I have a problem with Cubase: it often hangs when I try to save a project. I used to have Cubase 5, until last month I bought Cubase 14, but the problem is just the same in both versions: I’m working in a project and, when I press “Ctrl + S”, the blue circle starts spinning and I have to cross my fingers hoping the program does not hang. If I’m lucky, the circle disappears (the saving process has been successful); if I’m not, the circle keeps spinning on and on, endlessly… and it means that Cubase has just hung.
My first thought is always that it could be a rogue plugin, especially if the issue is in C14 as well as in C5.
Do you use the same plugins in the projects? Have you been running C5 in 32bit or 64 bit?.
You could try starting Cubase in safe mode with plugins disabled (Start Cubase in Safe mode / Temporarily disable preferences, but disable third party plugins instead of preferences. Although you could do that in a second step) and see whether you can reproduce the issue. Of course, you won’t have any third party plugins, so just do some other stuff and try to save and provoke the behaviour).
If disabling third party plugins helped, there’s the tedious problem of finding out which one is the culprit. If not, dunno.
When C14 hangs and I finally get to close it after a long, hard fight (which may mean to switch off the PC with the start button and then push it again), the next time I open C14 it asks me to disable third party plugins, and I do so. But the problem remains the same: I’m able to save the project several times… until the time comes when C14 hangs.
On the other hand, it happens in different projects with different plugins.
Finally, when I used C5, I thought the problem was that C5 was 32 bit in my 64 bit PC. But now both C14 and my PC are 64 bit. Therefore it is not the problem, too.
And this is on the same PC and the same windows installation? (by the way, which version? 10?).
Are there any crashdump files in “\Documents\Steinberg\CrashDumps”? If so, you could maybe upload some of them (or upload to dropbox etc and paste a link here). Else, when the program hangs, you could try creating one liked described here: How to get crash dump when Cubase freezes instead of crashes - #2 by Martin.Jirsak . Hangs are usually hard to analyze, but its worth a try.
Other stabs in the dark:
Do you have external MIDI gear connected? Maybe try unplugging them and see if the problem persists.
Have you tried disabling preferences in safe mode?
Thank you very much for your answer, Fese. I’ll keep it in mind for future trouble (I hope it doesn´t happen).
The point is that I found, just accidentally, where the problem was: I used to save my projects in an external HDD. My PC, which I bought in 2017 with built-in Windows 10, has always hung often when saving in that external HDD, or when copy-pasting files from an external HDD to another.
The other day, I decided (I don’t remember why) to put the current project in the desktop, and, from then on, C14 hasn’t hung at all. It also does not hang when exporting the project as “audio mix”, a process that used to cause hanging as well very often.
Something is wrong with that external HDD. You should try deleting the HDD partition and reformatting the HDD and re-test it afterwards to see if the same issue occurs. Pre-built computers can often have weird OEM configuration dependencies in them that can be troublesome.
You can reformat the HDD using Windows Administrative Tools / Computer Management in the Storage / Disk Management section.
Just make sure that you backup any important files first and that you reformat the correct HDD in the list as I do not take any responsibility for any user errors.
If that doesn’t work than I would assume that the HDD is basically dead. I have never had any problems with loading / saving / closing Cubase projects from a external HDD.
Thank you for your answer. I’ll keep it in mind, although I don’t dare formatting that external HDD due to the fact that the valious things I keep there make me afraid of losing them even if I backup them previously (I already have a security copy, but then I would only have that one copy, and I haven’t got any other HDD with such capacity for a second copy). Nevertheless, the mentioned issue happens not only with that external HDD, but also with other external drives such as USB pencils. It must be a problem of Windows 10, which was new when I bought my PC.