Got new pc but music production is slow

So finally got a new PC this weekend for my birthday ... yeh!! Its 3.0ghz Celeron D, 1gb DDR2 ram with 160 GB hd etc. It comes with a very bog standard sound card with a line in/mic which seems to have a lot of hiss. Okay so I'm using Cubase VST 2.5 and its slow. I mean its not slow its just that I'm expected no buffering with playing VSTinstruments. I don't know whether I need to configure my ASIO settings or what. I think I'm gonna look to make the transition to some other progs now such as Live or Reactor.

Anyways the score is my midi keyboard is hooked in via the midi in on my usb knob controller. Now I was wondering is that why I'm getting so much lag when playing notes or what? I dunno I had about 4 VST channels running and I honestly felt it should have been fastest and it did seem to be lagging. Any views guys or is VST too old XP SP2?? I dunno 'cause I've used Cubase VST 2.5 on XP SP2 or SP1 and it seemed pretty fast to me. Any suggestions how to get shit running fast ... just seems very slow.

  Promo said:

So finally got a new PC this weekend for my birthday ... yeh!! Its 3.0ghz Celeron D, 1gb DDR2 ram with 160 GB hd etc. It comes with a very bog standard sound card with a line in/mic which seems to have a lot of hiss. Okay so I'm using Cubase VST 2.5 and its slow. I mean its not slow its just that I'm expected no buffering with playing VSTinstruments. I don't know whether I need to configure my ASIO settings or what. I think I'm gonna look to make the transition to some other progs now such as Live or Reactor.

 

Anyways the score is my midi keyboard is hooked in via the midi in on my usb knob controller. Now I was wondering is that why I'm getting so much lag when playing notes or what? I dunno I had about 4 VST channels running and I honestly felt it should have been fastest and it did seem to be lagging. Any views guys or is VST too old XP SP2?? I dunno 'cause I've used Cubase VST 2.5 on XP SP2 or SP1 and it seemed pretty fast to me. Any suggestions how to get shit running fast ... just seems very slow.

did you try gettin asio4all for your soundcard?

also, all the normal xp tweaks...no graphics...no screensavers....no powersaving...virtual memory...disable error reporting... disable services you don't need...hmmm....

maybe try energyxt? I mean... I know that's not the solution you're looking for...but it's soooooooooo light on your computer vs cubase.

Cubase is a bloat monster.

I dunno I just expected Cubase to run like a rocket! It is a very old version I am using though but I'm still a little surprised.

Cubase is always slow. It's rubbish. Fuck running your VST's in that...use something else - Renoise, FLoops, ACID Pro, Ableton.....anything but that if you want speed....

You've got a Celeron processor, which although 3.0GHz, will not cope well with processor-intensive stuff as it's a Celeron which are, sorry to say it, er, a bit crap. You ideally want a Pentium 4, DuoCore or Turion or something for Cubase.

But I'd say you should be able to run the programs I listed OK. You will need to sort out all your ASIO settings and shit though....

Lag is rely's solely on your soundcard buffer asio settings. are you using asio4all? A new cpu is a bad idea.

Yah, the Celeron is fine for this.. what latency is your sound card reporting via its ASIO drivers? You should be able to manually change the buffer settings for it to bump down the latency on the card, which I would assume is your culprit. Never used Cubase tho, so I don't know if its possible that its causing this much lag. I would tend to doubt it though.

yeah like what's been said it's your soundcard. but totally check out ableton now that you got a better comper

go to device setup in cubase, then vst whatever

see what the current driver setting is. there'll be a couple, and right below the dropdown to pick there'll be some text telling you what the latency with that particular setting is.

also, you can go into 'advanced settings' and mess around with the stuff there, but that never did too much for me.

finally, if you have a non-crap soundcard, go into the settings for it, and there might be a latency adjustment.

  DrHat said:

go to device setup in cubase, then vst whatever

 

see what the current driver setting is. there'll be a couple, and right below the dropdown to pick there'll be some text telling you what the latency with that particular setting is.

 

also, you can go into 'advanced settings' and mess around with the stuff there, but that never did too much for me.

 

finally, if you have a non-crap soundcard, go into the settings for it, and there might be a latency adjustment.

Sadly I do have a crap soundcard but plan to get an M-Audio PCI card soonish. I really think that to use my keyboard and for it to play in realtime I'm gonna need to use the joystick port of a soundcard and the one I've got has no joystick port. I notice that usb to midi leads exist but I really doubt that it'll speed up the transmition of notes via my keyboard.

  BCM said:

Cubase is always slow. It's rubbish. Fuck running your VST's in that...use something else - Renoise, FLoops, ACID Pro, Ableton.....anything but that if you want speed....

im running cubase 3 on a 1.8ghz amd chip pc with 1gig of ram. i can run around 15 vst synths with mutiple effects and processes on each channel with zero latency.

cubase seems mighty fine to me, and the sound engine kicks the arse off ableton and floops.

mind you - it might be the delta 1010 that gives it headroom.

  locum76 said:

  BCM said:

Cubase is always slow. It's rubbish. Fuck running your VST's in that...use something else - Renoise, FLoops, ACID Pro, Ableton.....anything but that if you want speed....

 

im running cubase 3 on a 1.8ghz amd chip pc with 1gig of ram. i can run around 15 vst synths with mutiple effects and processes on each channel with zero latency.

 

cubase seems mighty fine to me, and the sound engine kicks the arse off ableton and floops.

 

mind you - it might be the delta 1010 that gives it headroom.

ye - the 10/10 might have something do with it indeed

and aye, for all it's the biz in almost every other dept, Abe's audio summing is still the pits. But hey ho...it's what u do with it I guess...

15 vst and multiple fx!!! Now thats music to my ears. I'm planning on getting an M-Audio card soon because I know that the piece of shit I have want suffice.

have you tried the asio4all thing yet ? It reduced the latency of my USB soundcard from about 100ms down to about 4ms.

  mcbpete said:

have you tried the asio4all thing yet ? It reduced the latency of my USB soundcard from about 100ms down to about 4ms.

Oh there is no way I'd consider using a usb soundcard. Its bad enough having my midi keyboard coming in via my usb knob box ... i'm sure that effects latency too. Yeah I tried Asio4all. I'm not sure what the latency is but I have a feeling I've got about 1/4 to 1/2 second delay and its enough to irritate the fuck out of me. I've got it down 64 samples on Asio4all but the audio is a bit funny so not sure. Overall Cubase doesn't seem smooth running at all. Its ironic since it ran pretty well on my old PII 333mhz pc and I had no latency issues on just internal soundcard and external equipment. I can't record any vst in real time for instance in my new pc so that seems like a waste of time. To be honest I'm gonna get an M-Audio card for this pc so I can hook my midi keyboard directly into that as well as my sound module and then take it from there. One thing I can't stand is not being able to play my keyboard in real time.

Latency is like the delay between pressing a button input to the sound coming out the other end. It's measured in ms (milliseconds) so your 1/2 second delay equates to 500ms (which is pretty bad), like I said I've managed to get my USB soundcard down to 4ms (or 0.004 s) which is, not bad I guess for such an old card.

  Jubal said:

there could be tons of reasons why you experience bad latency, have you tried running vst(i) in other music software on the new comp? Is there a noticable latency difference with cubase? Maybe the old cubase just isn't compatible with your new setup, I'd say dl a crack and check how the newer (sx) versions run.

 

Like Bcm said, celerons are not the powerhorses you'd ideally want for heavy audio work (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celeron) But more 'power' doesn't mean better music, just start on some shit.

Well I've got Traktor 2 running on here and a Evolution UC-33 controlling various functions and its pretty satisfactory. Cubase to me is pretty unusable on my new pc. Without trying to play any notes on my midi keyboard etc the vsti just seem kinda slow and buggy anyways. Then again I've noticed problems on other more powerful pcs with the old version of Cubase so who knows. It could be the soundcard or it could be the older version of Cubase. To be honest I'm just not sure. I've used Cubase on an XP system with an SBlive card and it seemed pretty fine to me. I do nevertheless need a dedicated midi in (to the soundcard) for my midi keyboard as I'm not comfortable with it coming in via my Evolution UC-33 midi in.