Hi!
I’m experiencing the same issue in both Cubase 11 pro and Cubase 15 pro .
When I add Sampler Control and open MediaBay, I try to drag and drop audio files from MediaBay into Sampler Control, but nothing happens. The Sampler Control window seems to be inactive and does not accept the files.
Why is this happening, and is there a way to fix it?
I use Cubase 15 pro - 15.0.30 and Cubase 11 pro - 11.0.41. Both versions have the same issue… please help me. I’ve spent around 10 hours selecting samples and importing them into Sampler Control instances. I had a large number of Sampler Control instances in my project, with more than 20–30 tracks using them.
Now, most likely because of this issue, all the samples have disappeared. The tracks themselves are still there in the project, but they are completely empty. I can see all the tracks, but the samples that were loaded into Sampler Control are gone.
I really cannot spend another 10 hours searching for and re-importing all those samples into some third-party sampler. I need to understand why Sampler Control has stopped accepting drag-and-drop from MediaBay and, most importantly, whether there is any way to recover the samples that were previously loaded into my project.
[SOLVED] Sampler Control opens empty / drag & drop from MediaBay doesn’t work (Cubase 11 & 15, multiple Cubase versions installed)
Root cause: This machine has multiple Cubase generations installed side by side (11, 15). Using Sysinternals Process Monitor to trace file activity, I found that Cubase 15 was loading the Sampler Track component from the Cubase 11 installation folder instead of its own:
Load Image C:\Program Files\Steinberg\Cubase 11\Components\Sampler Track.dll SUCCESS
…instead of C:\Program Files\Steinberg\Cubase 15\Components\Sampler Track.dll. Cubase’s shared-component resolution scans all installed Cubase versions on the system for matching internal component IDs, and in this case picked the older, incompatible Cubase 11 build (from 2020) instead of its own bundled one — which is why the panel only partially initialized (no knobs, no waveform, drag & drop from MediaBay not working).
What did NOT fix it (ruled out one by one):
UserPreferences.xml)Note: Safe Mode (“Disable program preferences”, Ctrl+Shift+Alt at startup) did mask the symptom during testing, which made this confusing for a while — it isn’t actually about preferences, it just happens to sidestep the bad component resolution for that session.
The fix: In the older Cubase installation’s Components folder, rename the Sampler Track files so the newer Cubase can no longer find/load them:
C:\Program Files\Steinberg\Cubase 11\Components\Sampler Track.dll → Sampler Track.dll.disabled
C:\Program Files\Steinberg\Cubase 11\Components\Sampler Track.srf → Sampler Track.srf.disabled
After that, Cubase 15 falls back to its own local Sampler Track.dll/.srf, and Sampler Control loads correctly — knobs, waveform, and drag & drop from MediaBay all working.
Caveat: this disables Sampler Track specifically inside the older Cubase version — in my case that installation had the exact same bug anyway, so nothing was lost there.
TL;DR: if you have multiple Cubase versions installed and a broken/empty Sampler Control, use Process Monitor filtered to your Cubase exe, watch for Load Image events on Sampler Track.dll, and check whether it’s loading from the wrong Cubase version’s folder.
Wow good find. I haven’t noticed this problem but still worth knowing.