Hello,

I am using Windows 7 64 bit, Cubase 6 32 bit, and using East West Hollywood Strings, Hollywood Brass Silver, Hollywood Orchestral Woodwinds Silver, East West Quantum Leap RA, and Garritan Personal Orchestra plugins.
I have recorded ten parts using different instruments on each part, and am using a few effects on some. Now when I playback the project, one, two, and at times All of the tracks stop sounding, sometimes coming back in only to skip out again. :?: In Cubase I have Audio Priority on Boost, and Disk Preload at four seconds. My Project and VSTs are on an external hard drive, and my computer has tons of free space, plus being set on performance mode.
Can anyone tell me why my playback is skippy? Is it a RAM or CPU problem? Or maybe my audio driver?
I am on a deadline and would appreciate some help! Thanks! :!:

I think you have some kind of bottleneck limitation on your system, either software or hardware depended. Hmm.. check your ASIO driver, try and raise the buffer to 1024. Also be sure to check Cubase' ASIO performance meter, to see if you have any peaks going against the roof, when the sound dropout happens. If you have all you samples and synths places on an external harddisk (maybe USB), this can be a bottleneck on the performance, especially if you have other chained drivers associated with the USB port.

Try raising the audio priority to 6 (I think its max), and see if this changes anything.

Another thing could be DPC latency, which could be a problem on higher Cubase performance loads. High DPC results in bad Cubase performance & dropouts. You can measure DPC latency with this tool: DPC Latency Checker (Download, install it.)

And then when you run the tool, make sure that your vertical bars is all green, and doesn't contain any sudden red peaks. Performance should be really good, if the bar values is under 100.

Another thing could be 3. part software, running in windows background, like (virus killers, antispam software, energy save tools...). Be sure, that you check out when you have in your windows task manager. You can always disable your computer from the Internet, and then disable virus killer and other background stuff (if you have any), to see if the performance gets better.