playback choppy when I add another track

A

andybhoy

New member
Yo,
Im using cubase 6 through a firewire audio interface/mixer - on an imac 27" - 8gb ram.

Working on a project with 5 Audio tracks and 4 Vst instrument tracks (3 halion orchestra, 1 superior drummer.)

Each audio track has maybe 3 VST effects. eq, compression, reverb (on vocals) and Guitar Rig on 2 guitar tracks. like this everything is working fine.

I just tried duplicating the 2 guitar tracks to experiment with panning and effects etc. each of the guitar tracks has guitar rig and an eq plugin - 1 track is a solo, one track is rythem wit distortion. when I duplicated the rythem guitar track playback goes choppy and the performance monitor also goes mental...

With the duplicated tracks - I now have 7 Audio tracks and 4 midi. surely my comp should be able to handle this?

Any ideas why this is happening? Should I be making my vst effects as in insert so Im only running one instance of them? or should it be ok to have the effects on each track?

all my other projects are fine, but I havent used as many vst instruments, probably the same amount of vst effects tho... surely my system should be able to handle this?

thanks for input anyone has. if you need more info lemme know.
 
You would think the mac would be able to handle it wouldnt you.
If all else fails and it cant, try shutting off some of the vst plug ins until the mix is near done then freeze some tracks to free up cpu usage and mix whats left. If you're unhappy with some aspects when you've completed the mix unfreeze the track in question make your adjustments and refreeze if needs be.
Some vst plug ins can be quite intensive on the macs brains.
 
Having that many active midis running alongside with direct vst effects (I assume?) can put a lot of load on a cpu believe it or not. The best thing to do is try to side chain or use parallel effects to free up some of the cpu load.

Oh, and did I mention that Cubase in itself is a pretty big cookie monster on cpu?
 
Ok cool. Thought it was something like that.

The midis - would bouncing them to a wave once they are complete and I'm happy with them be less resource intensive?
 
yeppers do that and dont forget to turn off all the unused vst/vsti on playback.
 
Very much so. Also - instead of inserting reverb on every track, you can set up a reverb send as an FX channel and send tracks to it, so only one instance of the plugin is running for all tracks, rather than than one instance per track. If Guitar Rig is stereo and you're using the same settings for the duplicated guitar track business, you can put it as an insert on a group and assign the output of those tracks to that group and only run one instance of that, too. If you EQ them the same - EQ the guitar group once for all guitar tracks, rather than repeating it for each - etc etc. There's a few easy ways I see you can free up some CPU, if that is the issue....

It sounds to me, though, like that version of Guitar Rig just doesn't like having two instances running...VSTs are written in native code, and there's no way of telling what exactly any plugin is doing, and it could be doing, quite literally... anything. Weird quirks like that are entirely possible if they do something like....say... lock a global named mutex assuming that only one instance will ever be loaded, but when you load two - suddenly they're battling for that mutex constantly because they're both using the same name...that could completely freeze up whatever thread is running those plugins and would, I assume, cause bizarre and unexpected behavior like you described. That's just one of an infinite number of possible scenarios that could cause chaos if somebody accidentally wrote some code falsely assuming there would only ever be one instance.
 
Yep, I'll defo be experimenting with these suggestions cheers dudes.

I do think, having briefly went back to the project in question that the problem lies with having 2 guitar rigs going (actually 4 instances going, 2 on lead 2 on rythem.) as you say typhid.

Few things to try out now. Every day is a Skool day.
Cheers
 
Cool, if it turns out to be that - file a bug report and maybe they'll fix it. It could even be a bug specific to the Mac branch of that version of Guitar Rig, since mutexes are platform-specific...

It should be easy to test out. Just create a new project and load up a few guitar rigs and see if it goes nuts. That would rule out cumulative system drain by all the other stuff going on in your project as the problem that an extra guitar rig just pushed over the edge.
 
You don't mention the interface - but you can always increase the buffer size while you are mixing. On my interface I record everything @ 96 sample buffer but increase to 512 for mixdown (where it doesn't really matter). Makes a huge difference as to when things give out on my box.
 
Just had the same problem on my PC - dual core CPU and 4gb RAM. Using Cubase 6.5 through M-Audio souncard. My Cubase project has 16 audio tracks, each with up to 7 inserts. It struggled with the M-Audio buffer size at 256, so I upped it to 512 and now it is as smooth as silk.
 
I find it difficult to believe that your playback should be choppy with so few tracks and effects. Check your buffer size. Aside from Guitar Rig, are you using the bundled Cubase effects?
 
Ive tried most of the stuff here - Raising the buffer size while mixing seemed to do the trick. I also created effects and used them as sends instead of on each track, which has also helped.
jonny - some are cubase effects, free stuff, and fab filter pro c and pro q.
cheers dudes.
 
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