Well I think that the VSL instruments that are iLok cloud based can be put on one of their USB dongles if you prefer to buy that. I just don’t use them as much as to buy the thing.
But here I think you’re talking about audio only projects? Because those, any machine can handle. My monster Prelude to War project wasn’t done only in the VSTi project, at one point I realized that doing the VSTi MIDI programming part AND the audio effects in the same session was going to be impossible, so I realized I had to work it in a way similar to a real life orchestral recording.
I did all the MIDI part, all the CCs like MOD and EXP and got it to sound as good as possible without any audio filters. Meaning, I tried to get the virtual musicians in the orchestra to play their parts as well as possible.
Once I got that, I did a mixdown but with the options that allow you to export each track to a new audio track and then create a new project for it. So the new project loads nothing but audio tracks, and that is fast as hell. Once in that project, I loaded FXs to each track like crazy, Fabfilter EQs, compressors, Soundtoys, Cubase’s own FX, you name it. And the project was still fast as hell to open, save, playback without any hiccups, etc.
It seems to me that the problem comes when working with VSTis. These can have thousands of files, for each note, for each articulation, etc, and that obviously takes time to load, even on the fastest drives.
I’m sorry Sebastian, I may have been a little to Sarcastic in my reply … I apologize.
My comment about the little blue USB thing… that is aimed at Steinberg getting rid of eLicenser support soon… all of these plugins doing online authorizations when you instantiate them vs load Cubase does really slow things down. In the old days everything was either eLicenser or iLok (doesn’t matter) and they would be good to go once Cubase loaded. Now its a gamble. That comment was more aimed at Steinberg than you, as was my Cows within 20 miles comment.
My other comment may have been too sarcastic as well, and was also aimed at Steinberg. My setup is mostly analog (so very different than your situation) but I am basically playing midi from Cubase and recording up-to 96 channels of analog in Cubase at any given moment by pushing midi out. That works fine, even recording 96 channels at 96k.
But the instant I put some new fancy VST in there with a new fancy GUI… Cubase frequently, and worse… randomly, chokes. ASIO overload this ASIO that.
This is not a data problem… I can bring 96 channels in and push them back out to a 48 channel mixer (that is a different story) and back into Cubase at 96k and there isn’t ever a problem. The instant I start adding some VST FX that have fancy GUIs … the computer dies.
I’m sorry if I haven’t been exactly helpful… what I was trying to get across was that Cubase 12, 13, 14 will handle an insane amount of channels at any sample rate as long as you don’t have some VST FX hogging the GUI. When you bounce or export audio mixdown… the GUIs of all plugins is disabled … and everything works like a dream.
For some reason the more recent versions of Cubase have allowed plugins to hog all the CPU with their GUIs … versions before maybe 9 or 10… absolutely rock solid. Maybe some complaints about “this plugin isn’t responsive” … somehow Steinberg needs to a) sandbox plugins (which they haven’t done well yet, instead they just cut off support for VST2 which was not the problem) and b) sandbox all plugins as if they were always in export audio mode UNLESS they were the window with the focus. I know, easier said than done, but as the UIs for plugins become more and more the focus and less on what they do (because almost everything has been done at this point) there is a new layer of CPU hogging that hasn’t really been discussed.
So I’m sorry if my comments weren’t exactly helpful. I have experienced what you were experiencing (under completely different situations) and it all went away when I bounced tracks. same amount of audio info being processed by Cubase … only difference was not VST user interface…
I think Cubase is taking a lot of criticism that should be directed at plugin developers.
The better plugins don’t need network access to “phone home”. I tend to avoid those that do. However another modern common affliction is for plugins to phone home to share usage statistics. I generally try to turn all of that off, although I actually wouldn’t mind sharing some of that data. Partly, because of performance - partly because of having nothing more than “trust me bro” assurances from plugin developers about exactly what data they collect.
And while I also run Cubase on Windows, there’s also numerous things where that OS plus the hardware/drivers (including motherboard resident components) can interfere in different ways:
From the default malware protection to video and audio drivers. Any of those in their common default settings can absolutely clobber ASIO and Cubase performance.
I’m not saying that SB never screws up - but they get a lot more blame than only what actually is their self-inflicted wounds.
If that gets really large ( e.g. over 10MB) , Cubase startup seems to slow to a crawl and so does the loading and saving of Preferences.
I have no idea how/why it got so big- and some quick searching of the forum suggests that other users have experienced it, but I haven’t seen any hints yet, how/why it could happen.
I’m still troubleshooting my situation, but wanted to ensure that you are or are not facing the same issue that I’m currently having.
Oh, right. I remember reading that Cubase also needed a dongle to launch. My first Cubase ever was 12, and it didn’t need a dongle. I was using Logic Pro X and I only got Cubase Pro 12 because the crossgrade was $215 and kept watching videos of Hans Zimmer using Cubase, so I thought I need to get it just because he uses it, even if it turned out to be a terrible program. Luckily it wasn’t, and much better than Logic, except maybe a couple of things, but well, can’t have it all.
Your cows comment I didn’t think was sarcastic, I thought it was hilarious, and it’s the kind of humor that sometimes I use and not all people get, so it makes me look bad, but I don’t care, the way I see it, I may be the only one who laughs at my jokes, but at least somebody’s laughing.
Yeah, ASIO overloads were a very common thing for me on my Mac Studio, but usually when I pushed it to the limit. But as far as GUIs, I think it’s more a matter of poorly coded ones than those with the latest and greatest. For example, my favorite GUI by far of any VSTi is Opus. Elegant, practical, simple but complex if you need it to be, and with MIDI filters and audio filters. A lot of bang for the buck, especially compared to SINE, which is plain and boring, and the most recent update made it uglier.
But neither of these caused me any problems just from loading. However, Kontakt always has something that is weird. Still the slowest loading time of any VSTi if it’s the first time after opening Cubase, and at least on macOS, several months ago it had this problem: if I rebooted my Mac Studio and loaded Cubase Pro 13, Kontakt would work fine. Same if I had worked on other programs before, with one exception: Blender. If I had used Blender at some point before using Cubase with Kontakt 7, the moment I opened Kontakt, the whole system would slow down to a crawl. Couldn’t do anything. You could barely close Cubase, and reboot the Mac.
It didn’t matter if you used Blender yesterday, didn’t reboot the Mac at all, and today you used Cubase with Kontakt 7. Still happened. However, I could use Blender to death, render thousands of frames in either Eevee or Cycles, then use Cubase and open any engine, Opus, Sine, Synchron, you name it, as long as it wasn’t Kontakt. The rest of the engines worked perfectly fine for hours, and so did all the audio effects plugins. And the tracks with Kontakt played fine, but the moment you opened Kontakt, the system would go into some crazy loop and that was it. Reboot or nothing.
So what does Blender (3D modeling and rendering software for those who don’t know) has to do with Kontakt, an engine for virtual instruments? Beats me!
That sounds like a brilliant idea. Of course like you said might be easier said than done, but if it’s possible, it would free CPU and RAM considerably.
Thanks, I really appreciate it! It was 2-3 months of heavy work and I’m still not 100% happy with it, but at some point I had to let it go and move on because with my experience that was as far as I was going to take it. Later this year I hope to complete the video for it, which is like 70% there and has a Viper flying through a 3D version of the key editor with self lit MIDI notes. Believe it or not, there is a way to convert MIDI tracks to a 3D environment, and it’s awesome, but very time consuming.
Oh, and the original version I did is in 5.1, which I couldn’t upload to Soundcloud because they only take stereo, but the video will be 5.1, and listening to all that in 5.1 is an amazing experience.
Very wise. Be very careful with Native Instruments. A year or so ago I discovered a file that was created by a program they had sent me to troubleshoot some bug. Before sending the file back, I opened it. It had a lot of information about my Mac that wasn’t just hardware related, but also a lot of paths to personal files on the home folder and on the external drives. Needless to say, I called them on it on their own forum because I thought it was despicable. This wasn’t just a thing or two, that file contained tons of personal information that had nothing to do with troubleshooting a bug.
I assumed you typed file but meant folder, right? As that is a folder containing several folders and files. In my case the folder is just 23.3 MB on disk, which is nothing for an NVMe, and even if it was a hard drive, I don’t think that size would matter that much.
Computers are strange.
The solution to an issue may be very arcane…
Last year I upgraded my GPU. Cubase 13 stopped playing videos. Are rather, played the videos like it was on LSD. Cubase 12 and earlier - no problem. Just 13. Nothing I tried worked, so I gave up. Enter Cubase 14. Still the same. Not a single MP4 of any format would play. MOV files did.
Anyway, I also use VEGAS, version 21 at the moment. But, I had occasion to require version 20 (because of a slight change in file format from an older project). So I installed. it, did what I needed it for, and went back to 21. I left 20 installed, just in case.
Bear with me, I’m getting to the crux.
I try, now and again, to import a video into Cubase, just to see if a Windows update, or Cubase update has made a difference. 14.0.20 made no difference.
But since I installed VEGAS 20 (after the Cubase .20 update) - Cubase 14 now plays videos, as expected.
Why?
No idea.
Nothing else changed or was installed, to my knowledge.
Computers are strange.
When you start having as many problems as you described, that’s the time to do a full backup, then do a fresh install of Windows. Best way to make sure that everything works as it should, until the OS gets messed up again. Windows is a dinosaur that has layers upon layers of code, some old, some new, and after several updates it gets really messy in there.
I know a fresh install is a pain, but in the long run, it saves you time. As long as you backed up every possible settings and preset file, besides your personal files.
Hey Thor, since you’re the only person I know for sure has this template, I want to ask you, did you have any issues with it? I keep getting a weird error when I open the Opus instance for each track, saying that the library is not installed. At the moment I don’t have the Composer Cloud+ sub, but I have permanent licenses for many EW libraries, one of which is the HWOOE, which is why I bought this template.
However, each time I load either project that comes with it, it gives me this error:
Then sometimes it gives me another error dialog about the license, but all the licenses are fine, as you can see that the libraries show “Activated” and the checkmark indicating that they’re fully installed.
I reached out to the seller and he’s puzzled that it’s happening, and EW support don’t seem to have an idea either.
Did this ever happen to you with this template, or anything else when using EW libraries?
Note: I know this is not the topic of this thread, but I tried to send you a message and an error came up saying you don’t accept PMs
No, everything loaded up just fine for me and I’ve never had any sort of library or licensing messages at all. I have the “Composer Cloud +” subscription and the only difference I saw in your list is that I have Hollywood Strings 2 and Hollywood Pop Brass. But all the Opus libraries matched up.
I have worked with all kinds of projects, a few with over 100 tracks, which obviously I don’t expect to load in seconds. But I also have projects with 20 tracks that load so slow I would think I have a 20 year old computer with a hard drive, and only one hard drive, so it has to load Windows and the libraries from it. But I have an extremely fast PC with Windows installed in one NVMe and the libraries in other NVMes, so it doesn’t make sense.
Well we just updated our recording suite with Cubase 14 Pro to the Dell Tower plus ultra nine 285KCPU and we are using the onboard GPU by Intel We are only using 32 GB DDR5 ram at 5200
We use a maximum of 15 to 20 midi and Audio tracks playing the selected VST3 instruments from Audio modeling SWAM library to support our lead vocals and chorus arrangements. This library hardly uses any CPU. We did notice that things were loading much faster and our projects are stored on a 5tb WD passport drive with no issues. This Wednesday we will be adding a Samsung to 2TB NVME generation four to the second socket on the ECB2250 motherboard.
So far everything is good and the support in the Steinberg forum is fabulous
Nice to meet you and I’m sure you’ll get your issues resolved especially when you upgrade your computer
