[SOLVED] The 15-second mystery-???

Cubase
1

This morning I loaded up a project I’d been working on yesterday with no problems.

The sound on the Eastwest Pianos QL (midi) track immediately began cutting out intermittently. There are also a handful of strings tracks but they were fine, no dropouts—just the piano track.

I exported the track as a wav with the same result–strings playing fine, piano cutting out. But I noticed it’s cutting out exactly every 15 seconds, stays off for exactly 1 second, comes back on and plays for another 15 seconds, goes off for 1 second, the exact same pattern over and over throughout the whole track.

I’ve tried everything I can think of. Multiple reboots. Doinking with the buffer size. I installed no new software, updates, etc between putting the computer to sleep last evening and starting work again this morning. Didn’t even close Cubase. Checked today to make sure sound drivers are up-to-date, also Cubase and all plug-ins. This just came completely out of the blue and has me baffled. I’ve never had a problem like this before. Any ideas?

Windows 7
Cubase 5
12 gig ram
RME Fireface 800 (sound-firewire)

2

Is it possible that some automation somehow ended up on the piano track?
J.L.

3

Good suggestion–I checked on that but none to be found.

But after doinking with it all day I finally got rid of the problem, although not completely solving the mystery.

It occurred to me that the strings library being on a different hard drive from the piano might have something to do with it. The hard drive with the piano was indeed getting full, although still had about 40 gig free out of 500. I moved the piano library to yet another (1tb) hard drive which freed up 200+ gig on the piano’s previous hard drive and still left about 400 gig free on the new one. Loaded up the track again and redirected Cubase/Play to the new location of the piano library. No more dropouts.

I’m no technical genius with such things, but have to assume that since the Eastwest Pianos patches are so massive that they need a good bit of remaining free space on the same disk to be able to stream properly-? In any event, the dropouts are gone, so maybe this will be helpful to anyone encountering this in the future.

Still no clue, though, as to why the dropouts were exactly 1 second long and 15 seconds apart every time…

Not sure how to mark this as ‘solved’, maybe only an admin can do that?

4

Edit the title via you first post.

5

Aloha l
and +1.

This is VERY useful info and as you say,
going forward this thread will be a help to someone.

I learned a lot.
{‘-’}