Things I hate about... - Cubase 7

[SODDI]

I think the most comments boil down to:

- the ASIO engine in general (being heavy on load, load improvements over various CPU generations are 3-5% at max, huge spikes especially within 32bit and below 1024samples - x64 actually performs more stable, but still high on load)
- the Insert Handling (the infamous "button overlay")
- feature cuts (like grouping, channel handling in general)
- core affinity bug (still present to some people)
- "always on top" bug (especially on dual screens, but since 7.06 also with overlaying windows on one screen - existing since 7.0)
- I encountered a random "delete project folder" behavior as well (could not be confirmed so far), especially if you have several project in one global folder, but start a new one and forget to save (and then close the host)

Yes, I have a couple more.
- The ASIO load and the ASIO engine (revisited). Cubase 7.05 requires me to use buffer settings 5 times higher than are required to run Cubase 5.5 on the same machine. And at higher settings suggested by Steinberg techs (8 X to 10 X), the audio and MIDI timing go completely to hell and recording is impossible. At reasonable settings there are constant ASIO spikes - transient and of short duration, but they trip the CPU overage alarm constantly.
- The "lazy initialization" bug - where on first play the first note from a sample-based instrument just drops out. It's been documented by many others than myself and seems to have some correlation to CPU spikes.
- The .pdf manual is EXTREMELY incomplete. Many of the essential settings in the "Device Setup" menu like the Steinberg Audio Power Scheme and Multiprocessing are not even included in the manual and while something like ASIO Guard is briefly discussed in the 900+ page manual, it is not in the index so that it can be searched for.

[Compyfox]

If you have some time for tests, please get in touch with me, SODDI.

[CableChannel]

Just want to point something out. Look at this thread:

http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=397770

u-he sees a problem with their software that only very few people are affected by, but instead of telling customers "we cannot reproduce it i.e. the problem is non-existent" / "its your fault" / "your machines is bugged" / "you use crappy 3rd party software", they try to track the problem asking the crowd for help. Now that is superior programming ethics!!

Big respect to u-he for transparency, communication, pragmatism, commitment, professionality!!

Shame on Steinberg for the lack of all of the above, shame on them for their way of "discussing away" problems and especially rare and hard-to-track bugs!

[GeorgK]

Great example...
I would guess that debugging an fx plugin for a handful of hosts is about 1% as complex as debugging a host for all possible (and sometimes f'ed up) hardware and OS configurations.
Plus, making 125 bucks from a hyped, quite simple plugin (just compare Satin to the sknote prices!) leaves a lot more resources for "user communication" than asking 600 bucks for a complete host.
Could you imagine what would happen if steinberg released a synth with stuck notes during preset changes? Some guys would go berserk. But nobody cared for this annoying behaviour in Zebra for years. Because this is what the nice guy gave to us, so we are happy with it...

In my experience there are no "good" and "bad" companies. Some are just more talented in making stupid customers happy.

G.

[fandango]

EVERYONE STOP DOWNLOADING!!!!11
Once I'm done, I shall give you all permission to resume...

(whilst Steinberg is doing it's usual Piracy survey, I hope someone points out to them the usefulness - and irony - of maybe hosting these files via torrent instead)

[ObsoleteAcc99]

[DELETED]

[Matsun]

Hey,
Has anyone tested the new 7.5 Cubase?

Did they fix at least some of problems written before?
Especially THE ONE with Asio overload? (Seriously, if not then I only wasted my money and will no longer wait and move to another DAW never coming back to Cubase).

[SODDI]

Hey,
Has anyone tested the new 7.5 Cubase?

Did they fix at least some of problems written before?
Especially THE ONE with Asio overload? (Seriously, if not then I only wasted my money and will no longer wait and move to another DAW never coming back to Cubase).

There is no indication that they have done that.

[SODDI]

Just want to point something out. Look at this thread:

http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=397770

u-he sees a problem with their software that only very few people are affected by, but instead of telling customers "we cannot reproduce it i.e. the problem is non-existent" / "its your fault" / "your machines is bugged" / "you use crappy 3rd party software", they try to track the problem asking the crowd for help. Now that is superior programming ethics!!

(snip)

Shame on Steinberg for the lack of all of the above, shame on them for their way of "discussing away" problems and especially rare and hard-to-track bugs!

If you take a look at the Steinberg Cubase forums you will see that many users are plagued the ASIO bug in all it's mutifarious glory and the lazy intialization problem. But you got to look deep - early (late 2012) reports of ASIO problems have been put in a locked thread marked "Not Reproducable" and "Issue Solved" by Helge Vogt - who is allegedly the Cubase Team Leader AND the Moderator of the Cubase Issues forum (no conflict of interest there.) No telling how many actual, substantive complaints have survived the various "reorganizations" of Steinberg forums.

I know that subsequent to the big outage in September (?) myself and many other forum subscribers were suddenly and without reason de-subscribed from the forum without a word of explanation. Mr. Vogt obviously does not want to see or resolve complaints.

[Katzy]

Hi,
I just joined this forum after recently upgrading my PC to new Ivy Bridge-E. Wanted to see if anybody else is having the same problem with the same sort of system, because I seem to be suffering the same issues in Cubase 7 as some of you.
In short, I was running Cubase 7.0.2 on my old X58 system on an i7 970. As an experiment earlier in the year I tested the old system to see how far I could push it, it was managing to load 56 pretty intensive VST's playing back realtime, with a buffer size of 64. Which I was over the moon with.
But fast forward to now, new PC, I updated to Cubase 7.0.6, totally useless, unstable and INCREDIBLY intensive on poor ASIO. I rolled back to 7.0.2, now totally stable, but I have still noticed since moving to X79 & Ivy Bridge E that every plugin I load takes a huge amount of ASIO time/power, I can now load 15 (not even very intensive) VST's and it's pushing it with buffer size of 128. This is worse than the performance I was getting back in 2008 on my old OLD system.

Something is seriously wrong, I don't know whether it is driver related or Cubase with Ivy Bridge. I have spent the past couple of weeks trying to resolve the problem, tried an enormous amount of changes/fix, nothing makes any difference.

My gut feeling is that Cubase 7 can run well if it's on the right chipset, but on this particular combination set up, although very stable, performance wise it's awful. It would be a major PITA to try build large templates with this. So right now I'm with a very powerful set up and able to do jack with it :/

With the poor/slow support from Steinberg so far, I certainly won't be purchasing 7.5.

I think the most comments boil down to:

- the ASIO engine in general (being heavy on load, load improvements over various CPU generations are 3-5% at max, huge spikes especially within 32bit and below 1024samples - x64 actually performs more stable, but still high on load)
- the Insert Handling (the infamous "button overlay")
- feature cuts (like grouping, channel handling in general)
- core affinity bug (still present to some people)
- "always on top" bug (especially on dual screens, but since 7.06 also with overlaying windows on one screen - existing since 7.0)
- I encountered a random "delete project folder" behavior as well (could not be confirmed so far), especially if you have several project in one global folder, but start a new one and forget to save (and then close the host)


Thankfully enough - no crashes for me.

Just massive slowdowns and unintuitive GUI design (like, not vertically locked faders, meter offset can't be set for R-128, can't setup color codes as needed, host customisation was cut away).

SJ and SODDI might have way more. Then there was also the CoreAudio2ASIO "noise burst" bug for OSX Mavericks. And I tend to write "VST3 issues", but these boil down to the SDK and Wavelab.


RME drivers have actually no effect on the performance - this was the first that Steinberg told me (driver issues). And this is the main thing I checked several times (with wiping my rig a couple of times as well). From v3.085 to the most current HDSPe is a different of 1% max!

I tried tons of OS tweaks, OCing, RAM checks, different rigs alltogether with different ADCs, ASIO4all (just for the hell of it). The main issue on my end is the ASIO engine, which performs about 20% worse than prior Cubase versions. Even worse with the Guard being turned off.

And I could reproduce it every time, with a test project I got by Steinberg themselves.


Steinberg is aware of all this - but I was put on "hold" ("please be patient, we try to find the issue". Literally. So were the rest of us having issues or being dissatisfied with cut once-essential features.


The new price politics only adds to the debate.

[Compyfox]

Something is seriously wrong, I don't know whether it is driver related or Cubase with Ivy Bridge. I have spent the past couple of weeks trying to resolve the problem, tried an enormous amount of changes/fix, nothing makes any difference.

I can confirm all this, and as soon as I get more results from friends and fellows, I'm sure we can even set that in stone "officially" now.


There is no difference in terms of used CPU or ADC, neither does it matter if you optimize your (Windows) rig. The perfomance for C7 is poor in general, and most scary of all - pretty much consistent no matter which CPU generation you're on, which drivers or even OS (Windows at least - I finally have a Mac tester). From i7 920 to i5 Haswell 4440 barely 3-4% improvement. From i7 Bloomfield to Sandy Bridge alone, 2-3% max. Still awaiting i7 Haswell reports though.


So no, you're not crazy.
If you run C6.5 and C7.0x side by side, you will recognize the following:

a) Low Latency performs way better on C6.5, C7 is unusable in low latency
b) Medium Latency performs better for C7 (around 1024 samples)
c) x64 compared to x86 version has up to about 10% more boost as well (see here for example)


This is all adressed to Steinberg already. They are aware of this, but didn't comment on it in public so far (other than me doing so), neither did they give any ETA for a fix. Though I was hinted at, that the C7.x cycle won't cover that unfortunately.


Unless....

Wait a sec - what Mainboard are you using? Just out of pure interest?

[egbert]

I would try to do some research and find out if your particular motherboard/cpu/OS combo is known to be a successful configuration for low latency audio. The Gigabyte X58 UD3/UD5 boards with i9X0 CPUs were good Win 7 systems but not all mobos were working well with setup.

I don't know how how experienced at configuring systems you are. Sometimes tweaks like turning off unneeded mobo features or updating a BIOS can make the difference. Eg it is not advisable to install all the utilities that come with your mobo on disk - for example some system monitor or EZY-overclock configuration tools are resource hogs. If your CPU is under-cooled or is running a Power setting that is racheting down power to some of your cores during heavy work you aren't going to get all the benefits of a fast CPU.

You don't mention your mobo or your audio hardware.

Run DPC Latency Checker if you are on Win 7 and see if anything is causing problems there. Any big peaks there will definitely mess with low buffer settings.

I'm sure plenty of others would like to know how you go and perhaps some others with similar systems can chime in. You might want to move this to its own thread in the hardware setup section. Before blaming Cubase I would see how performance is in other hosts. You could work in Studio One or Reaper (demos if necessary) to see how well they work on the same system.

[ObsoleteAcc99]

[DELETED]

[Compyfox]

I agree with most of the stuff that egbert and TheoM are mentioning.

Also keep in mind that the "E" series Ivy Bridge are "mobile" chipsets? So the performance does differ. Hence my question which Mainboard Brand and Type you're using.


Though such a drastic behavior should still not happen regardless. The first thing I'd check as well, is the mainboard setting. Then go from there.

If the performance form C7.02 to C7.06 or C6.x to C7.0x worsens, and you optimized your rig, you found a suitable latency for you and all that jazz - then we're talking about ASIO issues.

[ObsoleteAcc99]

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