What are the expected norms? (Audio behaviour)

Cubase
#1

General question really. I’ve made quite a jump in both PC performance and Cubase version in December (a 2006 dual core 2.4G / 1G RAM and Cubase LE4) so I’m a bit lost with knowing what is ‘normal’ behaviour with audio and what indicates a problem.

I’ve seen the various discussions around ASIO spikes, and while I don’t generally seem to have any problems some operations must be causing an overload (as the red indicator is sometimes lit) - I think these are generally ‘file’ operations like importing or switching between projects - and I sort of assumed they were to be expected.

But what about activating and deactivating sends during playback (by actually clicking buttons, rather than using automation) this doesn’t cause an ASIO spike but it does interrupt playback - is this normal or does this indicate a problem to track down?

I guess what I’m really interested in some views on what we should be expecting from audio performance and what operations will always cause audio to pause/drop out. Should we now be expecting everything we do in Cubase to have no effect on audio playback/monitoring - or will there always be some things to look out for and work around?

Any thoughts?

#2

Do you mean switching send on or off to effects tracks that are already loaded or creating new ones from scratch?

Activating a send to an effect track already in place should not have cause any drop-out.

Creating a new effect track does cause a drop out for me (and I see my faster PC is similar in spec to yours …slightly slower)…having just tested, it looks like the only sort of track I can add without a drop out in play-back is a MID one. No idea if this is normal…can’t say I’ve ever tried to add a track whilst playing back before!

#3

At least a part of the dropout is because latency has to be recalculated for the new path. This is unavoidable.

#4

I’m sending to an external FX via one of my interface outputs. When I go to the drop down list of send options and add or remove the send there is a slight pause. It isn’t a problem, from a workflow perspective, but I was interested in if it was normal behaviour. I got 8 Pro the week it came out and I’ve had very few problems, but over the last week I’ve been getting a few minor bugs (zooming with ‘G’ and ‘H’ stops working and other such minor niggles) so I’m paying a bit more attention to things at the moment.

On the adding tracks point, that’s not what I was trying to do, it’s just the adding and removing sends to places that already exist. Thanks for the input, it’s all helpful.

That makes sense, cheers.

#5

It’s normal