Optimizing Audio Performance in Cubase

today we talk about

Optimizing Audio Performance in Cubase

hello everybody Andrew Blake from thedigital audiom manual.com today let'stalk about optimizing our audioperformance in qbase but before we startI want to remind you that there's a linkbelow to the content navigation guidewhich is an easy to navigate web pagewith links to all the content on thischannel and besides that in the nearfuture I'm going to begin adding tipsand other bits of information that willonly be available there if you'reworking with programs like wave laab orqbase plugins or the cable guide shaperbox and many many other projects thatare in the works then I know you'regoing to find just like I have that thisis an invaluable study Aid and the otherthing I want to make sure you understandis that this is not a simple PDF this isa constantly updated page that has anyinformation that is new or anytimevideos are changed really anythingupdated and once you have it you willalways have the latest informationconstantly updated so if you haven'tgotten it already go to the link belowclick on it and save it to yourfavorites it's my gift to you okay solet's get started so you definitely wantyour computer to run at its peak whenyou're dealing with processing audio butwhat does that mean and what are thoserequirements one place to start is tolook what Steinberg's actualrequirements are if you go to Steinbergdomnet system- requirements you'll getthis page and as you go down this pageyou'll see all kinds of differentSteinberg products but of course you'regoing to land on Q bases you come downthe list and if we hit the plus sign toopen up the details we can see that thesystem has to be a 64-bit windows orwhatever you're Mac system is it tellsyou here tells you what your minimum CPUshould be for both the windows and theMac shows you what the cores are the ramwhat the minimum amount of hard diskspace you should have what kind ofdisplay and resolution you should beusing one thing you want to do is take aminute and check some of thisinformation and make sure your system isup to the task and of course if it's notbe aware you may have some system issueskinds of things that are affected by theway your computer is is the amount oftracks that you can use the amount ofeffects and eqs whether you can use thatthat stuff live or whether you're goingto have to render stuff down more thingslike this if you hit a fader and I pulla fader down or up if things respondimmediately that's much better than ifit lags behind and it's going to lagbehind if your system isn't up to thetask you always want to check your soundcard settings you go up to studio andcome down to Studio setup the topselection says audio system below thatyou usually can see your sound card whenyou click on that you'll typically seean option here that says control paneland when you click on that you'll get alist that says various things but onething says buffer size and in that listyou'll have the option to choosedifferent buffer sizes the lower downthe list you go the faster your computeris going to work but it's going to putmore of a drain on the system and youcan get things like clicks and pops andall kinds of other things that you don'texpect and the higher that you go up thelonger that it takes for things tohappen for example you may hit a note onan instrument or sing something in amicrophone and there could be likeseconds of lag behind it depending onhow high you set this sample rate so youalways want to find the best combinationbetween the fastest and the slowest ithas your system working at its best mostof the time for me 52 samples is what Itypically leave it on but I will changeit depending on if I'm mixing or doingother things if you go back up to theaudio system First Option you have hereis is the AO driver typically if you hitthis drop- down list you'll see variousoptions for drivers on your system youwant to make sure you're using the bestone which typically if one comes withyour sound card you're going to want touse that one the one you're not going towant to use if at all possible thegeneric low latency AO driver somethingthat may come with most computers if westay on this audio system option we movedown the list one of the things you'llsee is processing Precision you'll havean option that says activatemultiprocessing typically by defaultthat's checked and you should leave itchecked if you can that's just makinguse of all the different cores on yourCPU so one of the tools you have to lookat your audio performance if you go upto your studio menu come down to theoption that says audio performance thisopens up this audio audio performancewindow this kind of gives you anoverview of your processing load whatthe transfer is on your hard disk youcan just see these meters here the firstdisplay says real time this just givesyou the overall picture of the load onyour processing next option says AOguard this is kind of telling you whatkind of pre-processing is going on ifyou have AO guard enacted to see thatyou want to go back up to Studio down toyour studio setup and Midway down youhave the option that says activate theAAL guard the first thing you have hereis three different choices between lownormal and high if you kind of hoveryour mouse over it you get a littledescription of what these do the lowsetting tells you it's better forautomation but it gives you a little bitless audio performance the normalsetting is kind of like the balance themost efficient and the high setting isfor lots of tracks again the best way touse these is just experiment in yourproject select each one see how itbehaves if you get a better result andthe next option here says the peak ifthis starts to increase too much you'llactually experience a drop out of somekind and ultimately you'll see somethinggo red over here if something overloadsat that point you would either have tocut down some of your processing rendersome tracks turn off some effects thenyou have this bottom option that showsthe disc cache basically this is showingyou how efficiently information is goingthrough your hard disk again if thisstarts to overload and you actually geta red light over here you would have toreduce something in your project andthis is also a clue as to whether yourhard disk needs to be updated tosomething faster if you set it up downin your transport bar you can get like amini view of this window again the topone gives you kind of an overallperformance which could Peak if it goesto an overload and the bottom one showsyou the disc cache again so we pointedout on the audio meter here you havethis reading for the AO guard whatreally is the AO guard what it reallydoes is kind of a look ahead terms ofwhat's going on in your project whateverit can kind of predo maybe it'll analyzeyour VST Instruments or your effects oranything else that can kind of get readyas the track progresses and have thosealready processed so it doesn't happenright at the moment when things areplaying in many ways it takes the loadoff what's happening in your project letyou have more things happening because alot of the processing is being done kindof in the background or definitely justahead of where it's supposed to happenWhat you're going to find especially inheavy projects that have a lot of stuffgoing on is that if you turn up thesettings for the AOG guard in otherwords make that more the priority you'regoing to have the ability to play moretracks and have more effects but whenyou go to move the faders or maybe someautomation you may start to feel alittle bit of a lag in terms of it beingable to process what you do right at themoment and then just the opposite if youturn the AAL guard down potentially yourproject will then have to use lesstracks or less effects all of this beingdependent on how powerful your system isin the first place but with the AALguard turned down things like faders andautomation are going to move veryquickly because they're not beinganalyzed anymore and the a guard is notgrabbing it let me show you what I meanif I go up to the studio option down tothe studio setup and I come down to theAOG guard level which gives me theoption for low normal or high if I putit on the high high setting and I sayapply and okay now this project only hasa few tracks but if it had 30 tracksyou'd really see the difference as Iplay this now when I grab thisfader I can feel a little bit of a lagvery slightly because there's not muchin this project in the first place butit does respond a little bit slower inthis case it's not really a big deal andI wouldn't even give it a thought as Iwas working on this project as theproject got heavier that may make moreof a big deal I may grab this and I maybe doing some automation that may bevery important and wouldn't want that onthe other hand if I go back to my studiostudio setup and instead I go fromnormal all the way down to low hit applyokay again there's only a few tracks youcan see how much the AO guard is doing abuffer here when I grab a fader now italmost jumps out of my hand because itmoves so much quicker things like thatin automation are going to move veryquickly with a low AO guard setting butthen I have to be careful how big myproject is so it's always striking afine balance there's nothing saying youcan't change these settings in yourproject depending on what you're doingif you're working heavy on automation atany given time or you're in the mixingphase you may want to bring your AO DownYou're Building your project and you'rejust adding tracks feeling issues doingthat may want to turn the AO guard up oryou can just leave it on normal likethis is here that tries to strike abalance between it all right it's goingto wrap it up for today as always if youhaven't already be sure to grab yourcopy of the digital audio manual contentnavigation guide from the link belowthis video it's a faster better way tolearn and review pick it up look it overall the different topics that aregathered and then you two can getstarted on your path to a better way tolearn all this stuff so today we had alittle discussion on some ways tooptimize our audio performance in qbasewe saw how we can go to the Steinbergsite to see our Hardware specificationswe talked about setting the samplebuffer size choosing the right AOdrivers we took a little time to examinethe audio performance window and then weended up discussing what AO guardactually does and we will continue tolook through all these differentfeatures and functions in qbase asalways it's great to have you guys hereand I'll see you on the next video