12 crash dumps already today

Thankfully this is only a hobby for me so it’s only costing me my time. But 8 freezedumps and 4 crashdumps doesn’t even include the complete hangs, and five machine restarts due to license not found etc.
I’ve sent a few of the dumps to Steinberg, but perhaps I’d better start looking at Bitwig, or go back to Reaper?

Welcome.

Make sure you have ruled out corrupted preferences when you start to troubleshoot.

As you participate in the forum, you will observe that people post their crash logs to see if they reveal useful info, also, that posts include system specs.

See the Forum Guide too.

A lot of the time it’s down to dodgy plugins. Have you tried eliminating that as the problem?

Most of my projects don’t have any plugins at all, just one virtual instrument, and it often freezes when “Loading Mix Console” on a simple project with just four midi tracks and one VST.
I doubt there’s simple answer and perhaps I was just letting off steam - it’s very frustrating to have constant hangs and crashes. Thank you for your comments though!

Dodgy vsti then? I can run big projects with lots of audio, vstis and plugins without ever getting a crash so there must be something specific.

Perhaps, but it doesn’t seem to be specific to one vst - I use Modartt Pianoteq, and also the Kontakt and Halion pianos more or less at random in projects, and there doesn’t seem to be any correlation between the crashes and hangs and which instrument is in the project and they all pass the scan on startup.
I may try uninstalling and reinstalling in case something has become corrupted or some artifacts remain from version upgrades. Just for the record, I’m running Windows 10 Pro (21H2) on an Intel i9-9900K with 32Gb of RAM and Cubase Pro 12.0.51 Build 391.
All the best to you.

Your computer is identical to mine except I’m on win 11 21H2 and I don’t use the plugins that you do. Good luck finding the problem.

I feel your pain… Honestly I am surprised how fragile Cubase is. Exception handling is software 101. Steinberg Support’s through Yamaha is also a bit of a joke. My list of frustrations goes on and on. I haven’t used reaper/bitwig, but the right tool is more important than product loyalty.

Ok, empathy over, some thoughts on making things better. Latest of everything, make sure everything is up to date. Drivers, Libraries, OS updates, and etc. Hardware can cause so many unexpected problems that has nothing to do with VSTs/workflow as well. Replacing my UR44C solved nearly half of my stability issues. I had one bad ram chip that caused issues.

Track presets can be corrupted, so you are loading bad tracks into new projects. Same with project templates and any other ‘saved’ files within Cubase.

If you are having a lot of issues particularly with one project, disable everything you can, and slowly bring things back as you need them. You may find one particular vst / track / plugin causing issues.

Everytime Cubase crashes on a particular project, treat it as a ticking time bomb. My experience has been the more you crash, and the more you save a problematic project, the more corrupted it will become.

Backing up, or archiving a project is also a good way to restore/save a individual problematic project. It will rewrite into a new location trimming unused things and can all by itself fix the project.

If all else fails with a specific project, export the midi, start a brand new project, and create new resources for everything. Ive saved many a project by abandoning whatever was wrong with my original project.

Many thanks to all for your kind tips and suggestions, which I shall work through. I do keep my system completely up to date - except that I haven’t made the jump to Windows 11 yet…
I’ve not experienced so many crashes and hangs with any other software, but I should stop whining and start trying to fix things.
Very best wishes to you all, and happy music making!
Peter

Any reason why you haven’t posted the crash logs here?

Cubase 12.0.51.391 64bit 2023.1.27 19.24.09.098-freezedump.dmp (760.4 KB)
Cubase12 64bit 2023.1.27 15.32.13.027.dmp (586.9 KB)

I didn’t think there was much readable in the dumps - just a ton of binary data, but attached are the latest of the freeze dump and crash dump files.

I’ve followed earlier advice and deleted my preferences. Since then I’ve had just one instance of a frozen Cubase menu bar after closing a project, but otherwise it seems more stable.
Strange, because the preferences are just xml and surprising that anything could get “corrupted” and not picked up when the preferences were loaded/parsed, but I’m happy to be making music instead of rebooting!

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I had this problem, same symptoms, it was down to a MIDI Mackie setup. I eradicated it and things improved, but I still get crashes every day, for other reasons, various.

@peter_the_m You must update to 12.0.52

This crash involved your audio device

This one was the ara extension crashing.

Thanks very much for the information Steve!
I thought I had updated to 12.0.52 and that perhaps the version number hadn’t changed, but when I started the Steinberg Download Assistant just now it showed an Install option for 12.0.52, so I must have downloaded it but not installed. Will do that now.
My audio interface is a Focusrite Scarlett 2i4, with the latest driver (May 2022). It’s not a very expensive or high-quality interface, but it will have to do for now.
Are there any tools available for analysing the crash dumps, or do you just know what to look for?
Much appreciate your feedback, and happy to report that crashes are now very infrequent since I deleted my preferences. May be even better after I have installed the latest version!
All the best,
Peter

Well, no further crashes or hangs since I deleted my preferences and updated to 12.0.52.
Many thanks to all who helped!

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There’s a tool.

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Thank you very much Steve!
I’ve downloaded it and having a look at the old crash dumps.
Part of my day job is IT-related, but mainly ETL and databases and this is all very low-level. But will be a good learning experience for me.
I can see the ara service exception you mentioned. I think that is what scans VSTs so I must have a bad one in there somewhere :frowning:
Many thanks again!