Cubase - Playback with enabled 23 tracks at 87% CPU, 24 enabled tracks make light crackles appear right after starting playback.REAPER - Playback with enabled 17 tracks peaks at 96% CPU, 18 enabled tracks make nasty crackles appear after 12 seconds of playback.Cubase - Playback with enabled 22 tracks peaks at 95% CPU, 23 enabled tracks make light crackles appear right after starting playback.REAPER - Playback with enabled 10 tracks peaks at 95% CPU, 11 enabled tracks make nasty crackles appear after 5 seconds of playback.Cubase - Playback with enabled 14 tracks peaks at 65% CPU, 15 enabled tracks make light crackles appear right after starting playback.I'm using Windows 10 圆4, with overclocked (3.8 Ghz as opposed to stock 2.67 Ghz) QuadCore Intel Core i5-750 processor CPU readout was obtained by looking at the task manager while playing back supplied projects.

Performance was measured using 3 buffer sizes: 64, 2. These are relevant REAPER settings used for testing:Īnd these are relevant Cubase settings used for testing: That's the only reasons these project files don't have more tracks. Maximum amounts of separate tracks set that way is 40 in Cubase. In Cubase, instead of muting, enable tracks instead.Īlso note that due to Cubase Elements limitations, I had to use both instrument tracks and rack instruments.

In REAPER, simply unmute each track until you get crackles (REAPER will not process muted tracks by default). Each Kontakt insance has two instruments from Kontakt 5 factory library. My computer is not the most powerful one and performance is a big thing for me so I decided to test trial version of Cubase Elements 8.0.10 against REAPER 5.0 and the results were astonishing.Įvery track in the project is using one instance of Kontakt 5 coupled with ReaComp and ReaEQ downloaded from here. Last time I checked Cubase out, it was at version 5 and it's performance was sub-par when compared to REAPER. So I started looking into other DAWs, and Cubase felt like the most closest thing (feature-wise) to a good tool for composition. It's awesome for a lot of stuff, but it's missing MIDI features that could really speed up composition workflow. I've started feeling a bit tired of constantly trying to turn REAPER into DAW for composition.

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