Hello! I am trying to export a song I produced in Cubase 15. While it is mostly working well, parts of some of the tracks randomly glitch into a moment where they are silent in the preview play option, and in different places when I try and export it. It isn’t the whole audio track going silent for the entire export, just for moments. I am using Windows 11, for reference. Is there anything I can do to fix this?
I am using HALion Sonic, Groove Agent, and Vocaloid VSTi as the instruments on the song.
In my experience, when it playback goes silent, it has been from some kind of overload on the system where Cubase can’t keep up with processing samples in time to play them back. This can sometimes happen from using a low ASIO sample buffer setting, where using a larger sample buffer for your audio interface may help, or just because, even with the largest sample buffer size, Cubase just can’t keep up with the combination of CPU (and potentially other system) demands (e.g. for plugins, virtual instruments, and numbers of tracks) and/or routing (e.g. bus structures, sends, etc. that can’t be parallelized). This is even assuming ASIO Guard is active and configured optimally for your needs. (And, if ASIO guard is not turned on in your audio settings, that may help.) For playback purposes, you may also be able to freeze tracks, potentially with their inserts, to help cut down on the demands.
That said, while I’ve seen those sorts of issues, especially on my older Windows 10 system prior to upgrading to a new, modern Windows 11 system, I have not seen those issues in any exported audio, be it in Cubase 15 or earlier releases. One thing to make sure of here is that, in your audio mixdown settings, you would want to avoid the option that renders the audio in real-time. In particular, if your computer can’t keep up with playback for that project, it’s unlikely to be able to keep up with rendering that same project’s audio in real time, which adds slightly more demand for resources (e.g. writing the data to disk, and probably the same disk that any audio in your project is streaming from already).
The only other thing that comes to mind from my past experience is that a disk that is failing can potentially cause issues on both ends if, for example, data is getting corrupted on its way from disk or on its way to disk. CrystalDiskInfo is a good (and free) utility for checking disk health on Windows systems.