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Post by bchurch on Sept 11, 2022 15:40:00 GMT -6
This is an all-too-familiar scenario, I am sure - but I'm just gonna vent for a second.
As the title more than subtly implies, the best solve for my current issues upgrading to Cubase Pro 12 is to pull out that "what the government doesn't know about" bangstick from under my bed (back in the 90's, rappers were so much better at bartering), driving my mac out to upstate new york, and unloading a good 50 or 60 rounds of 124gr 9mm JHP's into its former self.
"Cubase Pro 12 runs sooooo much better" they said.
I had my apprehension. My 2018 mini is definitely at the end of its usefulness as a studio computer - but under Pro 11, everything was simpatico. Yeah, you'd have to goose the buffer a bit on busy mixes sometimes, but that's been the same for decades. "Ohhh, this new processor is 50x faster... which is why we made our app 50x more bloated!"
I've got a CPU meter that's spiking like crazy with maybe two or three plugins and a couple hw inserts - before I ug'd it wouldn't have so much as flickered. Now I'm deep into the dark corners of the internet, trying to find anyone who's got a solve for this. My system drive is at about capacity, so I can't install both. Dropping $2k on a Mac Studio isn't in the offing right now either.
Why, why, why.... why did I not listen to that intuition to not upgrade? Steinberg accidentally did one of their "double sales" where you got a Labor Day deal plus a coupon code, so I upgraded a full version for $40. I should have just held onto it.
Anyway, if you hear something like an Uzi mag-dumping into a little metal square? It's probably just some dude's lawnmower. Nothing to worry about.
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Post by kcatthedog on Sept 11, 2022 15:43:54 GMT -6
I hear ya:)
Can you wipe the drive and re-install the software that works or buy a used m1 mini ?
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Post by bchurch on Sept 11, 2022 16:12:14 GMT -6
I hear ya:) Can you wipe the drive and re-install the software that works or buy a used m1 mini ? I might just go the m1 mini route. Should have left well enough alone. |
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Post by kcatthedog on Sept 11, 2022 16:17:08 GMT -6
I have an m1 mini running big sur, catalina on my 2012 mbp, both computers are happy as clams , although never the twain will meet.
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Post by Johnkenn on Sept 11, 2022 16:43:44 GMT -6
Have you re-booted?
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Post by bchurch on Sept 11, 2022 18:41:16 GMT -6
I think you just quoted the customer service line at Verizon every time our Wi-Fi dies! Yeah, I think the culprit has something to do with changes in the ASIO guard. It’s just weird how much activity there is in the meter itself, the previous version moved more like a tachometer, this is just constantly jumping all over the place. |
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Post by christopher on Sept 11, 2022 19:15:06 GMT -6
I took an IT course last year. Useless… 6 months of “we used to have to manually do XYZ, now you just have to delete driver and reboot. It will re-install the best driver automatically”. I learned nothing, except reboot is the answer to everything.
You can try smaller buffers and faster sample rate if you haven’t yet. For some reason that made my CPU meter go down last time I upgraded Reaper
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Post by bgrotto on Sept 11, 2022 19:21:07 GMT -6
Had a similar situation a few weeks ago. Mixing a project that had my computer on its knees, even after freezing 2/3s of the tracks. Was pissed. Wife said "why don't you just buy a new computer", which was the obvious solution. Now I'm printing those mixes on my shiny new M1 MBP with no tracks frozen and nary a hiccup.
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Post by bgrotto on Sept 11, 2022 20:24:06 GMT -6
I think you just quoted the customer service line at Verizon every time our Wi-Fi dies! Yeah, I think the culprit has something to do with changes in the ASIO guard. It’s just weird how much activity there is in the meter itself, the previous version moved more like a tachometer, this is just constantly jumping all over the place. Here in Mac/PT/AAX world, I find there are a few culprit plugins that cause this sort of erratic behavior from time to time. The Acustica stuff is a prime troublemaker, but there are a few others that invoke similar gremlins. PT has a command to open a session with all plugins disabled; I use that to troubleshoot the offending processor, and armed with that info can usually manage a workaround of some fashion. Hopefully Cubase has something similar? |
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Post by svart on Sept 12, 2022 8:40:58 GMT -6
How can a 4 year old mac suddenly be too overloaded to work?
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Post by bgrotto on Sept 12, 2022 9:16:24 GMT -6
How can a 4 year old mac suddenly be too overloaded to work? What I gleaned when my recently-departed MBP started to shit the bed was that prolonged use and the heat that comes with it can lead to decreased CPU performance over time. My computer in particular was increasingly running hotter, and throttling its CPUs as a result. Cleaning its guts would help a little for a bit, but it would pretty quickly go back to its lower-performing slog. |
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Post by svart on Sept 12, 2022 9:57:12 GMT -6
How can a 4 year old mac suddenly be too overloaded to work? What I gleaned when my recently-departed MBP started to shit the bed was that prolonged use and the heat that comes with it can lead to decreased CPU performance over time. My computer in particular was increasingly running hotter, and throttling its CPUs as a result. Cleaning its guts would help a little for a bit, but it would pretty quickly go back to its lower-performing slog. That's really strange. |
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Post by svart on Sept 12, 2022 10:45:28 GMT -6
So thinking about it a little bit.. there's no electronic reason a CPU should reduce performance over time.
I wonder if the machine itself still has dust/hair stuck down deep in the heatsink/fan. I also wonder about the performance of the thermal grease(or gap pad) between the heatsink and cpu. Most higher performance greases do outgas over time and become hard which reduces their heat transfer abilities and need to be replaced occasionally.
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Post by kcatthedog on Sept 12, 2022 11:57:54 GMT -6
I use to open my mbp up from time to time to clean it out. The fans and air channels could get surprisingly dirty.
There is also software maintenance, running something like onyx from time to time, not maxing out your drives.
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Post by svart on Sept 12, 2022 12:13:04 GMT -6
I use to open my mbp up from time to time to clean it out. The fans and air channels could get surprisingly dirty. There is also software maintenance, running something like onyx from time to time, not maxing out your drives. Well, the increase in thermal throttling is an interesting symptom. Maxing out drives reduces cache volume and increases load swaps in memory, but it really shouldn't change CPU heat characteristics as the ram/drive bottleneck would actually decrease the CPU throughput. It seems like bchurch is perhaps seeing one of two types of problem. A physical problem with reduced airflow could easily explain this as the blockages will build up over time. However, the other issue is software. I've seen background programs (via updates or purposely installed) suck up a lot of resources while seemingly doing nothing. One that happened for me was Slate VMR. I didn't buy all the modules for it, but they install anyway. VMR then constantly looks for authentication for any module that's installed but won't verify and it really sucks resources doing so. For me, it was using about 10-15% CPU doing this in the background. The only option was to uninstall those modules I don't own through a hidden process I found in their FAQ. After that, VMR only uses like 1% CPU. So, over time if you install a handful of plugs that do similar things it could very well seem like performance has decreased for no reason. |
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Post by kcatthedog on Sept 12, 2022 12:32:12 GMT -6
When my mbp my drives got close to full, i’d notice decreased performance and would get system warnings.
I wondered if any system data was accurate: cpu, memory, etc.?
I’d make space on drive, clean machine snd things would go back to normal.
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ericn
Temp
Balance Engineer
Posts: 14,934 
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Post by ericn on Sept 12, 2022 13:04:00 GMT -6
Been there done that.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Sept 12, 2022 14:01:51 GMT -6
I use to open my mbp up from time to time to clean it out. The fans and air channels could get surprisingly dirty. There is also software maintenance, running something like onyx from time to time, not maxing out your drives. Well, the increase in thermal throttling is an interesting symptom. Maxing out drives reduces cache volume and increases load swaps in memory, but it really shouldn't change CPU heat characteristics as the ram/drive bottleneck would actually decrease the CPU throughput. It seems like bchurch is perhaps seeing one of two types of problem. A physical problem with reduced airflow could easily explain this as the blockages will build up over time. However, the other issue is software. I've seen background programs (via updates or purposely installed) suck up a lot of resources while seemingly doing nothing. One that happened for me was Slate VMR. I didn't buy all the modules for it, but they install anyway. VMR then constantly looks for authentication for any module that's installed but won't verify and it really sucks resources doing so. For me, it was using about 10-15% CPU doing this in the background. The only option was to uninstall those modules I don't own through a hidden process I found in their FAQ. After that, VMR only uses like 1% CPU. So, over time if you install a handful of plugs that do similar things it could very well seem like performance has decreased for no reason. The fancy guis in softube, some waves, and newer mcdsp versions can also suck up resources when open a big problem with recent MacBooks and other laptops is the wear on the electrical components from heat. Most of them are not built like old Thinkpads or PowerBooks or the white plastic MacBook after they fixed the cracking plastic. Thin metal enclosures not being used as a heat sink overheat. Later Intel macbooks constantly throttle the cpu. |
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Post by bchurch on Sept 12, 2022 15:46:53 GMT -6
How can a 4 year old mac suddenly be too overloaded to work? All I did was upgrade from Cubase Pro 11 to Pro 12. Saved all of my preferences and everything - but some new 'feature' is jamming up the works. One thing that's kind of sucktown with the Mini's - though they're actually pretty capable for a barebones studio computer, is the shared video memory. For example, certain plug-ins that have inefficient or overdone GUI's ("The God Particle" comes to mind) will steal away system RAM. I run a pretty large display (3440x1440), but that doesn't hinder things too much. This is the dark side of Cubase on Mac - the support and stability are way behind Windoze. I've thought a million times about a purpose-built studio PC, but it's like driving in europe for me to move the ctrl/alt keys backwards like that. And no, I'm not trying to instigate the internet's 10,000,000,000th mac vs pc poop-flinging contest. |
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Post by thehightenor on Sept 12, 2022 15:56:54 GMT -6
Cubase .... Mmmh I have an iMac and a PC Workstation.
My PC workstation is 8 years old.
I upgraded Windows 7 to Windows 10 then upgraded Cubase 10.5.3 to Cubase 12 and the whole process was smooth as silk
and Cubase 12 runs like a dream on my 8 year old PC workstation (6 core over clocked Intel i7 4th gen) uses less CPU and is
just all round super slick.
My iMac .... I nearly threw the bloody thing out of the window just trying to upgrade the OS to Monterey, in fact I've given up
on doing that and so I won't be installing Cubase 12 on it.
Needless to say my next new workstation will be a PC, it's just an easier ride with Cubase and keeping up on OS upgrades and keeping hardware compatible.
I do love Apple though and have their iphone 11 pro and iPad Pro, they make great life style iOS devices, they really are a master of the mobile stuff.
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Post by bchurch on Sept 13, 2022 8:23:23 GMT -6
I do love Apple though and have their iphone 11 pro and iPad Pro, they make great life style iOS devices, they really are a master of the mobile stuff. If Tim Cook and Company could put just 5% as much effort into continuing the development of the personal computer in of itself, and not 'an extension of the apple ecosystem', they could do amazing things. I doubt I'm the first person to feel that desktop computing is more and more an afterthought these days. The Mac is still, now almost forty years later, the choice of the creative class - video, animation, music, design... but that's not an industry where you can rest on your laurels for long. What nobody seems to understand there is that professional users don't want to run ProTools on an iPad - we need processing muscle in a stable environment. Not to take anything away from the landmark achievements they've made. Even if it's derided by the competition as a mobile chip in a desktop, the Silicon ARM-based processors have plenty of room to grow. It'll be interesting to see how Silicon expands into the upper echelon workstations like the Power Mac. I am definitely looking forward to installing a Mac Studio - more than a mini, but less than a Pro. More than I need - at least for now. |
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Post by svart on Sept 13, 2022 8:33:43 GMT -6
I do love Apple though and have their iphone 11 pro and iPad Pro, they make great life style iOS devices, they really are a master of the mobile stuff. The Mac is still, now almost forty years later, the choice of the creative class - video, animation, music, design... I knew folks who taught at Full Sail. Apple came in one day and said they'd donate a million dollars worth of Macs to the school with one caveat.. That they ONLY teach Apple products and Apple certified software/hardware from that point on. If they were caught teaching anything else, they'd revoke the "free" lease and remove all the computers. Full Sail accepted. That's why it's the "choice" for creatives, because that's what they were taught in school. Apple strategically positioned themselves in the education system to get kids "hooked". I still get a lot of folks through the studio that are amazed that my little PC trounces their Macs in track counts and overall speed because they had always been in the "mac is superior" echo chamber. Oh and when I was in grade school through high school, the only computers we had were Apple II(E), Macintosh and later IMac/Macs. Same deal, they got big discounts from Apple and Apple got the kids exposed early. |
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Post by drsax on Sept 13, 2022 8:38:25 GMT -6
Upgraded from Cubase 11 to 12 on my 2016 MacBook Pro and it’s been smooth and flawless - same on a new Mac studio. Have you tried a clean install? Sorry to hear about your computer troubles, that’s no fun. A 2018 Mac should run most any DAW pretty smoothly.
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Post by bchurch on Sept 13, 2022 9:32:43 GMT -6
The Mac is still, now almost forty years later, the choice of the creative class - video, animation, music, design... That's why it's the "choice" for creatives, because that's what they were taught in school. Apple strategically positioned themselves in the education system to get kids "hooked". Respectfully, I disagree. Full Sail's influence on the world is miniscule. Walk into any ad agency - art directors, writers, creative directors, etc., are 90% on Mac. They're not FS grads. Apple has never been about raw computing performance. Sure, they'll tell you how many gHz of this and GB of that (and sell you a 32GB DIMM for 500x the cost), but their stock in trade has always been a user friendly and wholly-integrated OS. Much the same way a BMW m4 may not be as user-serviceable or performance-minded as a 1969 Dodge Charger. There's arguments to be made for why either side is better or worse - though it should be said I vastly prefer the m4. Ugh. That poop-flinging war I cautioned against... |
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Post by svart on Sept 13, 2022 10:01:49 GMT -6
That's why it's the "choice" for creatives, because that's what they were taught in school. Apple strategically positioned themselves in the education system to get kids "hooked". Respectfully, I disagree. Full Sail's influence on the world is miniscule. Walk into any ad agency - art directors, writers, creative directors, etc., are 90% on Mac. They're not FS grads. Apple has never been about raw computing performance. Sure, they'll tell you how many gHz of this and GB of that (and sell you a 32GB DIMM for 500x the cost), but their stock in trade has always been a user friendly and wholly-integrated OS. Much the same way a BMW m4 may not be as user-serviceable or performance-minded as a 1969 Dodge Charger. There's arguments to be made for why either side is better or worse - though it should be said I vastly prefer the m4. Ugh. That poop-flinging war I cautioned against... Full sail was just an anecdote. Go to any art/creative school and you'll only see Macs for the same reason. Apple has a grip on education and thus the kids get hooked early. |
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