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

[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.

[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.

[Casey H]

Thanks all for the info. I'm doing some testing with tweaks to XP performance and I will look into the drive thing.However, the problem may be way more basic. For some reason, I thought I had 2 GB of RAM but I have 1 GB. That used to be a lot but nowadays for audio work it could be pretty light. Maybe I can up that to 4 GB... Casey

[Casey H]

Hey... Regarding the excellent advice to make sure my audio files were not on the same drive as my OS... I was having trouble understanding the "why" even though it's obviously correct. So I did some geek-research to, at least, get it in terms that I understood. This may have been obvious to many of you-- I may have been a bit thick-headed here.When you are running your OS, your hard drive head is moving around that drive all the time accessing needed OS files. So if you are writing large data files (such as audio) at the same time, the hard drive is bouncing around, switching between accessing OS files and data files. Since hard drives involve mechanical movement, even though the heads move pretty fast, it's not anywhere near "fast" compared to pure electronics. So a lot of time is lost moving the hard drive's head around. If you have a separate drive, the same hard drive head isn't trying to do both.So, thank you all. I'm going to put in another drive and upgrade my RAM to at least 3 GB. Apparently, even though you can put in 4 GB on many machines, Windows XP (32 bit) really can only give you use of around 3 GB. Casey

[eightyeightkeys]

Oct 17, 2008, 7:04am, hurowitz wrote:...When you are running your OS, your hard drive head is moving around that drive all the time accessing needed OS files. So if you are writing large data files (such as audio) at the same time, the hard drive is bouncing around, switching between accessing OS files and data files. Since hard drives involve mechanical movement, even though the heads move pretty fast, it's not anywhere near "fast" compared to pure electronics. So a lot of time is lost moving the hard drive's head around. If you have a separate drive, the same hard drive head isn't trying to do both.... CaseySometimes it's better when you discover these things for yourself...even though I told you why this is better in #2 above.Here is a link to the most straight forward XP Optimization tweaks :www.musicxp.netDon't worry about what it will do to your other applications. The tweaks have not affected my machine or any other machine that I've set-up.

[hummingbird]

Oct 17, 2008, 7:04am, hurowitz wrote:Hey... Regarding the excellent advice to make sure my audio files were not on the same drive as my OS... I was having trouble understanding the "why" even though it's obviously correct. So I did some geek-research to, at least, get it in terms that I understood. This may have been obvious to many of you-- I may have been a bit thick-headed here.When you are running your OS, your hard drive head is moving around that drive all the time accessing needed OS files. So if you are writing large data files (such as audio) at the same time, the hard drive is bouncing around, switching between accessing OS files and data files. Since hard drives involve mechanical movement, even though the heads move pretty fast, it's not anywhere near "fast" compared to pure electronics. So a lot of time is lost moving the hard drive's head around. If you have a separate drive, the same hard drive head isn't trying to do both.So, thank you all. I'm going to put in another drive and upgrade my RAM to at least 3 GB. Apparently, even though you can put in 4 GB on many machines, Windows XP (32 bit) really can only give you use of around 3 GB. Caseysounds like a plan, Casey! Good advice from everyone

[Casey H]

Oct 17, 2008, 8:16am, eightyeightkeys wrote:Oct 17, 2008, 7:04am, hurowitz wrote:...When you are running your OS, your hard drive head is moving around that drive all the time accessing needed OS files. So if you are writing large data files (such as audio) at the same time, the hard drive is bouncing around, switching between accessing OS files and data files. Since hard drives involve mechanical movement, even though the heads move pretty fast, it's not anywhere near "fast" compared to pure electronics. So a lot of time is lost moving the hard drive's head around. If you have a separate drive, the same hard drive head isn't trying to do both.... CaseySometimes it's better when you discover these things for yourself...even though I told you why this is better in #2 above.Here is a link to the most straight forward XP Optimization tweaks :www.musicxp.netDon't worry about what it will do to your other applications. The tweaks have not affected my machine or any other machine that I've set-up.Hey 88You did tell me... I was being thick headed... Thanks!! Casey