Cubase Pro less stable in Windows than macOS?

Sebastian_Alvarez · April 13, 2025, 4:56am

Until the end of 2024 I did all my work in Cubase in my Mac Studio M1 Ultra. Generally speaking, both Cubase and Nuendo were very stable, which was another thing that made me switch to Cubase from Logic Pro. Cubase seemed very stable even on very large projects that would go over the 64 GB of RAM in my Mac Studio.

But in January I built myself a new PC with 192 GB of RAM, mostly to be able to load a considerable amount of VSTis without having to resort to freezing or disabling tracks. I figured that if Cubase was so stable in macOS, it had to be the same or more in Windows, since Cubase to me always seemed like a program made for Windows and then ported to macOS. You take one look at Logic Pro and you can tell it’s a very macOS app. You take a look at Cubase, especially when you open extra windows with some functionality, and you can tell it’s mostly a Windows program. With this I’m not saying that I switched to Windows thinking of stability, if that was even the case. if I had more money than I will ever need, I would’ve just spent $8,000 in a Mac Studio M3 Ultra with 256 GB of RAM. Sadly, that’s not the case.

Unfortunately, it seems a lot less stable in Windows than macOS. Granted, I have way too many VSTs and VSTis, but they are the same I had in my Mac Studio. While stability in Cubase wasn’t 100%, it was generally very stable. Since I started working in Windows 11 Pro, as soon as a project gets a bit complex, I start getting problems.

The weird thing is that this doesn’t usually mean crashes while working (that’s the good part). In fact, the problems are usually not crashes, but hangs for at least a whole night until I kill Cubase from the Task Manager.

Right now I’m working on a MIDI mockup from a MIDI I got on Musescore. I can work on this project for hours just fine (although the other day it did crash), but when I want to close Cubase Pro 14, it starts showing the usual progress dialog that it’s unloading this and that, and eventually it should unload all and show the welcome screen (I’m not sure why in Windows it goes back to the welcome screen when in macOS it actually closes Cubase).

Except that in this case, at one point it stops unloading things, it just stalls:

I took the screenshot above late this morning, when I turned on the monitor and saw it still there, after closing Cubase last night.

When this happens, which by now is basically every single time I close this project, and same thing it happened with other projects before, if I hover the mouse pointer over the task bar Cubase icon, I see this:

And Task Manager shows me this:

So basically every time I close this project, or other projects except for the simplest projects with just an audio track, this is what I get. And I have to kill the process from the Task Manager and next time I start Cubase, I get the usual box asking me if I want to start without any 3rd party plugins, which I can do but it’s useless to me since I need the instruments I use, and some 3rd party VSTs.

Now, to be honest this is perhaps not the most scientific comparison, because I’m comparing mostly Cubase Pro 13 on macOS last year to Cubase Pro 14 on Windows 11 Pro this year. But there’s no chance I’m going to spend days installing all my plugins on my Mac (which I have since wiped to install Sequioaiyusoaaaa).

But I know I didn’t have these problems on my Mac Studio, but Cubase on Windows seems rather unstable. Besides the common error I already showed, this one happened the other and it puzzles me:

While that plugin is in the background, it was there before, it’s not like I loaded it and this error showed up. And the thing is I closed that dialog and kept working for five minutes without any problems, but I think when I tried to save the project, it told me I needed to save it with another name. So I did, closed Cubase, same thing happened with the eternal hanging, I killed it and started it again.

Now, it wouldn’t surprise me if this was because it’s Windows as opposed to macOS, since it’s generally more prone to crashes and weird behaviors; but my system is generally stable, built with components in the QVL, and torture-tested extensively as soon as I finished building it without showing any errors, and this includes that Intel app that tells you if your CPU is one of those in a batch that had some sort of problem that could fry your CPU and motherboard or something like that, but my CPU is not in that bad batch.

So, is Cubase generally speaking less stable in Windows than macOS?

glennloopez · April 13, 2025, 5:14am

if you post your dmp files someone will read them and maybe it will give you some more answers what is causing your issues. I am a new Mac user, been on Windows with Nuendo/Cubase since 2004. In general Cubase on Windows has been great for me with the exceptions of a few botched launces the last years at version v12.0.0 and v13.0.0.

There are a lot of more options to configure on a Windows platform over a Mac so the probability of issues should be a higher % on a Windows computer to begin with.
I have been running an Windows computer with AMD CPU, Asus MB and RME soundcard. it has been super solid and stable

Budawg · April 13, 2025, 7:09am

Firstly, let me say that I am not a Windows fanboy or apologist. Just the opposite. But bear in mind that the problem might not be with Cubase. It could be one flaky plugin (for which the Mac version is more stable) that is causing the problem. It could also be the Windows version of your audio interface driver, etc., etc.

What if, rather than closing your project at night, you just left it open? Would you get memory leaks and potentially even greater instability? Who knows until you try. Modern computers (at least Macs) are pretty good at going to sleep and waking up without issue. I don’t even bother to close Cubase on my M1 Max MacBook Pro anymore. I just close the lid, and my Cubase project is there waiting for me in the morning when I open the laptop lid again.

It’s probably too late to change course now, but did you really need an $8,000 M3 Mac Studio Ultra? You could have gotten the 16-core M4 Max Mac Studio with 128GB of RAM and a 2TB drive for around half of that ($4,099 before tax). I would argue that’s more power than what 99% of music producers need. And that includes me who is “getting by” with my M1 Max MacBook Pro with “only” a 2TB drive and 64GB of RAM. I run very demanding plugins and own several massive sample libraries. Also, given that the latest Macs all feature Thunderbolt 5, you really don’t need more than 2TB of internal storage on a desktop unit. And 128GB or RAM on a Mac is probably more useful than 192GB on a PC.

Incidentally, Logic did not start out as a Mac program. It started on the Atari in 1988 and came to the Mac much later. (It was also available for Windows for a time.) In fact, it was one of the least Mac-like programs available in its first Mac version. It has taken Apple the better part of 20 years to polish Logic into the Mac application you see now.

Regardless, the “origin story” really doesn’t matter. You are never going to get a definitive answer to your question, if for no other reason than some people have a much higher tolerance for (or obliviousness to) instability. Probably most people wouldn’t even consider having to shut down an application in the Task Manager as a problem worth worrying about. Windows users have learned to accept a lot of things.

John_Marttila · April 13, 2025, 2:21pm

I switched from PC to a MacBook Pro a year ago because I needed something portable, powerful, and very quiet. In my experience, the bugginess of my PCs was not significantly worse than my Mac, and the “it just works” Mac motto didn’t feel particularly true as I had to jump through many hoops to get my Mac working the way I wanted it to, but I also purchased my PCs from PCAudiolabs, so they arrived at my door with software installed and settings optimized for audio. Regardless, I’ve found plenty of ways to crash my PCs and MacBook Pro alike over the years.

I’d encourage you to briefly use safe mode to help isolate the problem. If the problem continues in safe mode, it may be a Cubase bug, a problem with the project file, or another system level issue. If the problem stops in safe mode, then it’s most likely a third-party plugin, a corrupt preference file/setting, or a problem with something like a MIDI remote script. A specific plugin has been the culprit in most of my experiences. So, I’ll usually start by deactivating third party plug-ins and using current program preferences to see if that’s the issue right away.

If it appears to be a plug-in, then I open the problematic project, disable all tracks, and save it as a new version. I can usually close Cubase successfully at that point (which also puts the problem solving project file at the top of the recent files for convenience after I get it to crash again).

If the problem persists with all tracks disabled, then it may not be a plugin, but if the problem goes away, then I start enabling tracks and trying to do whatever action made things crash until I find my culprit(s). If I rule out a few tracks, I can also speed things up by enabling all tracks that only have plugins that I have enabled without problems in other tracks (if this causes a crash, then there might be an issue with some track plug-in’s behavior with its automation). When I find the track that hangs up the program, then I isolate plugins one at a time and usually end up with a single plugin that is the issue.

When a third party plugin is problematic, then I have to decide if it’s worth my time to keep problem solving the plugin, as opposed to replacing it in the track(s) or just rendering to a new track & disabling the original (after mixing it the way I want). There are often ways to rehabilitate a broken plug-in by updating, reinstalling or seeing if the pluging works in a different project file without an issue (in which case you can import your other tracks to the new project file).

Anyhow, I’m just trying to illustrate that using those safe mode options can be very helpful for isolating problems. The last issue I had was actually a crash that occurred when creating mixdowns, and the problem ended up being the new track modulators I was trying to use in some drum tracks. That became much easier to find when I ruled out third-party plugins using safe mode.

Sebastian_Alvarez · April 13, 2025, 10:13pm

Yes, that’s true, and part of the problem. Having checked all components against their QVLs doesn’t guarantee the stability that you would get with a Mac, where all components inside are designed by the same company.

Sebastian_Alvarez · April 13, 2025, 10:46pm

True, it could be a plugin, and at some point I’m going to start deactivating them by manufacturer first and if that doesn’t give me an answer, one by one.

And yes, the driver for my audio interface could be another possibility. The world of Windows PCs has too many possibilities for something to go wrong because of its openness. Honestly I don’t think macOS would be as stable as it is if it was an OS that Apple sold freely to install in any PC, and that’s probably why they don’t do it.

It is too late because I’m way past the return period for all the components. And I don’t mind, I really like my new PC, and while Windows still gets on my nerves (actually more Microsoft than Windows itself), I don’t hate it, except for short periods of time when something happens that shows proper lack of QC.

And 128 GB would have been the amount of RAM that would’ve kept me from building a PC and stayed with my good old Mac Studio M1 Ultra 64 GB. What you say about a new M4 Max with 128 GB of RAM being more than 99% of music producers need is probably correct, if you are speaking of professionals that record music to audio tracks, apply VSTs and do all the mixing and mastering. Even 64 GB of RAM is decent for that task.

But if you are a composer, or that’s your goal, 64 GB won’t get you very far, unless you start working in small sections. Right now this project has 82 instrument tracks, plus some group tracks and an FX track, and it’s showing me 119 GB of RAM in Task Manager.

And if you see the first number, it says compressed, so the real number might be quite higher. The reality is, when you start loading Berlin Series and everything from OT, that number goes quite fast. And Eastwest doesn’t fall far behind.

But when you talk about just audio, it’s crazy how little it demands from the machine. I had a project that could barely play two seconds, until I did the full mixdown that creates a new project with all the instrument tracks rendered to audio, and that project opened in seconds in my Mac Studio. And I threw the kitchen sink at it, and it would still play in real time just fine.

2 TB get filled up in no time. My Mac Studio has 4 TB inside and that gets filled up quickly.

And Thunderbolt 4 or 5 may be great, but you need very expensive external SSDs to take advantage of that. The Mac’s internal storage is insanely fast at around 7 GBps. But the only thunderbolt SSD I have, an external OWC 4 TB that I paid over $600 for, gives me half as much. The rest of the external SSDs I have, 4 TB Samsungs T7 and T9, and a 4 TB Crucial, benchmark at best 1 GBps, when they are new and empty.

The PC I built has four 4 TB Samsung 990, one a Pro and the other three EVOs, all internal in NVMe slots. Each of them benchmarks 7 GBps. You just can’t get that on a Mac these days. You can get 16 TB internal only on the M3 Ultra for an extra $4,600. My four Samsung 990 NVMe drives cost me $1,138.71 total.

And while I agree with you that Macs are better at handling RAM, well, I don’t think a Mac with 128 GB is more efficient than a PC with 192. The difference is just too much.

Sebastian_Alvarez · April 13, 2025, 10:49pm

Thanks, but the thing is, without 3rd party plugins, I have no project, because they are VSTis from Eastwest, Orchestral Tools, VSL, Cinematic Studios which use Kontakt and so on.

Googly_Smythe · April 13, 2025, 10:54pm

Resident pedant here…
The compressed RAM is shown in brackets. In your screenshot, zero (0) RAM is compressed.

Resident pedant has left the building.

Budawg · April 14, 2025, 2:55pm

Sebastian_Alvarez:

2 TB get filled up in no time. My Mac Studio has 4 TB inside and that gets filled up quickly.

And Thunderbolt 4 or 5 may be great, but you need very expensive external SSDs to take advantage of that. The Mac’s internal storage is insanely fast at around 7 GBps. But the only thunderbolt SSD I have, an external OWC 4 TB that I paid over $600 for, gives me half as much. The rest of the external SSDs I have, 4 TB Samsungs T7 and T9, and a 4 TB Crucial, benchmark at best 1 GBps, when they are new and empty.

The PC I built has four 4 TB Samsung 990, one a Pro and the other three EVOs, all internal in NVMe slots. Each of them benchmarks 7 GBps. You just can’t get that on a Mac these days. You can get 16 TB internal only on the M3 Ultra for an extra $4,600. My four Samsung 990 NVMe drives cost me $1,138.71 total.

At the risk of getting off topic, a Thunderbolt 5 case will provide at least 80 Gbps of bidirectional bandwidth, which is roughly 6,000 MB/s for the drive speed. This doesn’t quite take advantage of the 7,000 MB/s theoretical speed of most current NVMe drives. However, the difference is not worth worrying about. Even the 2,800 MB/s drive speed of my Thunderbolt 4 case is fast enough to stream even the largest sample libraries without issue (although loading projects may be somewhat slower).

Yes, Thunderbolt 5 cases are stupid expensive at the moment. But the price will definitely come way down in no time. Here is the Thunderbolt 5 version of the case from ACASIS that I own (and for which I paid $89):

This is way overpriced at $269. But the case does include a quiet fan with an on/off switch which is nice.

So you could get two of these with 8TB NVMe drives and call it a day. That’s pretty much all you would ever need. If you don’t store your music production content (or massive video library) on the Mac’s internal drive, 2TB is plenty for applications, documents, etc. I have a gazillion applications and files on my Mac’s internal 2TB drive and still have 900 GB free.

But it sounds like you have convinced yourself that the PC is the way to go because of the amount of RAM your orchestral libraries require. I hope your issue(s) are related to one problematic plugin because I prefer many things about Windows 11 over macOS. The inherent instability (in my experience) for your use case is the reason I am not willing to roll the dice and build a PC “power tower” and then be stuck with all of these components I can’t return (and mostly likely can’t sell for anything). No thanks.

I plan to get the almost absurdly small, nearly-silent M4 Pro Mac mini with 64GB of RAM, 2TB of internal storage, and 10 Gigabit Ethernet (so I can set up a NAS for backups) for $2,900 plus an external Thunderbolt 5 case containing a single 8TB NVMe drive for around $1,000 with the ACASIS case. This will sit under one of the monitors on my desk and take up almost no space while generating practically zero heat. However, given your RAM requirements, that won’t work for you. But aside from the very small minority of composers like yourself, that’s a killer system you know will work out of the box (and doesn’t require sourcing parts and building the PC).

For better or worse, you just had to be one of those demanding composers.

Best of luck.

Thor.HOG · April 14, 2025, 3:11pm

This is such a wise statement… IMO, the conversation shouldn’t really be about “stability in Windows,” but rather, “stability on your home-built rig with components sourced from disparate vendors where interoperability is only an afterthought.” On the right hardware, with the right drivers, Windows can be rock solid. Now, I have privacy and security issues (particularly with W11) that factor into my decision to run MacOS, but the KERNELBASE.DLL error shown above has nothing to do with Cubase at all. That’s most likely caused by some bajankity driver, or even the oversight of loading the proper driver for a PCI-bus component. There’s a lot to be said for the Mac platform, and reliability is right up there at the top because of the way the hardware is designed and the drivers written (which is an oversimplification).

Psychlist1972 · April 14, 2025, 3:27pm

One thing I noticed with 285k builds with DDR5, especially if using XMP, is that the RAM can heat up significantly, and you need sufficient cooling.

My 285k build, with 192GB RAM needed much more cooling than any other rig I’ve built in the past, and it was almost entirely because of the memory. I was failing on the 3rd pass of memtest86 consistently, and was seeing random crashes elsewhere. I am using default XMP settings which don’t clock much higher than stock for a 4-stick set. But the two inner sticks of DDR5 just weren’t getting enough airflow and so were hitting temps where they’d start to show errors (it’s a matched set of 4 Corsair sticks with heatsinks, and in the compat list). The January BIOS updates also helped, but it was the cooling which finally got it solid.

Now, since you are not bugchecking and it’s an app or plugin that is failing, I suspect that’s not this problem. But it’s worth double-checking by throwing memtest86 on a thumb drive and running it overnight if you are doing things which fill up with data segments of memory not often occupied by running driver/kernel code.

A Cubase .dmp file will also help pinpoint the source of the issue if it’s a plugin or something recurring in app code.

Pete
Microsoft

Budawg · April 14, 2025, 4:59pm

Hi Pete,

Although I no longer use a PC for music production, I appreciate your taking the time to provide such detailed, informative help.

However, (and please excuse a bit of snark) reading your comments is like reading the “manual” for the Large Hadron Collider. This is so much more than the average musician wants (or needs) to take on.

Incidentally, I was trying to think of a device with a dense set of user instructions and requiring extensive prior knowledge to operate. I almost immediately thought of the Large Hadron Collider. But just for kicks, I entered the following prompt in Microsoft 365 Copilot:

What is an example of an extremely complicated, arcane piece of technology or device for which the manual would be extremely dense and difficult for the average person to understand?

And Copilot came back with Large Hadron Collider as the first example! Haha. How funny is that? I guess great “minds” think alike.

Thor.HOG · April 14, 2025, 5:27pm

Hey @Reco29, what do atomic research statisticians use to distill Spaghetti Models?

A Large Hadron Colander!!!

Psychlist1972 · April 14, 2025, 5:29pm

OP built their own PC, so I leveled my comments and made some assumptions at that level. (And didn’t even need to dig tunnels in Europe to do it )

Pete
Microsoft

Thor.HOG · April 14, 2025, 5:47pm

And I might add that typical commodity hardware components aren’t built for low noise floors. Some of those power supply fans are really loud, and horrible for studios. Just the fan on my Meraki MS130-12X switch generates too much noise for my liking in the studio - I had to disconnect the on-board fan and place two silent USB-powered AC Infinity fans on each side just to maintain ~32dB-A. Homegrown rigs aren’t all they’re cracked up to be unless you really do your research.

My MBP M3 Max runs silent under normal conditions.

Norbury_Brook · April 14, 2025, 6:29pm

my 9950x machine is as silent as my M1 Max.

To the OP are you usingt Midi RT rather than the defualt setting? if not then change it.

At the same time run the mmcss.exe fix (download from steinberg) and set it to maximum threads.

Those 2 things made my Cubase experinece on windows 100% stable after 6 months of trouble shooting and using a new Mac instead. After this i returned very happily to Windows, which for recording audio using RME means I have ASIO direct monitoring, something I didn’t using my M1 max… after a while it got irritating having to open total mix everytime using the mac… on windows Cubase controls it directly

M

Sebastian_Alvarez · April 14, 2025, 8:40pm

Thanks for the long reply, but honestly, it doesn’t matter. Like I said, I’m not able to return all the components, and even if I could, I wouldn’t. I didn’t decide to build a new PC on a whim. I considered all the options, and decided for that, the main factor being that a new Mac was going to be much more expensive, but it wasn’t the only thing.

Among other things, I like having a machine that I built myself, taking hours to do it very carefully and doing all the reading and watching I need to catch up with new technology since the last time I built one, which in this case was 2019 for an employer at the time. I’ve been building PCs for myself and friends since the late 90’s, and at least for the ones I still know of, they work perfectly fine to this day.

If I didn’t have this background in computer tech, there’s no way I would build a PC for something as important as studying music production, or probably for anything else, especially since if anything goes wrong, I didn’t have a clue on how to troubleshoot it. I’ve been a computer nerd for 30 years, so I may not be a computer engineer, but I know my way around computers, Macs and PCs.

While Microsoft gets on my nerves at times because of downright negligence, and there are many things in which macOS is far more advanced than Windows, I still love this new PC and intend to use it for many years to come.

Sebastian_Alvarez · April 14, 2025, 9:02pm

Memtest86+ is included with my motherboard’s BIOS. So the first test I did after building the machine, even before installing Windows, was to run that test. I think it needs to run four times to consider the machine stable if I remember reading that correctly back then, but now I’m looking that up and as usual there’s tons of conflicting results. But well, I ran it four times and passed.

I also left Prime95 running two nights in a row in the setting that tortures the machine the most, and it passed. I also ran other tests, one for the GPU and other things. They all passed back then, and I don’t see the point in torturing the machine again unless there’s a good reason.

This doesn’t seem to me like the kind of problem that happens because of hardware issues, incompatibility or whatever, because those tend to show when you’re doing something demanding, like rendering 3D or video, or if in Cubase you were attempting to play an insanely large project with instrument tracks. But I rebuilt my old “Prelude to War” project in the new PC and after taking forever to load, it did play and didn’t crash Cubase 14 Pro, being actually a Nuendo 13 project done in macOS.

So it seems to me that the machine is stable. The only other software I have a consistent problem with is F1 24, which gives me an error at launch sometimes but in a box that is from Unreal Engine 4. I recognize it because UE4 has a very different look than UE5, and that error dialog is definitely from UE4.

But you make a good point, I guess tonight I’ll boot into Memtest86 and let it run all night long. As for the DMP file, I guess I’ll send it to Steinberg support and see what they say.

Sebastian_Alvarez · April 14, 2025, 9:16pm

This is how I have it:

However, I was unaware of that WinRT MIDI setting, so I can give it a try and see what happens, and the other thing for the threads. I don’t know what could go wrong, but fear of the unknown is spiritual paralysis.

Norbury_Brook · April 14, 2025, 9:34pm

Run the mmcss fix first and set threads to max, it’s totally safe.

Then switch to midi RT.

It made the world of difference here.

Its more stable now than my M1 max

M