Cubase 13/14 Consistently Freezing

Hi all. Earlier today my Cubase installed started freezing immediately on launch. They’ll sit as “not responding” for hours and it doesn’t matter what I do.
Current behavior:

  1. I open Cubase 13 or 14 in any way. Either to main hub or into a project directly.
  2. Cubase crash reporter allows me to ignore preferences, continue as normal, or delete preferences. All of these options lead to the same end.
  3. Cubase stops responding. In the driver selection popup, in the hub (with nothing loaded), or just with the project opening directly and not doing anything. I cannot interact with it in any way and to close it I have to force kill the window through task manager.

I’ve tried uninstalling/reinstalling drivers, Cubase 13, Cubase 14, restarting the computer, purging configurations. I was using it fine yesterday with no issue, and there was no update or change that should modify this. Dorico still works fine, and attached are multiple .dmp files.

Cubase 13.0.51 64bit 2025.2.1 17.01.34.509-freezedump.dmp (2.3 MB)
Cubase 14.0.10 64bit 2025.2.1 18.04.41.827-freezedump.dmp (2.3 MB)

Any help is appreciated!

The hang appears to be in a MIDI driver. There is another thread at Still getting Wdmaud.drv freeze on hub that looks to have the same or similar problem. Not sure if anyone actually resolved the issue in that thread (it’s a fairly long one, and I only skimmed it after finding the thread in a Google search).

Hi,

Enable the WinRT MIDI Driver in the Studio > Studio Setup to avoid this old Microsoft MIDI Driver bug, please.

I was able to solve this issue by removing all midi devices from the computer, then restarting the computer, and starting Cubase immediately.

Thanks for the tip on the driver setting Martin.

I had a similar issue.

As Martin said try use the WindRT midi driver… but I’ll add that this didn’t solve my issues. I had to run the MMCSS fix and set it to use all threads so I could use the WInRT midi drivers with all my devices.

Since that point Cubase has been rock solid.

M