First thing I’d do is make sure there are no older versions of GASE on your system. I.E. If you have, or ever had an older dongle based version of Cubase/Dorico/Nuendo/Etc, there might still be an older VST2 plugin lurking that you need to get rid of.
Pop open Activation Manager and make sure you have Cubase (and Groove Agent if you’ve also upgraded to full Groove Agent 6) activated.
Pop open Steinberg Download Assistant. If it wants to update, let it do so.
If those steps don’t sort it out…
The next thing I’d try is to locate on my system the Steinberg media bay database files and move or trash them. The Steinberg dataserver will then be forced to rescan content and build a fresh db.
On Windows I can find such a “mediabay3.db” file at:
“%APPDATA%\Steinberg\Groove Agent SE_64”
I’m not sure where Macs keep this kind of account specific data, but the principle is the same. It’s probably going to be somewhere in your ‘user’ file path.
You can try the same thing for Cubase itself, and perhaps even HALion/Sonic, but do them one by one, and test first. I.E. Start with just the db file in Groove Agent SE. If it’s till broken try it in full GA. Still broken do it for Cubase 15, and so forth.
In short, Steinberg Hosts and instruments all share a common dataserver that generates files that media bay uses to keep up with and tag content. Sometimes forcing rewrites of this stuff from scratch fixes corruptions that can pop up over time. I.E. Something might get corrupted during a power outage or surge, a sleep/hibernate process that went wrong, a db-server crash, etc.
Be aware that trashing mediabay3.db files also ditches your custom ratings, tags, and comments that you might keep in media bay, so if you’ve invested much time custom tagging in media bay, back them up first before you trouble shoot, as you ‘might’ be able salvage your work somehow if you end up narrowing down a problem to one of these db files. I.E. You might just systematically rename them with an extra extension in the name.
If such a file is missing, next time you run something Steinberg that calls on the data server, it will scan your system for compatible content (Most of the GA stuff will live in vstsound archives located in “ProgramData\Steinberg\Content”…if Library manager installs content to alternate directories, you’ll generally find windows shortcut files pointing to their actual location in this ProgramData path as well) and rewrite the db3 file(s). I.E. Open Cubase, add instances of Sonic/HALion and Groove Agent to a fresh project, open their UIs, and go have a coffee or something. Give the system time to rebuild all those db files. Be patient, as it can take some time for everything to get rebuilt. It wouldn’t hurt to just leave it running for an hour or so, come back, shut down Cubase, reboot the system, then try again.
If that doesn’t work…uninstall all versions of Groove Agent. Use the Library Manager to remove all Groove Agent libraries. Go back to Download Assistant, redownload, and reinstall every bit of it.
