Hey, so im having an issue where every 20ish seconds my cubase will skip/cutout and it makes it to where i cant record things over 20 seconds, along with it cutting out every 20 seconds when im listening back. My drivers on my interface are all up to date, ive tried changing my buffer/sample rates, ive tried opening new projects, and nothing fixes it. It just randomly happened one day, i didnt add any new plugins or anything. Please help, thank you.
You might check if you’re having a disk problem, where a degrading disk is taking longer to fill up a buffer for streaming audio, thus causing periodic dropouts. If you’re on Windows, CrystalDiskInfo is free tool that can check the health of your disks. Windows’ built-in Resource Monitor can also be useful to watch while having issues since you can look at various areas to see where bottlenecks might be occurring, for example if disk queues are getting overly long, and which files and processes are contributing to that.
I dont really know what im looking for here, but all i know is it says health was 98% and stuff, im not super smart in these areas.
Can you max out the buffer size? See if this makes any difference.
Do you mean in CrystalDiskInfo? If so, I’m not seeing a percentage figure there in the information I would tend to look at (basically, the summaries). Here’s a screenshot from when I run it. The default screen in my case goes to the one hard disk I have on my system (not used in Cubase):
The area I’ve highlighted up near the top gives a snapshot of the health of all the relevant drives. There is more detail in the rest of the screen, but that is the most important part. When I had failing disks, it gave a rating other than good for the snapshot status.
You can click on the drives up at the top to get the details for other drives. If you are using hard disks, the rotation rate may also be applicable (you’ll want to be streaming audio from a disk that has a rotation rate of at least 7200 RPM – that would be pretty common for desktops, but not necessarily for laptops). The transfer mode may also be relevant for speed in communicating with the drive (as opposed to the speed of the drive itself).
Or did you mean Resource Monitor? If you meant a 98% in the Highest Active Time (I don’t see any Health), that would mean your disk is WAY busy. Here’s a screenshot of its Disk tab from my system at the moment. Note that I’m not running Cubase at all, no less actually playing back or recording, so the data would be significantly different if audio were streaming from disk:
Useful stuff to note here:
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Over on the right side, the disk queue length is a key. If you’re seeing a long queue length, there is some bottleneck where the disk can’t serve the I/O going to/from it quickly enough. What is “long” in this respect? I’m not really sure, but if you’re seeing numbers of 100 or more, that would certainly qualify. I’m not sure where between there and the sort of 0-1 values I’m seeing at the moment issues might start to develop for streaming.
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The Processes with Disk Activity section at the top shows the processes that have disk activity, and you can sort that by any of the columns (in ascending or descending order) by clicking on the columns you want to see. I typically keep this at Total (B/sec), in largest to smallest order), but the read and write columns can be useful if one side of things is seemingly causing issues. This will mainly tell you what’s using the most of the disk. If you’re streaming audio from disk in Cubase (be it sample libraries or audio tracks), I’d expect Cubase to be the biggest contributor (I don’t think stuff like Kontakt running as a Cubase plugin would show up at this level). If something else is, then there could be a conflict on your system, and this will show you what is competing. (My system snapshot currently shows that system activity is the main contributor with my Edge browser in second plce, then some other system activity, and finally Outlook).
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The Disk Activity section in the middle can be helpful in identifying more specific issues, and, again, you can sort this by various columns. Beyond the notes above about the B/sec figures, the Response Time can be useful for a descending order sort because that can show if something is taking a particularly long time to respond (e.g. due to a problem). The File list will show exactly what files are having the activity, and the Image column shows you what process that corresponds to. This section can give an idea of where specifically bottlenecks are occurring. For example, do you see a bunch of sample library files showing up with a lot of transfer and long response times? Are those files (e.g. Kontakt or Halion library files) where you want them to be, or should they be on a different disk to better balance the I/O with streaming audio tracks and system activity? (By default the Halion stuff gets installed on the system disk, but it is good practice to use the Library Manager to move that stuff off the system disk and onto a separate disk other than the one being used for streaming audio tracks, which should also not be the system disk. Similar note for Kontakt.) If there are other processes at the top of the list when running Cubase, what are they, and why are they active? (For example, you wouldn’t want a virus scan happening while doing Cubase work, nor indexing of files for search. So there may be configuration parameters in the operating system to tweak, like not indexing your sample library and audio disks at all.)
I hope this helps. If it is something else you meant by the 98%, maybe a screen shot would help show what you mean.
Okay, I see what you mean, and I just checked mine again. I’d mainly used it for hard disk status (when having problems in that area) in the past, and the screen shot I posted was from the remaining hard disk on my system (a relatively new one that I got for media library, mostly photo, storage). It doesn’t give the percentage there.
I just looked at my 3 SSDs, though, and they do have the percentage, albeit showing blue, instead of green, on my system (just figured out there is a “green mode” in the Theme menu that changes that). Interestingly, my system and audio drives show 99% good, while my sample libraries drive (the newest of the SSDs and 4 TB instead of 2 TB like the others) shows 100% good. My system drive is running a fair bit hotter – 50 C instead of 40 C like the other two.
I notice your screenshot doesn’t show the same sort of stats that mine does and only gives raw values instead of the current, worst, and threshold numbers. I wonder if that relates to yours being NVME instead of SATA/600.
Getting back to your original post, though, I’m only seeing one drive, the system drive, in your display. Is that correct, or are there drivers that CrystalDiskInfo doesn’t read for some reason?
If it is only the one drive, and sharing with the system drive, I suspect you’re having conflicts between system activity, audio streaming, and sample streaming (if applicable for the instruments you’re using). I think the NVME drives are supposed to be faster than the SATA, but there would still be the single drive bottleneck for all disk activity rather than spreading the load a few ways. If that is the case, this could be where looking at the Disk tab in Resource Monitor could be useful to try and see what is going on when you are having the issue. Specifically, is it all Cubase activity, or are there some system things that may be able to be temporarily disabled while running Cubase? Looking at disk queue length may be useful to gauge if there is an issue on that front.
FWIW, I just took a screen shot of Resource Monitor’s disk tab with Cubase playing back my latest project. It’s not very involved at the moment – a small number of frozen tracks, with only one Instrument track (using UVI workstation) playing back some MIDI. Here is a screenshot:
For reference, E: is my audio drive, and clearly the most activity is there thanks to streaming multiple 64-bit audio (due to the frozen tracks) files. F: is my samples drive, but I’m not sure if UVI workstation streams samples from disk or just loads them into memory. The files referenced in the top part (by total I/O) of the Disk Activity section are all used by Windows system stuff and Edge, but maybe that only shows system activity for some reason – perhaps if the files Cubase is accessing are cached in memory or something)??? That surprises me (and I scrolled down and am not seeing my project files elsewhere in the list, nor am I seeing Cubase show up in the Image name column at all – I’m pretty sure I have seen it there in the past).
Hi there,
This happened to me also,
I don’t know if you are creating large projects, which I do, and in my view, it has to do with the large amount of VSTis and plugins. Cubase bugs also play a role. I believe the more you use Cubase, the more the bugs manifest. In my experience, everything goes to hell in the 11th hour, including the skipping issue.
I did a fresh installation of Windows/Cubase etc (all fresh installations are copied now on a secondary hard drive, in case it all goes to hell again) and the problem went away.
I am now also maxing out the buffer size and maxed my RAM to its fullest capacity.
The skipping issue hasn’t happened since.
yeah, i uninstalled and re installed and its still skipping, ill try maxing out buffer size.
i might only have one disk, im on a laptop after all.
The one disk is likely a limitation if you’re doing something with a bunch of streaming audio. But seeing what is going on in Resource Monitor may help determine if it is actually disk streaming that is causing your issue. If it is, I think maybe others who use Cubase on laptops (or even desktops with limited configurability) may use external drives, such as USB3 or Thunderbolt, but I’ve only ever used “desktops” (actually towers or mini-towers, which go on the floor next to me, not on top of my desk) for music production for configurability reasons, including splitting out the system, audio, and sample streaming drives.
Oh , I see. Yeah, see if this helps.
Hmmm,to echo a fellow user, this might be the problem. Running everything from one drive (SSD I presume?), might be creating a bottleneck…Especially if your projects are large.