Sudden audio problems/vst spikes after some manual cleanup

Hello - pardon lack of lingo knowledge.

Yesterday I did some hard drive cleanup to make room in general for disc performance and storage of new audio files. I deleted some 20GB of large audio files. There are 60GB free, currently.

Last night when I went to use Cubase Elements 7 (which I’ve been using for almost a year without issue) I suddenly lack resources, I assume? On a track that worked fine the night before, I now can’t use a VST like Alchemy without intermittent audio breakdown, and the lovely crackling when the vst meter spikes. Now this would spike occasionally before, but never created audio issues, power issues etc. I tried a less power hungry synth with similar results.

I reinstalled the driver for my Tascam US-144 (I know, yuck, but again, all was working fine until last night). Latency is on ‘normal’ where it’s always been. I thought about increasing buffer in Cubase, but it is not such a visible task like it was in older builds (I couldn’t find it).

I did a disc defrag, probably not the greatest idea. Or I think I did, very weird in Windows 7. I also did a system restore to last week when all was working find.

Today I’ve just downloaded the update for Cubase Elements 7.0.7 but figured I’d wait, since I doubt that’s going to help things.

Do I need to reinstall Cubase Elements? What kind of horror show is this going to be?

Thanks for your patience and help. - Kenny :slight_smile:

Here’s system info - although again, it shouldn’t make a difference. All was working great until yesterday.
Hewlett Packard HP 2000 Notebook
Intel Celeron CPU B800 @ 1.5 GHZ
System Memory - 4GB
64-bit Operating System (I’m using 32 bit Cubase Elements, was having problems with 64bit)

very weird in Windows 7. I also did a system restore to last week when all was working find.

What happened following you system restore? Did your machine restore itself to a fully working system?

Seeing as you’ve “cleaned up” your drive by removing all that data, the system might be a bit confused as to where and what everything is!

When you “cleaned up” your system, did you just delete the files from your hard drive or did you clean up via the audio list in media bay? That ensures that unused files will be removed and remaining files were conformed and exported as a backup project?

The chances are that there could be spurious odd/related files in your media bay/project pool that the daw may be looking for but will go round and round trying to locate them, but, they’re not there?

Of course it could be any one of a number of issues but it’s a process of eliminating at every stage of your way of operating the setup until you can hone in on the problem that you’ve reached during that process!

Fun ain’t it :slight_smile: