Proper audio engine: Gapless Audio!

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This is not a “feature request” this is a bug report for the existing version.

Hi Stephen,

Your specific case may have gotten worse over the last several versions, but, to the best of my knowledge, Cubase has never had a gap-less playback engine. So, in that respect it is a feature request.

I can’t say that I have seen this issue get noticeably worse since v.8, but I can definitely say that I notice the issue a lot more now. Especially after using other DAWs that don’t struggle with this issue. It is something that makes Cubase seem extremely dated when comparing to the competition.

Maybe I need to think about a full re-installation. Re-setting Preferences didn’t do anything to correct this. I get drop-outs and glitches with nearly every move – see my bug report in “issues” on this. None of my previous versions were this bad. Something has gone horridly wrong with the audio engine or in some other part of the code. Cubase was never perfect, but it wasn’t unusable. It is now.

I agree.

I think this was suggested a few years ago. Not sure if it was on this forum or another one. I remember someone speculating that the reason this happens is due to how Cubase does it’s plugin delay compensation thing automatically when you insert a plugin. I think the other DAWs like Ableton might do it after you hit the stop button and in Pro Tools it never had automatic plugin delay compensation but it might have it now. This made sense when I read it at the time but I have no idea whether it is true or not.

If this is the reason, a simple menu option to allow the user whether or not this should occur instantly or after the stop button is engaged would be a good option.

If you’re doing mastering and using high latency linear phase EQs, you’d want it to enable plugin delay compensation instantly. Probably as well if you’re mixing live drums and stereo paired mics if you’re not soloing them. If you’re doing EDM, hip-hop and modern genres, it might not matter so much and you might be happier with the plugin delay compensation kicking in once you hit the stop button. This is of course assuming this is the reason.

I would suggest to the OP to rename the topic to ‘continuous playing audio engine’ so that it’s more likely to get noticed.

Huge +1

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Using Studio One 4.5 and loving the ‘no audio cuts’

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I think it’s neither too easy nor too complicated. I think the audio engine needs to wait for the next buffer cycle to apply the changes, not force the change in the middle of a cycle. Since we currently work with very small buffer sizes, the wait time to apply the modifications would be milliseconds.

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It’s the main thing making me think about going back to Pro Tools.

I would imagine some of the dropouts is to do with plugin latency and getting that plugin into the signal path. It may not be possible

Hi all,

To those that think that this is not possible, it is definitely possible because most other modern DAWs do not have this issue. Yes, in some cases, depending on the VST/VSTi that is being loaded there may be a slight delay/mute in playback, but not anything close to the glitchy playback that most users experience in Cubase.

If you compare Cubase and Studio One on the exact same machine, Studio One’s playback is by far much more stable. Many long time Cubase users (myself included) have just become so accustomed to this behavior that we think that this is normal, but when using another DAW it becomes glaringly obvious that it is not.

steinberg/yamaha are late on this…
i remember all other major keyboard makers(roland,korg etc) had for years changing sounds in their workstation keyboards with no cutting the previous sound abruptly.
finally yamaha had came with this with the new montage series.(better late than never ! )
hopefully steinberg are working on it also for next cubase update.
maybe it’s a lot of work to implement,but its a must to progress forward and to be up with the other DAWs in this regard

How long is the dropout? I’m seriously not hearing anything objectionable on my system with rme hdspe aes cards. A slight gap to allow the delay compensation to realign when inserting plugins, that’s all. Nothing that kills the mojo!

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Yes!

I just timed how long the audio dropout is by dragging an ozone maximizer plugin up/down a slot on an audio channel (project running at 96khz). Times are approximate. (I used a stopwatch while listening, did multiple tests to get a ballpark figure, would have been more accurate if I could be bothered recording the stream and measuring the gap.)

The dropout gets shorter as the soundcard buffer size is decreased.

At 4096 - dropout ≈ 1.3 seconds.

At 2048 - dropout ≈ 0.85 seconds.

At 1024 - dropout ≈ 0.6 seconds.

At 512 - droupout ≈ 0.45 seconds.

At 256 - dropout ≈ 0.3 seconds.

Playback seems to continue in the background (it resumes at the correct position as if the song hadn’t stopped).

I guess I’ve never found it annoying as I usually stop playback when I move or add plugins (got burned by a few crashes on old versions of cubase when trying to do this).

I was with you, until I tried Studio One…

It’s one of those things that you don’t even notice until you use another DAW and notice how smooth it is to add/copy/paste plug-ins/vsti’s, or add/remove tracks, or route them, and then you come back to Cubase and it feels so clumsy and stuttering.

Take this (fairly typical scenario), one producer in a room with a couple of topliners working on a song idea, producer is working on the track while the writers are doing their thing, every time the producer wants to do anything on Cubase it glitches the audio…

need to load up a new synth sound as you have inspiration for a new lead line? - glitch
need to load up a rough vocal channel cos someone has a killer melody? - glitch
need a cool creative reverb/delay effect on a vocal part? - glitch

It’s an absolute creativity killer and the writers don’t understand, as they probably use logic or ableton at home which both play smoothly, so it reflects badly on us for using Cubase.

Even if you don’t collaborate, once you get used to the workflow of looping a short section to work on it and experimenting with fx/extra vsti layers it’s really distracting when the audio cuts out every time you do one of these things, it really kills the flow of what you are working on.

Someone else also mentioned ear/brain fatigue from mentally compensating from all those tiny stops and starts whilst you are trying to concentrate on the audio. I hadn’t considered this previously. but I believe this is also a great point.

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I can totally appreciate that it would be annoying. I just hadn’t realised the gap was that long as I’ve adapted my workflow to the fact that cubase isn’t capable of adding or moving plugins on the fly :slight_smile: If it’s possible to make the audio engine gapless, stable, and with rock-solid phase-accurate delay compensation then I’m all for it :slight_smile:

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