Once again, DAW crashing supplants music-making.
It’s always a mystery with too many moving parts to lay blame with any confidence.
Not this time.
I caught it with a nanny cam – a disk image!
Problem: Suddenly, inexplicably, Cubase 8.0.5 stopped loading project files; crashes at about 10% during the loading process.
Could it be a third party plugin? Nope. Nothing has changed since my disk image backup (which works and loads the same projects fine).
Confirmed by disabling plugin folders; still crashes.
Could it be a Windows update? No. I’ve disabled automatic everything. No updates have happened since the backup.
Could it corrupted prefs? Nope. Disabled and Trashed prefs and it still crashes.
Could it be a corrupted project file? Nope. Projects load fine on the backup image taken just days ago.
What about a plugin corrupting something on the file system level? No, I don’t use any plugin that writes or reads from the drive, and no presets were saved or loaded from any plugin since the backup. The plugins were sandboxed to memory only (and no corruption occurred, because the projects load fine from the Cubase image backup).
Cubase has not crashed since the backup.
Cubase has not hung or crashed when quitting.
My computer has not crashed, rebooted or reset since the backup.
My computer doesn’t do anything at night. No disk cleanup, virus scanning, updating. Nothing.
What about a disk error? Nope. This is Samsung Pro 840 SSD, practically immune to such things as long as there was no power failure during a write operation. And there is no indication of any problem, otherwise. Also, project files and sound file are on a separate SSD. And again, they all load fine from the backup. Also, those drives have the write cache disabled to prevent any corrupt should there be a power failure.
How about a memory error cause by cosmic rays (this is a real thing). No, because the project loads fine and no pref change writes (or even prefs reads/edits) happened since the backup.
Memory has also been tested, passed, and is premium grade.
SSD health is perfect.
Nothing has been installed since the backup.
Nothing has been updated since the backup.
The only operation that has been performed on the DAW since the update, is using Cubase (and without any anomalies).
BUSTED, Cubase. I caught you this time.
Cubase did something to trash Cubase, there is no other logical explanation.
No big deal, I’ll revert to the image backup only a few days old and carry on.
But geez, there needs to be a more robust handling of Cubase’s internal affairs.
This is a rare, undeniable case of catching Cubase going from, working, to not working, over the span of 5 uneventful days where only Cubase was being used.
It’s Cubase trashing Cubase, somehow. It’s not cosmic rays, the OS, brown-outs, prefs, 3rd party plugins, hardware failures or any manner of project-level corruption.
It’s Cubase caught red-handed doing something.
