As soon as I use Ozone 11, Cubase crashes.

Cubase
1

Hello everyone,
I need help with a problem related to Cubase Pro 15 and iZotope Ozone 11 (Mastering Suite):

Whenever I open the suite in Cubase, the PC completely freezes with even the smallest action, forcing me to shut it down manually. I have no idea what could be causing this. The PC is brand new and equipped with a very good graphics card and processor, and it has 64 GB of RAM.

On my old and much weaker notebook, the suite ran without any issues under Cubase 10.5. What’s also interesting: with other DAWs that I installed for testing purposes (Ableton Live and Reaper), there are absolutely no problems with Ozone 11—it runs perfectly smoothly.

Things I have already checked:

  • I set the maximum buffer size in my Focusrite interface and driver

  • I checked whether the affected track is in Freeze mode

  • Other very CPU-intensive plugins run without any issues; the problem is limited to Ozone.

  • I’m only using very small projects (just one track)

  • I reinstalled both Ozone and Cubase (without success)

  • I confirmed that the plugin is VST3

Additional information that might help:

  • If I generally enable VST2 instruments in the Plugin Manager, Cubase also crashes

  • After restarting, the following error message appears:
    “The application was terminated due to an error while executing the following file: Freeze”

Since Ozone is extremely important for my work, I have only recently purchased/upgraded to Cubase Pro 15, and I even bought a new notebook specifically for better and smoother DAW performance, I would be endlessly grateful for any tips that could help me move forward with this issue.

I would be very frustrated if this meant the end of my work with Cubase and if I had to buy a new DAW at great expense.

Thank you very much in advance and best regards,
Johannes

2

if you have crash files then post a few of them. maybe the answer is inside them

3

Hello and welcome to the forum!

By that you mean: you really have to hard reset your PC via the on/off-button? And by “freeze” that you are not able to do anything in Windows anymore, not even start the TaskManager to kill Cubase?

If so, I suspect something graphic card/driver/OpenGL related. You didn’t write which graphics cards you have. You might want to try a different version of the graphics card driver. If you have an Nvidia, it is generally recommended to use the “Studio Driver”.

1 Like
4

Hello! Thank you very much for your input – you were absolutely on the right track. I downloaded the latest version of the NVIDIA Studio driver, and it no longer causes a complete freeze or crash. I’m not sure I would have thought of this solution on my own, so thank you! The only thing that’s still a bit annoying is that when I work with the suite, I occasionally get small clicks or pops while playing back my mastering track. Do you happen to know if, and if so which, graphics card settings could help prevent this? Thank you very much for your help!