What's causing unresponsiveness (momentary freezes)?

Cubase
1

Hi,

I keep having these irritating freezes all the time. Especially after +10sec playback when pressing stop, the daw (Cubase 6.0.5 64bit, running as administrator) freezes and mouse pointer changes to “busy-icon”. The freezes are around 5 seconds and after that everything works fine. The freezes occur also with no obvious relation to any action: Out of the blue. I’ve also noticed that all the plugins are very slow to pop-up when pressing (e). This didn’t happend before (cubase 5 32bit) with my old, seriously slower computer.

So any ideas, what might be causing these problems? Any useful tips I could try? I have Cubase up to date, NI komplete 8 ultimate, EW hollywood brass + strings, symphonic choirs and SD2 bundles. My computer is 12core i7 with 32gb of 1600mhz RAM and OCZ Revodrive SSD Hybrid hard drive (over 6 times better performance than my previous 4 core system) so the performance is really not an issue. These freezes occur no matter how light the project is. I’m running windows 7 professional 64bit.

I’m running cubase as admin 'cos when I’m not the Cubase freezes completely on exit and forces me to force shutdown the whole computer.

E: Now I discovered also that if I load NI Maschine as a plug in, each time I hit a pad to play single drum hit, during playback/record Cubase is unresponsive for little over a second. Weird stuff.

2

Hard to tell as ther’s many variables on setting up a new computer.
First off I’d check the Soundcard settings, then graphics. You could have the sample rate / latency set too low (if set at 1ms latency then change to someting like 3 or 5ms). Or a graphic setting may be slowing things down.

Those checks being negative I’d uninstall the heavy 3rd party VSTs and run Cubase on it’s own (anything with a name beginning with K can be suspect :mrgreen: ) with it’s own VSTs should be ok.
Then again, if you have a set of orchestra samples on the SSD drive it may be best to keep them on a separate 3.5 inch conventional hard drive. On second thoughts I’d uninstall the large libraries after checking the Soundcard and graphics settings.
Other than that and not being there hands on that’s the best I’ve got for now. Check the BIOS settings too if you feel you can.