What is the limiting factor?

[james_m]

I thought I had all I needed but it seems not.

Once I get approximately 8 audio tracks on a song in Cubase she freezes up on me. The CPU and disk usage go of the scale halfway through the song and I get big braeks in playback.

I've done a few little things to optimize performance such as removing sounds images, lower colour reolution.

Help me! What do I need or is there something else I should be doing?

I'm using:

Cubase VST/32 version 5.0
XP Professionsal
Creative Audigy 2 ZS Platinum Pro
Dell with 512 RAM & 40 gig hd

[NYMorningstar]

What processor do you have? What programs are running in the backround? What video board do you use? The problem could be related to any of those.

[james_m]

Originally posted by NYMorningstar
What processor do you have? What programs are running in the backround? What video board do you use? The problem could be related to any of those.

Its a Pentium 4. I have as little as possible running in the background, generally InCD and Norton Antivirus neither of which would be doing a hell of a lot and just sit in the system tray.

Video board = graphics card? either way I will have to check, I'm not sure. Would this make a significant difference?

One thing is I've got a significant amount of VST and DirectX plugins. I'm just thinking might this affect performance?

[cliff richard]

If you are using a lot of plug ins at once it may cause you problems. Instead of say using an fx such as reverb as an insert fx on each of your 8 audio tracks, why not place the reverb into your send fx panel and add the fx that way, thus minimizing the usage on your processor. However always leave compression fx in the insert fx panel.

[james_m]

Point taken. I don't go mad on the effects though.

Do you reckon the existence of a lot of plugins (not necessarily the use of them) would affect performance (I probably have 100 VSTs and the same in DirectX)

[cliff richard]

It shouldnt make any difference mate, i have hundreds too and never had a problem due to that. It may be that your system may dislike a particular effect, i use to have a problem with my system crashing when i used a certain plug in and in the end just had to get rid of it.

[Track Rat]

Do you have DMA checked on your hard drive?

[james_m]

Originally posted by Track Rat
Do you have DMA checked on your hard drive?

Not sure. I heard about this alright but can't figure out where to set it. Any offers?

Cheers Cliff, I'll do a bit of trial and error and see how they work. I know some of the plug-ins are dodgy

[Track Rat]

Control Panel>System> find your hard drive on the list and look at Properties and under the tab called Settings there is a check box for DMA. Check it and restart the computer.

[james_m]

DMa - done. Was on it already.

Just realised though. I'm on FAT32 instead of NTFS. Methinks I should be on NTFS so it look like a whole reformat job for me

woe is me

[Nosferous]

I wouldn't go format yet.
That shouldn't be the problem for 8 tracks, a few vst's and an effect or two on each track on the whole bus. NTFS from my understanding while it will be an improvement is very minor and not really noticable to the average person that doesn't benchmark their PC every week after tweak for tweak.

Have you tried disabling norton and InCD?

I know you don't think they affect a lot, but Norton can be quite a little shit of a hog.

Also, when doing Windows updates: disable norton download, install, restart and then load norton again (should auto-start by it's self but just incase check). Downloading windows updates while having anti-virus programs running (biggest culprit Norton) for some reason has cause big lag issues with XP machines. MS released a notice about this once regarding the patches that had the issue, they said to uninstall the respective patches and re-install them properly.

-Not saying this is your problem, but just take note of it.

I dropped Norton 'cause it wasn't catching virus' as good as it should have been and I noticed it was a considerable hog for it's application type.

[james_m]

Cheers for that.

Yeah I've tried disabling norton with no noticable difference. InCD is fairly passive so I don't think it'll make much diffrerence.

I was looking at what effects I have on the audio tracks. Not much really, in total I'd say about 8-10 all of which run with the Cubase standard rather than a fancy front-end as some of them do.

[MILLSY5]

Hello mate,

You state that both the CPU and the disk usage meters are going of the scale. This is very strange for only 8 tracks of audio and a few VSTi's. Are you sure this is the case. CPU is effected by VSTis and effects whilst your disk meter is effected by audio tracks and disk streaming.

In the set up page in Cubase have you ensured you are using the ASIO drivers and set a reasonable latency time and disk buffer? The first place you should really look is your creative card - they really arn't up to much.

If you cant solve the problem could you watch the disk meters and let me know if they both shoot up just as the machine crashes or whether one of them is verging on hitting the red through out the song.


Cheers

Keith

[james_m]

Both meters start off fine. Then one starts to run up about halfway throught the song swiftly followed by the other (I can't remember which order, the bottom one first I think - Disk?).

As a result the songs starts hopping and then it becomes impossible to do anything, i.e. extremely slow reactions to mouse movements, clicks etc.

I know the latency is set reasonably. I haven't checked the disk buffer though. Any idea what it should be? I know the Audigy may not be ideal but it should be able to handle this.

[MILLSY5]

The doptimal disk buffer setting will be unique to your situation. I would try increasing the number of buffers and see how that goes.

Have you checked the IRQ's ie do the graphics card and audigy share the same IRQ. Even if they did it is rare using XP fr this to cause a problem but it may be the case. Its a hassle but you could try assigning the IRQ's yourself by changing the PC to standard pc instead of ACPI. Make sure you read up on this before trying it.



Keith

[james_m]

Thanks a lot Keith.

Okay so part of it was as simple as bringing up the disk buffer. I've done that and its running way better now.

The CPU still gets swallowed up every now and then but I'm happier!

[Laynestaley]

I have more or less the same problem as you do. Especially when I'm using a lot of midi and/or when I'm using more then 12 tracks my systems tends to freeze up.
Increasing the buffer size is what did the trick for me too. When I am recording I lower it to 286 to get a minimal latency of 9ms. When the recording part is over and I'm about to start mixing I sometimes increase the buffer size to make sure to system won't freeze. Latency is irrelevant at this stage anyways.
Other things that can help:
- increase the memory per channel
- convert midi to audio

Good Luck.