Cubase = sluggish!!

Bongo Fiend

New member
I write progressive house music using Cubase. It's a very powerful program - I can load heaps and heaps of samples into it, play loads of channels at once, etc. ... but boy is it sluggish!

The screen update is really slow, even on my 300 MHz Pentium-II. It's not exactly doing any complex 3D rendering! My tracks generally have about 30 channels (some mono, some stereo) and last for about 10 minutes. I have enough RAM to easily store all the samples at once. Not exactly very demanding.

But when I view the whole track, the screen takes several seconds to update. Even when I switch off 'waveforms' it takes a whole second - it's only got to draw a few hundred rectangles for god's sake!!!

Similarly, if I multiple-select a few parts and press Delete, it sometimes takes as much as 10 seconds to delete them. If I'm playing the tune at the same time, there is typically a stutter/click in the playback (even though the bit I've deleted is nowhere near the bit I am listening to). What the hell is it doing?!!

Apart from the screen update, there are lots of aspects of the program which are very lazily implemented. E.g. only one level of undo. Some functions could be made much more intuitive and/or interactive. E.g. to zoom into a specific part of the tune, you could highlight the area with a zoom tool, as you do in most graphic design packages.

To its credit, it's great that you can do most operations while the track is playing. But this power is wasted with such poor performance. E.g. I think "hmm, I'll delete this part which is about to play" but by the time it's deleted, playback has already gone past that part.

Does anyone else agree with these criticisms? I think that for Steinberg, having an established product (and a status as one of the market leaders) has made them complacent about basic UI issues.
 
Everyone says lots of nice things about Cubase and I can see why. But it seems to me that people have become tolerant of its more shoddy aspects.

Only one level of undo;
Slow screen update;
Some badly designed UI.

Does anyone feel the same way?
 
First of all Cubase doesn't load its audio in RAM. It is played directly from disk. So having 30 tracks playing at once gives you about 2.5MB/sec (or 150MB/minute) data transfer from your HD, read out of 30 different files. (so you have to include HD hard disk time to this equation) and you'll see it's quite demanding to do.

You probably ask why it plays from HD rather as from RAM. Because Cubase is a multitracker and NOT a sample player. It can handle several huge files (for example a 10 minute stereo recording at 24bit 96Hz wich would be around 200MB ) at the same time. Not many other progs are able to do so. (Last time I used cubase multitracking extensifly I had for about 600MB of audio data in that song.)

Cubase also does all EQ and FX in realtime. this is taking a lot out of your puter and believe me a 300Mhz is not even near enough when things get serious. Playback stutter and stuff like are simply due to lack of system resources, not cubase. And yes indeed the resources needed for realtime audio rendering of a complete mix are comparable to what's needed for 3D work.

Cubase is build around non destructive editing (so you don't mess up your original recording.) One level of undo is indeed no fun with midi and with what you do, but if you're working with huge files and the prog needs to copy that file every time you do an action your HD would be full before you could actually do anything.

Slow screen update: Screen update is not important for cubase and it's the first thing where it cuts to keep the audio ok. Cubase will automatically reduce screen update and give priority to the audio for system resources. this is what I call intelligent programming. Guide the resources to the most important part.

Some badly UI. I don't think so. If you use it for what it's intended it's a very good UI, well thought of, although a zoom tool won't hurt anyone and the basic UI is rather a bit confusing at the beginning but once you get the hang of it, no problem. For cutting and pasting loops there are other more effecient progs as cubase (like Acid.)

and then again. If you are copying the same bar several imes, use ghost copies. it will give better performance. And use a seperate HD or at least an other partition of your HD for audio recording for use with cubase. You're running the rather severe risk of trashing your FAT if windows tries to interfere with cubase when you are playing 30 tracks. And if you use samples.. get some VST instruments to play the samples for you. They do play from RAM and do put less stress on your computer.

I hope you have now better insight in how cubase works. You are just creating a huge stress on your system the way you work. A program as Acid is developed for working with sampled loops, cubase is a semi-professional multitracker and is in a complete other league. You really don't hit the ball when you accuse cubase of bad performance... cubase is capable of performance wich is only surpassed by pro-tools systems (wich are at least 10 times as expensive.). Of course it's all in the hands of the people working with it.

so far to the defense of cubase.
 
hmm...

Cheers for the reply. Actually, perhaps I know more about the workings of Cubase than you think. I agree with some of your comments but still think it's shoddy in lots of ways.

> "First of all Cubase doesn't load its audio in RAM"

On the Audio / System dialogue, it lets you set amount of RAM allocated per channel. I have 128Mb, so I set this to 1Mb per track (usually I have 20-40 tracks, mostly mono). So yes, it does effectively load the sounds into RAM.

Actually the sound playback (usually) only stutters when I perform edits while playing back, but I don't see the big deal (it was obviously designed to do this).

> "Because Cubase is a multitracker and NOT a sample player."

I think the difference is academic. I have a load of sounds, I want to play them. Cubase is designed to do this. But, on a fairly powerful machine, it falls over when I try to playback at the same time as simple editing (e.g. deleting a part).
It doesn't take a degree in rocket science to realise that it could do some semi-intelligent caching to minimise unnecessary hard disc access.

> "Screen update is not important for cubase and it's the first thing where it cuts to keep the audio ok."

The screen update is slow even when not playing back. I believe that it's lazily programmed.

> "If you are copying the same bar several imes, use ghost copies"

I do.

> "And use a seperate HD or at least an other partition of your HD for audio recording for use with cubase."

I do, I have a separate disc for WAVs.

> "Cubase is build around non destructive editing..."
> "...but if you're working with huge files and the prog needs to copy that file every time you do an action..."

You've contradicted yourself. Most of the edits I do are non-destructive, as you have said. But this means that it does not have to actually modify/copy/back-up/delete any WAV files. All of my edits in Cubase are the addition/removal of parts, the trimming of samples within parts, and MIDI editing. All of which could have been implemented with multiple undo.

Only one level of undo = serious design flaw. Undo-ing and redo-ing are fundamental parts of the music creation process.

> "Cubase also does all EQ and FX in realtime. this is taking a lot out of your puter and believe me a 300Mhz is not even near enough when things get serious"

It should be taking advantage of my soundcard (which can mix - *in hardware* - 64 tracks at once).
Furthermore I use very few realtime EQ/FX, if any.

> "Some badly [implemented] UI. I don't think so"

I'll give you a few more examples. The 'zoom' faders (at the bottom right of several of the windows) behave inconsistently (sometimes you can move it left or right but it won't zoom any further). In the 'audio pool' the keyboard control is not very well written - e.g. if you press 'down' from the last item, the cursor goes to the top, but not vice versa; you can't use the END key to jump to the end; when you import a new WAV it is not always selected. There are hundreds of niggles like this which make me think Steinberg don't actually use their own product extensively.

There are so many obvious additions which would make it easier to use. E.g. multiple cue points so you could quickly play the tune from those points (or move the view without using the zoom faders). Multiple songs open at once. The ability to cut/paste parts between songs. When you move the cue point to a new position ready to play, it could start caching the sounds so that there isn't a big pause when you press 'play'.

I agree that it is very good at simultaneously playing several large WAV files, and I have already given it credit for being powerful. But for some reason, when people buy a powerful product, they seem to be more tolerant of a few bugs / design flaws here and there.

I'd be interested to hear your comments :)
 
It has been a long time..... but here you go..

On the Audio / System dialogue, it lets you set amount of RAM allocated per channel. I have 128Mb, so I set this to 1Mb per track (usually I have 20-40 tracks, mostly mono). So yes, it does effectively load the sounds into RAM.

it's not because you set up memory per channel you are buffering audio. In fact you are buffering your processors calculations (wich is the one that is doing the work!!!) Those 512Kb backside cache ain't enough you know.




> "Because Cubase is a multitracker and NOT a sample player."

I think the difference is academic. I have a load of sounds, I want to play them. Cubase is designed to do this. But, on a fairly powerful machine, it falls over when I try to playback at the same time as simple editing (e.g. deleting a part).
It doesn't take a degree in rocket science to realise that it could do some semi-intelligent caching to minimise unnecessary hard disc access.

The difference ain't academic. That's why a sampler isn't the same as a multitracker! A multitracker requiers far more (non-repeatable) data transfer where caching the disk makes no sence (as most disks are fast enough.). Get a sample playing ustillity into cubase and your problems will be solved, lower the block size 'till your HD can't take it no more. The less caching on processor and the less caching on block readin the less time you have to wait.



> "Screen update is not important for cubase and it's the first thing where it cuts to keep the audio ok."

The screen update is slow even when not playing back. I believe that it's lazily programmed.

Cubase is realtime.. what's active eats processor power, playing or not. I never had any problems whatsoever with screenupdates in cubase. (and I've been using it since version 2 as well on PC as on Mac..)


Only one level of undo = serious design flaw. Undo-ing and redo-ing are fundamental parts of the music creation process.

Maybe you have a point here, but nevertheless there are a fair amount of destructive utillities in cubase too (timestretch for example) wich would result in a photoshop like 'swapfile' (and a few gigs swap file ain't really a benifit in speeding up disk transfer.)



> "Some badly [implemented] UI. I don't think so"

I'll give you a few more examples. The 'zoom' faders (at the bottom right of several of the windows) behave inconsistently (sometimes you can move it left or right but it won't zoom any further). In the 'audio pool' the keyboard control is not very well written - e.g. if you press 'down' from the last item, the cursor goes to the top, but not vice versa; you can't use the END key to jump to the end; when you import a new WAV it is not always selected. There are hundreds of niggles like this which make me think Steinberg don't actually use their own product extensively.

There are some GUI flaws. But non of them really annoys me, and do remember cubase is originally an atari prog, converted to Mac and then transfered to PC. so the PC version may differ from the Mac version.

There are so many obvious additions which would make it easier to use. E.g. multiple cue points so you could quickly play the tune from those points (or move the view without using the zoom faders)

This is possible.

. Multiple songs open at once. The ability to cut/paste parts between songs. When you move the cue point to a new position ready to play.

this is possible too.



Cubase is by far not perfect. But you can't say it's no good. What cubase does today wasn't possible only a few years back unless you had a 5or6digits$$$ worth pro-tools setup, so there is no reason to complain. If you just wan't to playback loops get Acid or something alike, wich is a prog caching as you like and playing as you like. i don't know why you even use cubase in the first place (no offence)?? It's the wrong app for using as a 40 track phrase sampler.
 
inocybe said:
There are some GUI flaws. But non of them really annoys me
Yeah well they bloody annoy me!! :)

inocybe said:
What cubase does today wasn't possible only a few years back unless you had a 5or6digits$$$ worth pro-tools setup, so there is no reason to complain
It's this attitude that holds back software development and strangles innovation. People are too busy singing the praises of their 'amazing' new programs to really question the way they work.
The only way forward is to criticise and to redesign - not to compare it with how it used to be.

inocybe said:
i don't know why you even use cubase in the first place (no offence)?? It's the wrong app for using as a 40 track phrase sampler.
One of the main selling points of Cubase is how many simultaneous audio channels you can have with realtime effects, and how it makes the most of your hardware. I'm not convinced.

Also, being an 'industry-standard' I thought it would have evolved into a really fine-tuned, stable program, but I don't think this is the case either. I upgrade every so often, but I've had lots of crashes with *every* version of Cubase I've used on my PC.

I don't see your point about Cubase being a 'real-time' program. "what's active eats processor power, playing or not" ... so you're saying you'd *expect* it to be slow at performing normal operations (deleting parts, updating the screen etc.) even when I'm not playing back the tune? What a load of rubbish!

Deleting a single part (or several parts) should be virtually INSTANTANEOS. It is NOT a complex operation! I'm not asking it to perform any difficult filtering. It doesn't even involve loaded or unloading a sample from memory. IMHO it is very lazily programmed. I work for a software company, and if you ever have to wait for something to happen in our software, we question "WHY?" And yes, our software is real-time too (vector graphics).
 
cubase ain't the industry standard.. that's pro tools. and pro tools is a finetuned version for audio. (lacks a good MIDI part though.). Cubase only got audio from version 3 and has been fintuned and added ever since, computers today aren't fast enough yet to cope with the amount of calculations needed for this, it's getting better as new CPU's are on the market. But you can't have realtime if your processor only can do one calculation at a time. For graphic work a lot of functions are lifted from the processor and done by the video card installed in your computer, speeding things up a lot. For audio there are only limited cards wich can do this (a pro tools sytem does this and recently some others are available.) so cubase needs to mix on the processor as most cards mixing algorythms suck big time. If you really want excessive use of audio then try nuendo wich was rewritten from scratch and preforms better at only audio, but has no Midi at all.

I don't see your point about Cubase being a 'real-time' program. "what's active eats processor power, playing or not" ... so you're saying you'd *expect* it to be slow at performing normal operations (deleting parts, updating the screen etc.) even when I'm not playing back the tune? What a load of rubbish!

that seems untill you plug some synths in cubase and use it as an FX processor...silence is still a signal. That's thru in the analog world, but also within cubase. Maybe you don't need this function at all, but most users expect this from such a prog.


Cubase is far from finished, but you can't call it sluggish at all. But don'tt expect a 300Mhz system to act like it's a studio, because it ain't. It's a small wonder you're even able to run 40 tracks on your machine.
 
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