Help me, I'm gonna lose it.

[silencethevoice]

I am posting this because I am basically at the end of my rope... I apologize in advance for the length of this post, but in 2 months I have tried everything under the sun to get this to work right, and am at a complete loss. Ever since I built this machine I have had a problem with sx 2 locking the system up. It is a hard lock up where the mouse cursor freezes, system has to be turned off or reset. The file I am using to recreate the problem is a 12 track stereo file at 24bit/96khz that has approximately 3 plugins per track (compression, exciters, etc.). CPU usage is at about 50%, disk at 0-1. This file recreates the problem everytime. It occurs somewhat randomly, but usually anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour into the looping of the entire file. But the problem is definitely not isolated solely to this file, it is a reoccurance in many other files, happens during recording, etc. The system is a dual Opteron 246(2ghz) with 2GB of RAM (corsair/kingston ecc reg, dual channel ddr), 3 hard drives: WD Raptor 36GB main system drive, 30GB Hitachi Ultra ATA recording drave, and 250GB WD SATA for additional storage, my display is a Matrox G450 Dual Video Card. I am running a M-Audio Delta 1010LT sound card with the latest drivers. I am running Cubase SX 2.2.039. I am currently running XP Professional with SP2, although I have done the majority of testing without SP2 installed, it was installed as a last resort. The system itself IS stable, I have run Prime95 for 24 hours straight with no crashes and also have run Soundforge looping with 4 or 5 plugins chained for 20 hours straight, just to isolate the problem to a Cubase related incident only.

Things I have tried:

1.) Disabled ACPI, and made sure all controllers, video, and sound were on separate IRQs.
2.) Changed DMA buffer sizes from 512 up to 2096.
3.) Tried removing all plugin inserts from my test file, and still crashes.
4.) Made sure no plugins were loading into cubase(moved VSTPlugins folder), still crashes.
5.) Tried running all diff. versions of SX 2 from 2.0 up to 2.2.0.39
6.) Changed Windows-> System-> Performance -> Settings to Optimized for Background, not performance.
7.) Changed Virtual Memory settings to 3000 min, 4000 max.
8.) Made sure I was set to M-Audio Delta ASIO in ASIO settings, not Multimedia ASIO.
9.) Various other minor things to optimize XP, mostly found on tweakxp.com...

If anyone has any advice, It would be GREATLY appreciated, I am really bummed, as I spent over 2 grand for this system, and have yet to get Cubase to run reliably.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Easto]

Sorry to hear that.

It appears that you've tried everything I would have suggested but a few things come to mind... you say after you've been looping for 15 minutes or more. Possibly a memory leak problem(?). Try a Ctl + Shift + Esc while your running your song and see how windows reports the memory usuage. Check to see if it gradually increase. I'm also thinking that this is a vid card issue. Usually a total lock like that can be in this catagory. Are you running the latest vid card drivers? Also, with that much memory I don't see why you're running such a large virtual memory sector. Knock it down to 512 or 256 and see if that makes a difference.

 

[Chriss]

sounds like the kind og problem you would have with a cracked version
It's weird, though... most likely a soundcard issue...
have you tried the steinberg support phone/mail?

 

[silencethevoice]

Not a cracked version... Legit, 2.0 hybrid.. I will definitely look into that memory leak possibility.. I guess I will go ahead and hit up steinberg and see if they have any ideas.

Thanks.

 

[xstatic]

The Matrox G4xx cards have been known to guess big problems with audio apps. Not sure why, but many people have reported problems. I used to have one, but had no real issues. I have had no issues at all though since I got away from my Matrox card.

 

[Halion]

Had somewhat of a similar problem with my Terratec sound card when I first got my computer. Couldn't fix it. Fortunately, new drivers came out, and they worked.

I've seen this problem before, in different setups, even non-workstations. I have never been able to trace the problem back to one origin, however, I've figured some stuff out:
- It's highly likely a compatability problem. I don't think any of your stuff (hardware or software) is "broken".
- Matrox cards are indeed very much not compatable with everything. Hate to say it, but you might have to get rid of it. Try some tests without the use of the matrox card (get rid of the drivers and run at 256 colors perhaps?)
- As far as I know, it happens pretty randomly, but never in the first few minutes when the computer is on, and never after many hours. Recreating the problem with any heavy-load or benchmark program failed (for me, at least).

I hope that helps a little bit. My guess is there is one device in your computer clashing with one software program (cubase). So try to find out what that device is. Turn everything off, and use default drivers, except for one device at the time. It's alot of work, but a day's labor might fix your problem.

lastly, 2 comments: 1) extremely nice system dude and 2) Perhaps upgrade to Cubase 3?

 

[Tifstorey]

Sounds like your having a bad time.. most of the things i would suggest, you have tried, although i know someone who had a problem kind of like yours, his computer kept freezing and locking on certain programs which needed a lot of power to run (E.G. Cubase!) Basically, he tried everything and then finally resorted to taking it to a computer shop, where they couldnt find anything wrong. Anyway, cut a long story short, it ended up being dodgy RAM fitted. Cant guarantee that its whats wrong with your system, but you might want to get it checked out? I mean, Cubase needs quite a bit of RAM when your recording, so if its using alot of it, the RAM itself might be locking the system.
Im in my 3rd month trying to get my set up working, and i know how you feel! All you have to do is look forward to when its finaly working and all of this will feel worthwhile (Trust me )

Good luck!

Peace

 

[TFranklin]

XP and SP2

Sorry to hear your struggling so much, that's a drag. I run Cubase on Mac OSX with no problems so I can't help there. However, I do have a PC running windows XP with SP2. SP2 seemed to cause alot of problems, you might want to shut off the firewall feature and any anti-virus software you are running. Sometimes this software will "grab" your file and cause time-out issues which could crash a program not designed to handle that. I would also suggest trying the default video driver, that's a definite suspect. Good luck, I'm sure you'll resolve it....