How did I fix this? (Cubase/Zoom R16)

[Day]

Hello all, really new here and fairly new to home recording all together. I consider myself fairly computer savvy, however I'm very unfamiliar with a lot of the settings in Cubase.

Here was the issue: Friends I play music with got an R16 recently. Prior to this they had some kind of 2 input Lexicon, that while they only had 2 inputs it seemed to work fine. We get the R16 all hooked up and after a couple of hours I had it working as an interface and controller almost perfectly... (couldn't monitor at first got, got that figured out a bit later). Everything is fine and dandy...

Next day... (I wasn't at their house that morning, so I have no idea what happened), all recordings now sounded very metallic and very very distorted and also fairly quiet. (Almost like it was recording as a .midi..) After we would record a track in cubase it would hang a few seconds as if it were processing, then the track length would literally shrink, playback was also lagging behind the marker by about 5 or so seconds. If we did 6 or so tracks at once the "shrinking" would be more severe on the first track and subsequent tracks shrank less and less. So you had a stacked look as if track 1 was 5 seconds, track 2 was 6 seconds, track 3 was 7 seconds... etc. Monitoring sounded normal during all of this, Playback sounded sad, very sad.

This occurred in different versions of Cubase, including 1.3 LE (lol), 4 LE, SX3.

I sat in front of their PC for about 5-6 hours before something I did finally got it working again. However I don't feel the very last thing I changed actually was the problem. I changed/unchanged so many options and ruled out so many things I can't even begin to list them. As I had gotten frustrated I had started adjusting more than one thing before closing and relaunching cubase... stupid mistake... so now I can't pinpoint what the problem was... and I'm a little gunshy to try to reproduce the issue because of this.

So... last thing I remember changing was under "Mackie Control" (for the Zoom, instructions state to set this up as Mackie Control selecting Zoom Driver for both in and out midi)... what I changed was changing the out midi to the Microsoft SW whatever driver. Leaving the IN as Zoom R16. I don't think this is actually the problem but I'm hesitant to adjust pretty much anything at this point.

Anyone had a familiar experience or know of a setting in cubase that would get these results while recording? I kept thinking there was something converting the audio track into a .midi file or adjusting the tempo, but it was just so distorted and... crappy sounding... didn't seem like any kind of function you'd actually want to apply.

Any insight appreciated, I just don't want it to occur again, and would like to know how to fix it for sure if it does come back. Sorry for wall of text.

 

[Day]

I realize now that there are probably way too many factors for anyone to be able to tell me what went wrong. I did go back and change the makie control midi out to the zoom and it didn't reproduce the problem and actually made the lights start working on the zoom. Kind of a duh moment on that one. Oh well... if anyone has this occur at least they wont feel as alone as I did scouring forums trying to figure out what was wrong.

 

[ertaka]

I have exactly the same problem

Did you ever figure out the problem? I cannot for the life of me figure this out. I am having exactly the same problem and cannot sort it. I have torn my hair out for days and days. The R16 works perfect as a recorder and controller, and seems to record to Cubase perfectly, but playback is just atrocious. I have changed buffer settings, bit rate settings, mackie controller settings , but nothing works.
What is even more frustrating is that it sometimes comes good and plays perfect until I rewind to the start of the track, and then back to the same old shit sound. Any info or help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Ninja_Drummer]

It sounds to me like you're having latency issues. Switching your out to Microsoft SW is switching the output, which, is where your play back comes out, to the onboard or default computer output for sound.

Have you disabled all computer sound devices with the exception for the device or recording device you are using? Did you disable windows sounds? Do you use the zoom to playback music or are you listening from computer speakers/monitors/headphones plugged directly into the computer.

If you're listening from your zoom then it makes no sense to set your zoom as an output if you're not even listening directly from it. And if you're multi-running playback devices then you run into the risk of interferences. You should narrow everything down to one device for the best results. As of right now it seems to me that you have everything coming into cubase through your zoom, then rerouting the data from there out through your computer speakers/headphones. This should be fine for now if you say it has resolved your problem as of now. If it continues to be an issues try resetting the zoom device within cubase in the device setup. Try switching completely to Microsoft SW or whatever is your computer sound/rec device for both ins and outs and see if the issue still continues from there.