Cubase LE mixdown problem

[Casey H]

Maybe someone out there can give me some ideas here.I run Cubase LE with a Tascam 144 USB Interface-- the version of Cubase LE is the lightest one- the one they give away with the Tascam.Lately, when I do an audio mixdown to .wav, I get problems whereby I get bad output files (no sound after a point in the file) or ones with major cracks and pops. I know when the problem is likely to happen- the progress bar during export slows down dramatically and I hear a lot of hard disk activity. When things are good, the progress bar moves smoothly and the export does not take a very long time. When bad, you see the time remaining stop decreasing or even increase quite a bit.I did not have this problem early on. I made two changes to my system in recent months. One is I installed a new sound card. It should have been an upgrade, it is a later model of the Creative card I had before. The other is I installed Antares Autotune 5.0 and the associated USB iLok.At first I thought the problem only occurred when I inserted Autotune on a track. I thought maybe it was more processing than could be handled. However, I see the same problem now even when Autotune has not been inserted on any tracks.My PC has a fairly modern & fast Pentium processor and 2 GB RAM. (I forgot the clock speed- I'll check but it's not a slowpoke at all)I'm thinking of trying one or more of the following:* Uninstall and reinstall Cubase.* Uninstall Autotune and run that way for a while and see. * Go back to the old soundcard which still works fine.Any ideas? Settings? Adjustments? Voodoo?Thanks,Casey

[marcblack30]

sounds like a serious problem there, what a pain.i think you're on the right track with your list of solutions.i would start with uninstalling AT first, that seems like it would be the easiest.also you might want to just double check your Export Audio Mixdown settings and make sure there nothing goofy there.good luck, sorry i couldn't be of more help.marc

[eightyeightkeys]

# 1Check your buffer size. It may need to be increased for smoother, stutter free exporting of audio files. Especially with many plug-ins which require more CPU power such as Auto-tune etc..#2Do you have a seperate "recording drive ?" That is, a hard drive dedicated to recording your Cubase audio files. This must be a totally seperate drive, not even a "partition" of the C-Drive. Your C-Drive is working very hard as it is reading data from the application and the system. If you give it the job of reading massive audio files as well, you can have problems.#3Defragment your hard drives often. I did a couple of set-ups recently on lap tops and their C Drives were so fragmented it took several hours to defrag !#4If these suggestions fail to help, look-up Windows XP Optimization on the web. There are quite a few out there that tell you how to optimize XP for audio/studio use. imo, these optimizations are very much worth the effort and will give you a very stable, fast, streamlined machine ready to rock.

[Casey H]

Oct 16, 2008, 3:30pm, eightyeightkeys wrote:# 1Check your buffer size. It may need to be increased for smoother, stutter free exporting of audio files. Especially with many plug-ins which require more CPU power such as Auto-tune etc..#2Do you have a separate "recording drive ?" That is, a hard drive dedicated to recording your Cubase audio files. This must be a totally separate drive, not even a "partition" of the C-Drive. Your C-Drive is working very hard as it is reading data from the application and the system. If you give it the job of reading massive audio files as well, you can have problems.#3De-fragment your hard drives often. I did a couple of set-ups recently on lap tops and their C Drives were so fragmented it took several hours to defrag !#4If these suggestions fail to help, look-up Windows XP Optimization on the web. There are quite a few out there that tell you how to optimize XP for audio/studio use. imo, these optimizations are very much worth the effort and will give you a very stable, fast, streamlined machine ready to rock.Thanks marc and 88.I did a defrag today. My computer hadn't had a defrag in years so I left one running all day while I was at work. (I came home and my computer was laying back on the bed smoking a cigarette). I already increased the buffer size to the max.Unfortunately I only have one drive that I use for everything on this computer and I realize that's not best for audio work. Many suggest a dedicated machine with nothing else running on it, no internet connection, no virus software, etc.There was a link on this forum to an article about how to optimize your XP for audio work. I'm going to try that. I'm a little nervous because I don't know if changing those settings will affect anything else I do on this machine, but I have nothing to lose- I can always put it back as it was.I'm going to play around with it. What puzzles me is how it suddenly started happening when it ran fine for quite a while. I changed soundcards but the soundcard isn't even involved in the mixdown, at least I don't think it should be.Thanks again! I appreciate the suggestions... Casey

[ibanez468]

Hey Casey!Yeah, computers are strange beasts. There's so much goin' on inside there, that after a period of time, stuff is building up to the point where sometimes it ends up takin' a crap. Just the nature of the beast. Defrag'n will probably help a good deal. Can't say whether or not it'll solve your problem, but it might help. These things are like cars. When you ask a mechanic what the trouble might be, he's liable to say, "Well, it could be a number of things. It could be this or it could be that, or it might even be so and so". That's how a computer is when it decides to take a crap. It could be any number of things that caused it to crap out! Then ya' hafta' think about everything you may have done or changed, in a reverse order mind you, in order to pinpont what might've caused the problem in the first place. Sometimes it may not've been anything you did, it was just time. Hope ya' get everything all straightened out. Good luck!I-468PS -- BTW you may want to really consider getting an external hard drive to save your audio files to, that'll probably help lessen the load on your main hard drive, and it would probably free up some much needed disc space, if you transfer audio over to the external drive, and delete all the audio files from your main drive. Every little bit helps to take pressure off of the main drive.

[Mark Kaufman]

Casey, I would highly recommend getting another drive. There are slots for them and they are actually easy to put in, and not expensive. Another option is an external drive...run the program on the C Drive, but direct all the files to the other drive.Something tells me your defrag will help.

[garrettmiller]

Firewire drives work great for audio and are easy to install into any computer setup....Glyph are the best IMO...Garrett

[Casey H]

Thanks Mark and Ibanez...I'm confused about something, as a computer geek of sorts. Why would keeping the audio files on a separate drive matter? I have a lot of free disk space so that's not the issue. If my disk was almost full, I would understand. When you are doing a mixdown, the CPU processing to mixdown to a file is the same regardless of which drive the file is on. I know there are lots of good reasons to use a separate drive for audio files, especially since they are large and the extra storage space is needed.I could see how not defragging could be a problem because large files being fragmented really slows down access to them.Also, my projects are pretty small- many with as few as 5-6 tracks.Just curious... Not saying anyone is wrong, just trying to understand the reasons.Thanks again! Casey

[Mark Kaufman]

This where big word go from Mark into dark cloud...I'll leave that explanation to someone who actually knows the answer.

[devin]

Sometimes an "innocent" update on any software you have installed can cause a hiccup. Maybe something changed when you weren't looking, and now it's too much to handle.I'm not too savvy with computers (sorry Casey!), so I keep the recording machine off the 'net. I only hook up twice a year to check for updates, and something always gets tweaked at thost times.A second drive that gets installed inside your machine is a really cheap upgrade, certainly do that and move your audio to that (original drive for operating system, second drive for audio). This arrangement also gives you the option of "backing up" the music to the main drive once in a while, just in case the music drive gets fried.I put in a second internal drive right away, on advice of good folks here.I also ended up getting two external drives to backup the music and picture/video collection of the kids growing up etc. Someone on the forum lost their family digital memories about 6 months ago...that was a heartbreaking post to say the least...