Cubase Pro 12 This application was terminated with an error on each shutdown?

I mean actual crashes that occur while working in Cubase, but sometimes it also crashes when closing the project.
However it seems very sporadic as many people also say they aren’t experiencing any crashes, while running Cubase on the same OS.
In any case, the 12.0.10 maintenance update has increased performance for some people, and made it a lot worse for other.

Thanks for clarifying.

The one actual workflow issue I’ve seen while working in projects early on after the 12.0.10 update has been more frequent hangs, specifically when making certain plugin changes while the transport is running. For example, I know one time I was changing drum kits within Superior Drummer 3, and another time I may have been changing plugins (I don’t recall which brand, but it could well have been Waves, and there was at least one time using an IK Multimedia plugin the IK stuff is “special” with respect to changing presets in that they don’t return control to the DAW when just trying different presets in their browser, but only after hitting enter to finalize the selection – annoying anyway, but I think I did have a hang in that scenario in 12.0.10).

I don’t think I’ve had any actual crashes, though (not that hangs are really preferable). But since the time when I was seeing this, I started treating certain types of plugin changes like walking on eggshells – i.e. stop the transport, then make the significant change (e.g. changing one plugin for another or loading a different sample set, as opposed to just switching presets in an audio plugin), then restart the transport – and I don’t think I’ve seen further hangs, other than on exit.

When you use Cubase you now and then reset this counter. At least some of this reset points also will hang when the data is wrapped. For example Constraint-delay-compensation. There was a similar bug in Cubase some years ago but with crackling audio as result.

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Just to try and test the theory @cubace alluded to above with the amount of audio engine runtime thing, I did a little testing today before getting started with my session. Of course yesterday’s session had hung, so I started out with the normal “freeze” dialog box on startup. I got past that, then let Cubase 12.0.10 start while going away and doing a few other things. I was probably away from my computer for 15-20 minutes. When I got back, I played my project through once (on the order of 3 minutes), recreated my groove quantize setting from the drums track (one super annoying thing is that these hangs on shutdown don’t preserve that, so it has been reverting to a setting from the last song I worked on), then saved the project and shut down Cubase once the red close button was available. Hang! So this was after way less than an hour, probably less than a half hour, of runtime.

So it seems obvious that, even if the long session consideration alluded to is always an issue that can lead to this hang on shutdown, it is not a required catalyst (since my session was nowhere near the amount of time needed to trigger that specific issue).

Next I decided to try one other thing I’d seen alluded to by some others with respect to this problem. Specifically, I’d seen some mention issues in a multi-monitor setup when windows are left open on the non-primary monitor at the time of closing a session. The mentions I’d seen seemed to involve some virtual instruments or plugins, and I did not have any of those open on my second monitor. Rather, I had the MixConsole and the Markers window up. It’s possible I may also have had the Quantization settings up since I’d tweaked those again after getting back into my session. I think I again saved the project, then I shut down Cubase. No hang this time. This would have been a much shorter time between starting Cubase and closing it than the previous time, though – almost certainly less than 10 minutes.

So now I wanted to try opening some second monitor windows again and closing the project. I opened the MixConsole and Marker windows. I think I also opened the quantization window at one point, but I noted that was always on top (i.e. it didn’t go behind the MixConsole window when selecting the MixConsole window), so I closed that. I didn’t think I’d actually made any changes to the project (apparently wrong, as Cubase prompted me to save the project on shutting down), so I didn’t save it when closing Cubase. Again, no hang.

Opening Cubase again, I noted that it did not open the MixConsole or Marker windows (I guess, “duh!” since I hadn’t saved the project), so I opened them again, this time did save the project, then shut down Cubase again. Again no hang.

Opening Cubase again after that, the extra monitor windows were back. Hmm, could it be that the project had to be both started and closed with the windows open to trigger this? The short of it is that I’ve done the same opening with extra monitor windows open at least 3 times since then, a few times with playing parts of the project and or trying some other experiments in between, and, so far, it has not hung on shutting down again.

This is obviously not to say it won’t do that at the end of my session late tonight. In fact, based on similar experiments this past week, I strongly suspect it will hang tonight. Thus, I have no clue whether this experimentation actually tells me (or anyone else) anything. But perhaps there is some connection to what happened in the previous session, not just the session in question??? For example, maybe if it hung and had to be killed with task manager on the previous session, plus there was some other necessary condition (windows open on a second monitor, something else???), this audio engine runtime counter (if it really is involved in the hangs on shutdown) doesn’t get cleared (e.g. maybe there’s some reference to the previous value made at the start of the session and a corrupted value from that session already starts things off on a bad foot), and that somehow also gets combined with the value from the current session, only needing one of the conditions (i.e. corrupted previous session value or overflowing a samples processed counter) to cause the situation, but a short previous session, even with a crash, then a current session that doesn’t overflow the value, gets past it and everything is cool until the next long session??? (Yeah, this is a totally wild guess, so probably unlikely, but for entertainment value???)

Well, FWIW, after about an 8.5 hour session today, Cubase 12.0.10 did NOT hang on closing tonight. Same project that’s had Cubase hanging on closing every day for the past week or two (basically a day or two after 12.0.10 came out), same virtual instruments, still keeping MixConsole and Markers open on my second monitor, playing with a bunch of plugins during the course of the session (including quite a few from Waves), though all were frozen with their tracks by the end of the session (other than one instance of Superior Drummer 3) and no plugins were in the Control Room inserts. Go figure!!! :rofl:

FYI, this hang on shutdown persists in Cubase 12.0.20.

After my previous post where the hang (temporarily) did not come back in 12.0.10, I had one session where I had a hang while actually working on the project – I was loading a PSP Infinistrip Stereo plugin at the time – but then, after coming back from that hang, Cubase still did not hang on shutdown that night. I think there might have also been one other session where it did not hang. Then yesterday I had a much shorter than usual session (maybe 5 hours at most), and it did again hang on shutdown.

Today when I started on the same project in 12.0.20, I fairly immediately (maybe after playing the project back once?) closed the project then closed Cubase, and it hung. After that, I did a sequence similar to what I described above, closing some windows that had been active on the second monitor at the point of the project hang – the first iteration was closing a Kontakt 6 window, then the next was closing the MixConsole and Marker windows – saving the project then closing the project then closing Cubase on each iteration, both with hangs resulting. But then I opened the project (now without extra windows) again, went to close the project, and it prompted me to save (despite having made no changes during the session), which I did, then closed Cubase, and this time no hang. Then I went back into Cubase 12.0.20 again, this time opening the MixConsole and Marker windows the first time, then adding the same open Kontakt window the second time, saving the project then closing the project then closing Cubase after each iteration, and there were again no hangs on shutdown.

So now maybe I’ll get a few real sessions without the hangs on shutdown after which it will come back at some point for whatever still-to-be-determined reason? I guess time will tell, but the bottom line seems to be that this situation has not changed from 12.0.10 to 12.0.20.

Just wanted to add to this.

For me, the new 12.0.20 Update seems to have cured this issue so far.

All of the projects of mine that had this issue at shutdown now close as they should so thank you Steinberg. :grinning:

If it happens again I will report back on this thread.

Same issue here with the 12.0.20 too … only put run cubase in administrator mode could fix it but it’s not recommended by Steinberg as someone doesn’t find some media after that … but Cubase closes always good in administrator mode.

For me, it is not a constant thing, one way or another, with given project. In the example I mentioned above with 12.0.10, I was only working on one project, and, though it hung the majority of times on exit, there was also a period, after the testing I’d mentioned, where it wasn’t hanging for several days, then it came the night before 12.0.20 came out. That same project was then hanging on 12.0.20 until I repeated the testing with the closing second monitor windows, after which it also did not hang on shutdown again, including after a relatively long session yesterday. I guess I’ll see what happens after today’s session. :slight_smile:

I still have hanged (beachball) after long sessions when stopping the application.

This is discussed on another Topic.

That thread is more about performance issues. I think this is a different issue and will only confuse in the other thread. I dont think I have ASIO issue.

I’ve never had Cubase sitting overnight or even for 8 hours, though my session lengths are commonly 8-12 hours. Probably the longest time Cubase would just be sitting during those times would be 1-2 hours for my dinner/practicing break. Maybe another half hour (or less) break or two during the course of the session.

Interestingly 12.0.20 hasn’t hung on shutdown for me again since the exercise I mentioned above with closing down the second monitor windows, saving the project again, then reopening them for subsequent sessions. Last night I thought it might, because it took a while after trying to close it before the title bar went away, but it did actually close cleanly. Of course, this needs to be postfixed with the word “yet”, because I’d also had some periods with 12.0.10 where it also didn’t hang on shutdown prior to having the regular hang come back.

One thing in particular worth noting about my 12.0.20 uses, though, is that I haven’t yet put plugins back in the Control Room inserts since I haven’t gotten to mixing yet. Based on prior experience with Cubase 10.5 and 11, it had seemed that the potential for hanging on shutdown might relate to having Waves Nx plugins in the Control Room inserts. Those seemed to be somewhat less frequent after the Waves 13 update, which allowed turning off the extra head tracking window, and I also found later in the C11 era that waiting for the red color to come over the Windows close button for Cubase before clicking it seemed to further reduce (almost, but not quite eliminate) the hangs on close. Then Cubase 12.0.0. rarely actually hung on shutdown but mostly always put up the startup messages like it had, and 12.0.10 usually did hang on shutdown.

There is a thread I saw today that may be of interest to Windows users on this thread:

FWIW, I tried this with the three minidumps from hangs I’ve had thus far with 12.0.20 (not ones I’d explicitly captured, but rather the ones Cubase produces on the next run of Cubase). Two of those where hangs on exit, and showed Kontakt being in the stack trace. The other was a hang when I was trying to add a group track to 16 selected tracks in one go, and did not show any plugins in the trace, so was likely a hang inside Cubase itself.

I’d deleted all my earlier minidumps, so I can’t tell at this point if earlier hangs on shutdown consistently showed Kontakt in the traces. And I haven’t had hangs on exit since the early couple with 12.0.20. (While Kontakt has been in my project all along, it’s conceivable that it might have been frozen and/or disabled at the point of shutting down 12.0.20 most of the time as I know I’ve been mostly working on vocals recently, and have done that against an instrumental tracks mixdown, with all other tracks disabled, to keep resource use low for tracking, comping, etc.)

Hi @cubace ,
as already confirmed: the hangs as you described should be fixed with the coming .30 update. Thanks again for the int32 hint :smiley:

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the 12.0.30 update is out now, but I can’t find the log to see what’s new

edit: the release note is out now

12.0.30 release notes

FWIW, my early experience with Cubase Pro 12.0.30 in this respect:

I have not had an actual hang on shutdown yet (but only had one less-than-2-hour session to close thus far (and my current project had not been hanging on shutdown the last few days anyway, despite extended sessions), so it is too early to say if that has gone away for good on my system.

HOWEVER, I have already had the (seemingly related) issue I was having with Cubase 12.0.0, where Cubase did not (at least visibly or in terms of still being in Task Manager) hang on shutdown, but Cubase reported it had hung in the previous section in the next startup. I’ve related what I know about it at this point in the Cubase 12.0.30 thread at:

In this case, a plugin (Guitar Rig 6, which is fully up-to-date on my system) was referenced in the call stack, but not as the topmost entry. (My most recent hangs in 12.0.20, including those in the same project, did not reference plugins in the call stack at all.)

Happens to me in 12.0.30 and other people I know in 12.0.60
Including projects with no plugins. It’s a bit annoying, but I prefer it to the “Freeze On Close” issue that used to constantly happen in C11. I think some code to force close was added in 12, but the root causes are still mysterious. Possible any 3rd party plugin just existing in the plug in list might be the problem.

I ran maintenance on my soft elicenser, and that corrected the problem. Also updated my Ilok softward.

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