Suddenly started glitching (All new equipment)

Cubase
1

Hi,

I’m turning to you guys to hopefully get this sorted out once and for all. It really is starting to get on my nerves, especially since my whole studio is brand new.

Anyway, here it goes…

I bought and installed Cubase 7 (64 bit, the full version) on my new not even 3 months old computer. The computer setup is:

Windows 7 Home Premium (64 bit)
3,4 GHZ Intel Core i5
RAM memory 16GB

And for the recording I’m using a brand new Mackie Onyx 820i (firewire) mixer, running through the fastest firewire card I could find when I put the computer together. In other words, the mixer is used as a soundcard/driver.

Everything has been working SO well. Great actually. I’ve recorded 2 big productions with many midi-tracks, audio-tracks, effects and plugs (only using Hallion so far, have not bought any other plugins yet, so it’s all “cubase intergrated” plugins). Not a SINGLE glitch, latency or other issue with recording or playback. With that said, I know the computer, the mixer and my settings are all good and capable of big productions.

Then suddenly one day as I was starting to record a new production, I could not record even ONE simple midi-piano without it glitching all the time. I can’t explain it in any other way than little pops and glitches while listening back to what I’ve recorded (playback). This just a couple of days after finishing a monster project. I checked everything I could and every setting in cubase seems to be the same as before (from what I can remember). I am not running anything else on this computer than Cubase 7, so there’s no other programs running in the background. It is a dedicated studio computer, nothing else. Even the task manager tells me nothing else is running. I have gone through device setup a million times hoping to find something wrong there, but no.

I opened up my last production and can’t listen to it without pops and glitches all the time. Incredibly annoying! A week ago I could listen to the whole song with everything activated without any problems at all. I have spent many hours working in Cubase 7 and i absolutely love it. Like I said, I’ve managed to record two big songs without any problems. Now I can’t even lay down one simple piano without it glitching.

What can possibly have happened? I updated to 7.0.1 today after finding out there was an update, but it did not solve anything. I guess I wasn’t expecting it to, but I thought I’d let you know.

Will appreciate all the help I could get with this! I really need to continue working in the studio.

Regards
/Daniel, Step one Studio

2

Presumably you’ve checked in Devices/Device Setup/VST Audio System that you are still using the correct ASIO driver for your soundcard?

3

You might consider re-seating the firewire cable and/or swapping it with another.

4

try swapping fw ports and reinstalling the onyx driver

5

Of course, like I said, I’ve checked device setup a million times without finding anything that’s not how it’s supposed to be. Thanks anyway though.

Is there any explanation to why swapping fw ports would help? I’d really like to know why this is happening and actually find the cause. But I will try and get back to you guys! I will also re-install the drivers and see what happens.

6

While there is no direct evidence to support this in your case, crackling and popping in firewire is often the fault of the mechanical connection. Firewire cables can be faulty and the mechanical connector can sometimes fail due to dust or other contamination. IEEE 1394, in all its manifestations, is a complex protocol(s) which expects errors and performs retries until packets are successfully transferred. This problem is compounded by large packets and correspondingly large overheads. It does not take much by way of retries to cause audible results. Check out the ‘ASIO dropouts detected’ value under Devices → Device Setup → ASIO → Control Panel. If you see lots of drops it is probably a mechanical issue or you need to use larger buffers. If things were working last week it is even odds that you are dealing with a mechanical problem.

7

Also, be sure to make sure any onboard audio is disabled in BIOS or Not taking over the helm on you.
This happens sometimes after a driver install.
That said, Sounds like what has already been posted but don’t rule out a bad power supply or HDD.
btw, did you OC your WS or is it stock speeds?

8

Check your memory run stress test on it. Also have a look into the powersupply delivering all voltages steady, it’s often possible through the bios setup or mainboard manufacturer special support software.

That your computer is brand new doesn’t mean that it can’t fail (sadly enough).

9

Did you install any new software?

My current computer had exactly the same kind of symptoms that you describe. What I had done was install a motherboard tuning utility from Gigabyte (it was a Gigabyte MB), and it was hands down the nastiest piece of software I ever encountered. Came up automatically on startup, and would send the DPC latency sky high.

10

This is happening to me , 7.0 worked a charm, 7.0.1 is causing me massive memory issues and spikes. Hopefully things are sorted in the next update coming Feb.