Maximizing Track Count & Saving CPU in Cubase

[Music] this is in response to the cubase academy facebook page somebody was asking me questions about their machine locking up they sent me a picture of their CPU bar just pegged and well let's do that I have actually emulated that exact scenario where my CPU is pegged no not even playing anything and my average load is very high if I play this track now it's going to sound terrible hopefully I'll turn it down so doesn't blow out your speakers but it's gonna sound bad I'll bet even the metronome can keep up it that's not too bad all right now I'm only playing three MIDI tracks I have two VST instruments loaded I have a Holly on 6 we're just playing a piano a string and a synth ok pet arpeggiator and I have another piano loaded just so I can play it here [Music] for latency purposes like right now when I played gets on cerebral but the response is fantastic feels good so let's take a look at my settings oh and by the way before we start my processor is a Xeon e3 1275 not the latest xeon by any stretch of the imagination running at three-and-a-half keyguard so it's four core eight virtual total so it's a decent processor its liquid-cooled i've got 16 gig of ram and we're running off SSDs right so there's gonna be no drive issues here so why so bad well if i go to my studio studio set up I know Aldi doesn't seem logical but those using Cubase a while you know that used to be devices and alt D made sense it stays it's locked into my muscle memory right LD so here we can see we have our devices screen and at the bottom you'll have your VST audio device and this is where you choose the device you want to use I'm I could use in depth and this applies to all the devices right if I'm using my machine 3 or my focus right input or whatever I'm using right right now I happen to be using a Steinberg USB which is my 8 input device here actually has 24 inputs this light pipe but I'm not using any of that that's just a straight input right now I don't have any Oh guard on I'm gonna leave that off for the moment but if I go into my actual driver here's all my ins and outs and I look at my control panel it's gonna look different depending on the device you choose alright really important I'm down at 64 samples which is the lowest I can choose on this interface which is about five and a half four and a half five and 1/2 milliseconds input four and a half and output 5 and 1/2 milliseconds which is why when I play the piano it feels so good I mean it's real time the human brain there's a hard time sensing anything less than 6 milliseconds right at least my brain is barely so let's see what happens if I double the sample rate to 128 bring up f12 by the way brings up this meter here it's pegging but not quite as hard it's probably still going to sound bad when I play the piano not as bad still feels good still feels sometimes I'll use the pack you can feel the latency better when you're striking a pad but it feels real time to me but if I play these tracks I bet it's horrible [Music] yeah so if I just want to play a track I don't play too many notes I bet I could get this - I can you take it up a little more right so go to the control panel and let's go all the way to 512 okay that's a much better picture right let me see how the piano feels it's just feels a little squishy it's weird because we didn't change anything mechanical but it feels softer doesn't feel as sharp if I play the tracks that's really not bad okay let's look at my meter [Music] already it's taxing again so what can I do what if I want low-latency to play and I but I need is a system not to go crackly like that well there's a couple of things you can do let's say that let's say that I wanted to keep my latency to 256 and that was my acceptable feel for my piano probably okay what I have to do is here I can either say well what's the minimum tracks I need to actually play along with right suppose I didn't need the ARP synth and the strings then I can right-click and I can disable them for now right but it doesn't stop the fact that we're still have this this VST loaded right it's still taking the overhead let's look at our meter okay let's let's play along with just a piano track [Music] so I've had a metronome that might be okay right so I've temporarily disabled those tracks and then when I'm ready to I can just re-enabling that's one way to do it another way to do it is to press f11 which brings up the tracks and racks window write anything above this line is a track anything below is a rack it applies across it applies both ways I'm not gonna get into what the difference is here but look what I can do I can come to the howling on six and I can freeze it now that's gonna freeze all my alley on six tracks that are coming from that instrument okay so some choices here freeze instrument only or I can freeze everything including the channel but if I want to put effects on the channel or change things about the channel I do not want to freeze the channel so let's leave the channel alone and only freeze the instrument the tail size doesn't matter in this case because I'm looping but if you're gonna freeze a whole track and it's got a some some room or some verb or an acoustic tails you need to account for that in the freeze it doesn't matter it's gonna sound weird cuz I'm looping and you'll see what I mean so I'm gonna also unload the instrument when it's frozen because when it's frozen I don't need the instrument right so anyway I'm gonna freeze it it's actually rendering audio tracks right now okay and they're the halle own six is frozen you can't do anything anything with it and the tracks are locked you cannot edit them okay if you're curious know the rendered files are not in the group the pool they're not there but let's see what happens if I play the track now [Music] I still can play my piano because it's it's a number ended right it's still ps2 [Music] and it's not crackling or anything so if I'm able now to record my tracks put my instruments and frozen while I record [Music] that's fantastic so there's one option now if I record that piano let's record a little piano didn't plan on doing this and probably asking for trouble I'm just gonna record a couple of bars of this tea out here [Music] good enough so [Music] another option I have is to take the track that I just recorded and do what's called render in place okay this track I can say I would like to transfer the channel settings the complete signal path or the signal and master paths or any reverb and anything that's in the path will be recorded with this rendered with this I just didn't do the channel settings okay tail size in seconds again doesn't matter we're looping okay but I could add a tail in here and say yeah it needs to be 5 seconds all right mm-hmm and I don't need to give it a name I don't need to do anything else and here I can say do I want to keep the source offense or mute them I want to mute them I don't want them to play after they're rendered so let's go ahead and render this you audiotrack here that represents my piano okay and notice my piano is muted [Music] okay let's look at my meter still the way under things look great crackles dropouts so that's another effective way the render in place you can also do I could have done that another way you can do it with the media export window in fact if we do this media export audio mix down I could pick the piano track and it's here VST piano and I could say export that to whatever my format is here in my project okay or in an audio track not in any folder okay well watch this actually a neat trick I'll show you no post process close the window okay PST piano is the only one I'm interested in all right here we go export this track movie - the project and I must not have had something checked however if I checked on my boxes probably never go off the script ever then this would have rendered the piano track now I'm gonna now I'm annoyed so what happened okay it was muted that was a test did you get it yeah so let's take off the mute sorry I couldn't just edit this out was it worth it alright let's do that again my shortcut is all control X I'm gonna go ahead and make sure the VST piano is selected and I just want to I don't want all the track so I don't want one so we turn off batch okay you could also in the latest version of Cubase I think 9 did this I know 95 does it because I'm in 95 right now you can make a marker track right so this I could select it here it's already selected I can do a ctrl M to bring up my marker window I could add a insert cycle marker call it piano okay there it is and now when I go to my export window I can actually export piano just from a cycle marker they will ignore this up here whatever i have checked so even if i have main out it won't do it it'll export this piano into the pool into an audio track in a folder called rendered piano and i want to do it right now okay there so there it is there's my rendered oh it rendered nice and loud to more than this one so if I meet this one here and play [Music] most tracks of land so there's the one that I rendered as a cycle here's the one I rendered in place and if we look at our meter you know again everything's playing from audio right now even though you have MIDI tracks so when it came time to do some playback and do some editing I may want to bring up my hailey on 6 and unfreeze my tracks which now makes my MIDI editable again oh by the way if you don't do a render in place it doesn't mute the MIDI track so we were actually sitting to a mini version and two audio versions lots of piano we're going on there so now if I play it might get crackles back again [Music] right because I'm done recording there's no harm in me going into my control panel and making my latency ridiculous right I wouldn't want to try to record with this kind of latency it would be awful but so now I've got my tracks unfrozen let's see what happens it's fine I can play it back because I've like made the buffer huge doesn't matter in the playback I mean I've never had any issue it is I just know that I'm going to record and I need low latency and I've got a lot of tracks there are just some things I have to do too you know short of upgrading your system you know putting a 10 core Zeon in here or whatever or or even offloading the VST processors right there's multiple ways to do that with with cards you can insert or external boxes but it's expensive ok anyway and that's the other thing make sure there's no other superfluous processes running things you don't need shut them down if you're running background processes will by Adobe or by Dropbox or Google Drive or all these things that take up processing shut them down don't run them go into your startup configuration and disable them I run them when I need them this is primarily an audio workstation but I do a lot of file transfer and it's a pain to do it you know without a internet connection so anyway thanks for watching I know this was long but I hope it was worth it if you made it this far congratulations and hope it was helpful I really do I know this is a tricky subject and there were multiple ways to fix stuff so thanks for watching and I'll see you I won't see ya you'll see me next time

Channel: Cubase Academy

Views: 105,777

Keywords: Cubase, DAW, pro audio, production, mix, mixing, recording, steinberg, help, expert, sound design, sound, yamaha, audio glitch, cpu max, audio dropout, crackles, distortion

Id: yMOUGa1TY98

Length: 18min 5sec (1085 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 14 2018