Please help, major dropouts in playback!

[sadrumboy120]

I am using cubase le, and when i am playing back either through my computers sound card, or my tascam us 1641, there are major dropouts. it only started recently, after i had not used the program for a few weeks, but before that, i had listened to this same project without any problems. i tried changing the latency, and as i made the latency higher, the dropouts became less frequent, but for longer..

please help!

[uab9253]

F12 - see what your load on your cpu is. I presume by dropout that you mean snap, crackle & pop? If so, it is CPU related. If you mean actual silence likely your hard drive is not supplying your ram fast enough or you have some other ram capacity problem. If in fact this is the problem and it got worse when you bumped up your latency it is even more likely you have a HDD speed/RAM problem.

Defrag your hard drive as first step and let us know what the size/speed of it is. Also how much and what type of RAM do you have?

[sadrumboy120]

Hi, thanks for the response

during playback there is some popping/crackling, but also long patches of silence, while the bar continues to move

when i press f12, the asio bar is all the way to the top
i defragmented my hard drive, and the size is 160 gb

i have 2038 mb of RAM, i am unsure of how to locate the type

thank you for your help

[sparqee]

Just as a random guess... are you using any plugins that are in demo mode? Some will do this sort of thing until they're registered.

[sadrumboy120]

nope
but thanks for the reply

[brandondrury]

Something has changed on your computer. What? Who knows!

You didn't mention if this computer was dedicated to recording or if it was used for internet, email, etc. If it is used for internet, I'd say that this is the time to switch to a dual boot system with internet disabled on the recording operating system.

I find that it's faster to simply format and reinstall than it is to troubleshoot. After you have reinstalled your system and have it working as it should back it up like this:
Create A Perfect Backup Of Your Windows Hard Drive

If you really want to troubleshooting it check out these:
Recording Computer Troubleshooting: Is Your Windows Operating System Clean?

Home Recording Computers: Clicks, Pops, and Latency

Brandon

[uab9253]

One way I avoid the Nuclear option of formatting and reinstalling everything is through judicious use of the Windows system restore. Try to restore to a point when things were last working good. This could eliminate the problem. It will not cost you any data, but programs installed since then will go away, since it is essentially a registry restore. Food for thought.

[rexde]

I had lots of problems with pops and drops with cubase le on my Pentium 4 HT. When I turned off hyperthreading, things got much better.