Cubase Pro 8.5
OS: Windows 10 Pro
Intel i7 5820k 6-core CPU
64GB G.skill NT Series DDR4 RAM (8x8GB)
1TB Crucial MX200 Sata-3 SSD (Sample drive)
500GB Crucial MX200 Sata-3 (OS drive)
Presonus Audiobox 22VSL
EVGA nVidia Geforce GTX 950
* the problem I had was similar when using Cubase 8 and Windows 8.1. Did not upgrade the OS until Steinberg officially announced Windows 10 compatibility.
I use Hollywood Orchestra Diamond Edition, and a lot of the Powerful System patches for Sustain and Legato strings. All instruments load fine when I’m constructing templates, and I’ve been able to build one up to 51.5GB in size. Loading the template file (Whether it’s track presets, or an empty project with all of the instruments) is where things choke. When trying to load the 51.5 template, loading speed proceeded as I expected, but at some point it slowed to a crawl (Should not have taken four hours to get to the point it was at). When I try to load a track preset that uses the Legato patches, the results have varied:
- There’s an N-minute pause from when the PLAY loading prompt first appears, before it actually starts filling. During this time, the instrument tracks may appear on the left, but the PLAY user interface does not change skins. N ranges from 2 to 10 minutes and possibly more, and does not seem to correspond to the amount of data I’m trying to load.
– Example: I tried loading a 2nd Violin Legato preset which used one instance of Play, 9 instruments, and one out of four microphone positions. (Most patches reuse samples loaded in the very first one on my list, so it’s not trying to load 9 independent mega-samples). This took roughly 10-and-a-half minutes to load. The PLAY engine was only using 1867MB of RAM after this point. For comparison, I loaded different microphone positions for each patch by hand, and was able to do so in about 1 min and 15 s. (For more comparison, my old computer loaded 13GB templates in ~20 minutes, without the aid of an SSD, DDR4 RAM or an i7 processor)
- Sometimes when trying to load a track preset, Cubase will stop responding. Either it officially Stops Working and makes me close it, or it gets caught up in a seemingly infinite process and I have to kill it from Task Manager.
In some cases, I experience faster loading because the samples are still cached–but I’ve done enough setup over the past few weeks that I have a good feel for the normal amount of time it takes for samples to load. The fact is, loading track presets with the legato patches takes an abnormal amount of time. The crashing leads me to believe that I’m not just being impatient, but that something’s not working the way it should. I have separate track presets for the string instruments that use four microphone positions, four instrument tracks with PLAY and expression maps, and these have loaded faster than the corresponding single mic Legato presets. If I were to just make new Legato track instruments on the fly, doing all the setup might even be quicker than the time it takes to load a preset–but I don’t want to risk having a project that doesn’t load later down the line.
Has anybody experienced anything like this? I asked somewhere else and they told me to check my SSD, which turned out to be fine. Could it be RAM, or just Cubase doing something weird when loading? I’m assuming that if it were RAM, it would not have let me make the 51.5 GB template in the first place.