Audio Dropouts.... HELP!!!

Everything appears to be normal in regards to other apps running. I don’t see any abnormalities that I can tell. Any other suggestions? I’m at a loss and continue to lose money daily.

Could you try to run Apple Hardware Test?

Ok I will run the hardware test 2 hrs from now when I get home from work. I work from home on Thurs so I hope to be able to work on a solution all day with you as well. Thanks!

The hardware tests (short and long versions) both came back with no issues.

Sorry, I run out of ideas. Apart from the fact I would recommend to increase RAM and exchange HDD to SSD.

This is very disturbing to me that this situation has come to this. To lose money and have no idea why this all of a sudden is happening has me really upset. I may just have to switch up to Pro tools and see if that works. Thanks for your help.

You say you’ve not changed anything on your system but something must have changed for this to have suddenly started happening. If you’ve not installed any new software or hardware then the most likely cause is Martin has suggested a driver. It is sometimes the case that new drivers cause issues where the older ones did not. Remember also that these drivers are often installed automatically.

Aside from audio system drivers (check the dates on them to see if they may have changed recently) the most common culprits for sudden problems are graphics drivers. Try rolling back to an earlier version?

Actually I stand corrected. I did just install software that came with my new Akai MPK Mini MKII about a month ago. Should I uninstall all of that new software?
Also, I really was feeling like it was a graphics drivers issue based on how the screen would freeze and then connect back again. I’m open to any and every suggestion. Thanks in advance.

I would think it’s more likely to be the Video drivers than the Akai software so I’d start there. I’m not a Mac person so can’t go through rolling back or getting new drivers but I assume there’s plenty of info on how to do it in webland.

To read all of this make me so angry and disappointed at Steinberg.

This is clearly an Software issue from like version 8 and up. First of all I will tell you my story in short.

I’ve used cubase for about 10 years. From version 4 and up I’ve used their software without any issues what so ever. But from version 8 that drastically changed and everything became an nightmare. I have experienced everything from enormously crappy setup, to the need of performing windows register hacks to EVEN BE ABLE TO INSTALL the software in the first place because of the totally worthless GUI that seems to be developed in Cubase 8. The developers and the company should be ashamed for this GUI.

Now with my “sound dropout” issues. I have an powerful PC, i7 3.8ghz, 16gb RAM, Geforce GTX 750ti and a presonus firestudio project sound card. I’ve been able to run Cubase 5, 5.5 and 7.5 on this setup without ANY dropouts EVER. I’m using Propellerheads Reason for other music making and loading it with about 32-48 tracks without ANY issues what so ever. But from the Cubase version 8 I experience audio drop outs ALL THE TIME. This is totally worthless and if not a company as steinberg can take their customers and users seriously and FIX THIS ISSUE without complaining on all other reasons (windows versions, audio drivers, graphic drivers, storage drivers), I’ve heard it all. Then it’s time to LEAVE STEINBERG CUBASE and go for something that works. Cubase 8 is honestly a real crap product and I cant wait to go back go cubase 6 or just skip this totally and leave for Logic or likewise.

Im so so so angry after paid an expensive bill for a “state of the art” music software and cant even record 2 simple lines of guitar before it brake down all the time and I get audio drop outs. Don’t tell me that Im configuring the sound wrong, as stated above I’ve used their products for years without any issues and recorded 32 tracks with VST effects and recorded guitars, drums, bass and such without any issue.

I’m so done with this crap, it kills all motivation and inspiration!

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I feel my issue is still around DWM the Destop Window Manager. I have the Task Manager open so I can see what’s going on in the processes
and noticed that every time a get a small audio drop this service seems to be peaking.
I had this issue in the past with Windows 7 and was able to disable the service but Cubase 8+ requires it all the time now.

I’ve suffered from this - it was overloading my ASIO in XP / cubase 5, so I upgraded to Win10 & Cubase 10, and the same projects gave the same problems. In the end it was down to a single plugin - Izotope Ozone 5. I turned it off and all the dropouts ceased completely :raised_hands:t6:

I just had a similar problem and Ozone was the culprit as well. For some reason it wasn’t showing as being authorized on iLok after installing Windows 10 Pro and a new hard drive. However, after re-authorizing Ozone, everything appears to be working fine. I wish I found this thread about 4 hours ago… would have saved me some frustration!

Been a while since I posted here but just to say a resolved the issue. It was something to do with the legacy card setting on the Firewire not being turned on in the device manager.
Microsoft Firewire 1394 Legacy Driver Installer will be needed.

Hi,

I have the same problem. New SSD disk, new win 10 last update. And starts dropouts. In previos instalation on normal HDD and win 10 1607 works everithing perfect.

Description:

I had an installation of Cubase 7.5 on HDD with win 1 1607 distribution. Everything works fine. Cubase work without dropouts, everythnig was working perfekct with settings 128 sample rate (in tascam audio preferencies).

Now i bought a new SSDisk ADATA Ultimate SU800 SSD 256GB. Win 10 made update by yourserf on version 20H2 built 19042.804. And sound is dropping out. When you change a sample rate on audio interface on 2048, is still dropping. Thats very bad, and cubase its no ready to use.

I’m also having audio dropouts… I recently upgraded to a new PC, which came with windows 11, and I re-installed Cubase and everything on it. No big problems, at least no regular audio hiccups… Then I encountered this really annoying bug with Groove Agent where it takes a while, but it will notify you that an audio file is missing (btw it’s also very annoying to not have an option to store audio files used by Groove Agent in the project folder), and since it takes a while for this window to pop up sometimes, you might start clicking somewhere else, but if you click somewhere else, the whole GUI freezes up and won’t let you click on anything, including the Groove Agent alert window… After this bug, I forced Cubase to close and restarted, and I noticed it was laggy after that, even after restarting… I ended up wiping my entire system and reinstalling windows (this time I chose to install windows 10 because windows 11 is awkward, slow and buggy as hell). Well, I’ve re-installed Cubase and everything again, and it seems to be faster now, but now I’m getting regular audio dropouts about every 12 seconds. I’ve installed all the motherboard drivers, and all the drivers for my audio interface. It seems the problem is with Cubase. I tried running the Generic Audio Drivers with direct outputs from my computer and it still drops out. I also tried running the ASIO audio in Izotope RX and no issues at all there. And there are no issues at all with windows audio.

Obviously, I’ve already wiped my systems, so I don’t think wiping it again would help at all at this point. I’ve also tried switching from AHCI to RAID, and I’ve tried changing literally every setting there is in Studio->Studio Set Up->Audio System settings. I’ve restarted my computer over and over. I’m only testing this with 1 stereo track. I have an AMD Ryzen 7 5800X with 32gb ram, NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB Graphics Card, 2 2tb SSD Drives with about 1.3 TB of free space on each…

I’m running out of ideas… I hope the main reason Steinberg is taking so long on Cubase 12 is that they’re finally going to tackle all these bugs that have been building up year after year. I’m sure with a yearly schedule, they’ve rushed through so many Quality Assurance checks and the bugs have gotten worse…

Let me know if anyone else is still experiencing this and/or if anyone has any ideas.

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Also, I have Cubase installed on 2 other computers at home and 1 more computer at my studio, all of them running windows 10 and no dropouts with Cubase… so this does not seems to be a windows 10 issue.

Here’s a video of the audio drop out bug:

I’ve pulled up the resource monitor and task manager. You can see big spikes, mostly in the ethernet graph, but I’ve uninstalled and re-installed the network drivers from the motherboard website, so I think this is more of a symptom than a cause…

Cubase doesn’t register any extra CPU loads or anything… but this seems to only be a problem in Cubase. Also, in the recorded audio, it sounds like the audio is cutting out a LOT very rapidly, but at the time of recording, there were no little dropouts, only the longer dropouts you hear in the video… not sure how those short dropouts got there in the recorded video…

Solution maybe.
I had the same problem.
Then I Tried to record on another hardisk, NO Drop Outs!
Tried my normal Again- Drop Outs, another Harddisk no drop out.
So I chkdsk error checked my hardisk and did a Defragmentation.
For now it seems to be solved.
I Had 2 audio tracks that were looping the same parts and two Vst plugs.