I'm writing this on behalf of my friend, who recently purchased a Firepod and is running Cubase LE. It's a Power PC G5 with a 2 Ghz processor and 512 MB of RAM.

Here's his problem - every time he tries to add a plugin (even the basic Cubase plugs) he gets all this staticky nastiness that, to me, indicates a CPU usage problem. I could be wrong, but it sounds like the exact problem I used to have before I upgraded my RAM.

But man, shouldn't his comp be powerful enough to play 5 audio tracks with one reverb plug??

He may have the latency set to low, that will suck the CPU down. Find out what the latency is set at,
10ms is a good starting place, and then work down till it all turns to crud again. Increase till it goes away and you should be set.

Does he have the sample rate the same as the Firepod?? The Cubase sample rate should be the same as the Firepod.
Another thing, is the light holding a steady blue on the Firepod? If not he may have to reload the drivers.

I run 40+ tracks with many VST's with no troubles with the Cubase SX3.1.

I can get it crunchin' though, then I start freezing tracks.

Man, I really need to pay attention. Latency settings - duh! I'm constantly messing with my buffer size when going back and forth from tracking to mixing... I don't know why I didn't think to suggest it to him. Thanks for straightening me out.

How do you freeze tracks in Cubase SX? I use SX and haven't figured it out.

I do not think it's available on the LE, but if you have SX2 or SX3 it's on the inspector it looks like a small snowflake.

http://www.acehk.com/eng/Manufacturers/steinberg/produc...features_details.pdf

Second row from the top.
The record (red, far left) button is on the left of the row and the freeze button is the snowflake(far right)

If you are not seeing this type of Inspector configuration, single click the bar at the top of the inspector and it should come up.

A double thank you, Dutch. The buffer size relieved his CPU strain (although it still seems to be struggling a bit too much given the speed of his machine), and I finally found the freeze button! Should make things much easier.