[Solved] Cubase 9 Latency Problem

  • Today, I nearly went nuts while trying to get the proper feeling for the Amp Envelope Attack and Decay of a rather short pulsing sound. I just couldn't achieve the same groove as I had with a sound from Monark which I wanted to replace. After several hours of trying in vain, I compared to two synth tracks each with the drum tracks alone, and realized that whatever I did, the Virus was dragging. Did some fiddling with the track delay in Cubase and found that it started to groove when the Virus track was negative delayed by -20ms.


    Now I got curious.


    After reverting the track delay to 0ms, I did a Render In Place for both, the Monark track and the Virus track. And sure enough, notes in the audio file generated from the Virus were starting 20 ms (roghly ) late.


    So I checked settings in Cubase:

    • The PluginManager reports a Latency of 3072 Samples for the Virus TI VST 3.5 plugin
    • The PluginManager reports a Latency of 4096 Samples for the Virus TI VST 2.4 plugin
    • ASIO Guard was off


    Switched around a couple of things and found the following:

    • It doesn't matter whether I use the VST 2 or VST 3 version of the Virus Control plugin
    • ASIO-Guard set to minimal didn't change anything
    • ASIO-Guard set to normal/maximum had an influence on the timing of the VC plugin! Sometimes the timing would be exactly like without ASIO-Guard, sometimes the VC plugin would get a compensation of 20 ms. However, it is rather unpredictable, once with the ASIO-Guard set to maximum, VC was compensated by almost 50ms, i.e. it was 30 ms earlier than the reference audio track.

    It would be easiest if there was a way to globally set the latency of the VC plugin somehow.


    Any ideas?



    Virus OS / VC 5.1.6.05
    Cubase 9.0.10
    MacOS 10.12.4

    Bass Player and Synthesist.
    Virus TI2 Darkstar | Virus TI2 Desktop | Sub 37 | Voyager RME | Machinedrum | Analog Four | Digitone | MPC Live | NI Maschine+
    Mac OS 13.5.1 (Ventura) | Cubase Pro 11.0 | Ableton Live 9.6 | Logic 10.4 | MainStage 3.4 | NI Komplete Ultimate 13 | RME Fireface UFX+

  • Yesterday, I did a couple more experiments.


    Installed Cubase 8.5.30 to check whether the problem is related to Cubase 9, but got exactly the same results.


    Then I simply started with a new empty Cubase project and just added the Virus Control plugin. And sure enough, timing was as tight as it could be, with zero samples latency! So I figured it was somehow connected to the project I was working on. Hence, I created an empty project, imported all the tracks from the problematic project, added a new VC instance, loaded the VC preset from the other project and... latency was there again.


    Then I started to delete groups of tracks (audio, instruments tracks with NI plugins) until there was only the MIDI tracks with VC present. Didn't change a thing, latency still there. But when deleted the VC plugin, added a new one, and just used the default Init presets, timing was spot on! Thus I knew it had to do with the Virus presets used in that project.


    As I final step, I reloaded the VC preset from the problematic song, and started to replace the presets with Init presets. And as I removed the Input preset on Part 16 which used the Virus Inputs, the timing was back to sample accurate!


    Bottom Line:


    If a preset using the Virus Inputs is loaded in Virtual Control, it adds a latency of about 20ms (I measured 892 Samples several times) to all sounds coming back from the Virus Control plugin.


    It's not clear whether that latency should or could be compensated by the Virus Control plugin or Cubase.

    Bass Player and Synthesist.
    Virus TI2 Darkstar | Virus TI2 Desktop | Sub 37 | Voyager RME | Machinedrum | Analog Four | Digitone | MPC Live | NI Maschine+
    Mac OS 13.5.1 (Ventura) | Cubase Pro 11.0 | Ableton Live 9.6 | Logic 10.4 | MainStage 3.4 | NI Komplete Ultimate 13 | RME Fireface UFX+

  • If a preset using the Virus Inputs is loaded in Virtual Control, it adds a latency of about 20ms (I measured 892 Samples several times) to all sounds coming back from the Virus Control plugin.


    It's not clear whether that latency should or could be compensated by the Virus Control plugin or Cubase.


    the latency is always compensated by the host (or not...), but a plug-in cannot compensate for latency on its own.


  • the latency is always compensated by the host (or not...), but a plug-in cannot compensate for latency on its own.


    Naturally, that makes sense. But the host can only compensate if it knows what to compensate. Which is an information only known to the plug-in, right?

    Bass Player and Synthesist.
    Virus TI2 Darkstar | Virus TI2 Desktop | Sub 37 | Voyager RME | Machinedrum | Analog Four | Digitone | MPC Live | NI Maschine+
    Mac OS 13.5.1 (Ventura) | Cubase Pro 11.0 | Ableton Live 9.6 | Logic 10.4 | MainStage 3.4 | NI Komplete Ultimate 13 | RME Fireface UFX+