

2

I do find when you have a huge amount of audio events on your arrange page that zooming can become quite slow. If you turn them into a Part then zooming becomes fast again (at least in the arrange page).

3

yep, I noticed that too. but the question is - why is this happening? we have good CPU and stuff, why can’t it handle this?

4

Yep had this with the zero version and the .10 release, haven’t tried the .20 update yet!

I reported this to steinberg so they know about it i guess.

5

There is nothing new in this. With a very large number of clips after slicing the graphics load causes everything to slow down. Macs have been worse than PCs in the past but now (specially with faster graphics cards in newer Macs) it’s improved a bit. I guess I just accept it and render the the parts as soon as I’m happy with them (I always save a ‘sliced’ version so I can go back to the slices if i need to)

6

True, but it’s important to ventilate this so it’s taken seriously by SB :mrgreen:

7

This is bugging me since ages - in Nuendo as well, has nothing to do with the drum-quantize itself, just when you have truckloads if events/slices on a track… it can help moving stuff to new tracks - for example from the middle of the song just to an identical set of tracks - just for editing…

the crazy thing is that CPU & Ram usage etc etc is quite low - but everything slows down as hell… I have SSD all over the place, this just makes no difference…

8

To get around it I always select all the events and bounce it or render in place.

9

So, is this problem actually cured with a high end graphics card, or is that not the limiting factor?

10

No not solved by using high end videocard, I use a GTX 660 Ti OC.

11

I’ve always noticed this in Cubase right back through the versions. I dont think its a new phenomenon with version 8. It would be good to have it addressed though. Is someone going to log it as a program improvement suggestion?

12

it’s not a new phenomenon, but i actually found c8 performing worse than previous versions in this regard, posted here: GUI in fact laggier on C8 compared to C7 - #26 by Kip - Cubase - Steinberg Forums

another related laggy graphics bug that i just noticed made it into an actual acknowledged bug is this one; perhaps there’s some hope of improvement…? [BON-10950]GUI issues - project cursor breakup - Cubase - Steinberg Forums

13

Yep, been having this since SX3 at least… I also get a lag in changing tools which increases as there are more cuts on the current track. This can get to 2 seconds… But by that time I’ve chopped it up into smaller parts and hidden all the cuts in another track version!!

So, cut long tracks up, work on the smaller parts, make the comp/timing cuts, then bounce them again and Hide the cuts/comps somewhere. If you’re using vari-audio then defo use smaller parts and bounce first because once you vari-audio a long clip this is like having lots of cuts, i.e. loads of vari-audio objects will cause the same sluggish lag instantly.

Mike.

14

why is this happening? Is it really so gpu intensive to have a lot of slices visible, should be a very non-advanced graphical thing really.

(fwiw, it´s the same problem in Logic for example)

15

i don’t know… again, the smoothest daw out there is fl studio. combined with the slight inertia when navigating around the arrange gives it a very smooth futuristic feel. all other daws are much ‘steppier’ and ‘quantized’ when zooming and navigating about.