I am very satisfied Cantabile user for many years now but all of a sudden audio glitches and drop-outs are appearing too frequent to be accepable. I suspect that these glitches and drop-outs are related to my new external hard disk drive. For many years now my equipment has been a PC ASUS Notebook UX425E with 32GB RAM, 1 TB hard drive,11th Gen Intel(R) Core™ i7-1165G7 2.80 GHz processor. My OS is Windows 11 H2402 running Cantabile 4 build 4303 for the moment. And these gear have served me very well, no problems at all. After many years of usage and my PC hard drive becoming more and more packed I decided to get an external hard disk drive to store all my VST libraries. So I bought a Toshiba DTB520B 2TB drive and after that the glitches and the drop-outs started to appear together with my Time Load indicator at the same time presenting score well over 100%. So as I said my suspicion is that the reading capacity of my external hard disk drive is too weak. What do you think? And if so do you have any recomendations for external hard disk drives that can provide decent capacity for avoiding glitches and drop-outs. Not alla VST plug-ins causes problems, there seems to differneces in time load from different plug-ins. For instance Halion Sonic and Waves plug-ins seem to be heavy loaded while Arturia plug-ins causes no trouble at all. In both cases the VST libraries are stored on my external hard disk drive. So I guess I have to buy a a new drive or what do you think
PS I have made all the setting adjustment recomende for glitch free performance
Hi @Molinda and welcome to the community forum!
Moving plugin data to an external hard drive will definitely create a communication bottleneck; USB communication is typically slower than accessing an on-board SSD or HDD. Fastest communication will typically be an onboard M.2 SSD - that’s the fastest route for the processor to access the drive, plus the fastest access time.
First: make absolutely sure that your external disk drive is connected to your notebook via USB3 - if the connection is USB 2, this reduces the data rate drastically - not recommended!
Also, if you have the chance to move your sample-based instruments back to your internal drive, this could help - samples will need to be read every time you hit a key, so keeping this to the fastest access is essential.
Typical synth plugins are not so problematic - they get loaded once, then their load is mainly on the CPU and to some extent on RAM, but not on drive access.
Overall, my recommendation would be to replace the internal hard drive with a large enough internal SSD - this would allow you to keep everything internal and also boost access performance significantly. There are migration tools that could help you “clone” your internal drive to a new SSD, so the process is not so difficult. You might have to re-authenticate some of your plugins, since the hardware configuration has changed - a bit of fiddling is always involved…
Cheers,
Torsten
Many thanks Torsten for your respons and for sharing your technical expertise. Obviously my decision to take use of an external hard drive was a mistake. I will get back to a fully internal VST-setup following your advice and recomendations. Once again many thanks
I have two 2TB internal SSDs which I overflowed with sample libraries and Windows components so needed to add a 4TB USB3 attached SSD. I’ve struggled for the past year with dropouts under cantabile and tried everything in Brad’s Glitch Free document. I should also say that that the dropouts occur with both internally and externally sourced SSD sample libraries. Some plugins are worse than others, such as Ivory 3. Reducing mic positions helps but I also tried a latency switch on my Motu control app and this seemed to solve the problem. I get a tad more latency in some latency VSTs, such as the newest VSL Imperial reissue, but not generally noticeable. I hate dropouts!!
Hello,
I have also moved my vst plugins to an external SSD drive (samsung 2 TB) connected with USB -C and no problems at all. Everything runs as smooth as my internal drive.