Cubase Hangs On Shutdown - Troubleshooting?

Cubase
1

Hi,

I’ve suffered for years, since perhaps Cubase 7 or 8 with two possibly related symptoms.

  1. Sometimes, when I go back to my PC after it has been left overnight, The sound stops. Everything else ‘works’… meters go, transport, recording, etc. But no sound without re-starting Cubase. But that is NOT the point of this post.

  2. After a certain period of time, Cubase will refuse to gracefully shut down. It seems to go into an endless loop in Windows Task Manager. I simply End Task and re-start but… it’s a pain because various settings are not saved unless the shutdown goes smoothly.

Anyhoo… what I just realised is that, according to Task Manager, the offending child process is “VST Plugins”. So… does that give a clue? Perhaps a plug-in is to blame?

I have never before considered this possibility because I usually only use ‘big-name’ plugs like ToonTrack Superior3, Ivory, Komplete, etc. And it happens regardless of which combination of these I’m using.

Any ideas on how to troubleshoot… once and for all?

TIA,

2

I dont know what debugger tools they have with microsoft. But on OSX it’s easy (and I assume it can be done in Microsoft too)
Open a terminal. Find the process number for cubase. (for example ps -ef | grep -i Cubase)
When you have the “PID” do kill -ABRT “PID”. It will crash the process, and a developer can look into the generated crash
and probably find the cause.

3

The sound stopping after the PC “sleeps” overnight is fairly normal. Drivers tend to fail to start back up properly. Either fully shutdown the PC or let it run normally.

Isolating an plugin holding up the shutdown could be tough, especially if it doesn’t cause the problem every time, but the best way would be to remove them all and add them in gradually, observing for bad behavior.

4

Since it wasn’t mentioned…
Make sure you have the latest eLCC installed and make sure to run the maintenance as administrator.

Regards. :sunglasses: