I’m having consistent crashes whenever I disable/enable Instrument tracks. Rack Instruments appear to be working fine, just happens with Instrument tracks. It doesn’t matter which instrument I have loaded. In my large template it crashes often (almost every time). In an empty session with only 1 Instrument track loaded, it may take several disable/enable actions, but eventually it will crash.
I’m running Cubase 9.0.1 on Mac 10.11.6. Appreciate have any thoughts or experience with this behavior?
I have been having the same problem since the introduction of the disabled-tracks-feature of Cubase 7 or 7.5, some four years ago. I still hope that this feature will be 100% working someday.
In the latest version, 9.5, Cubase still crashes when enabling a disabled track, but Cubase don’t totally crash with a program shutdown anymore, so I just ignore the crash popup messages save the project in a new filename and continue working, because the vst instruments from the disabled tracks do work, so its not the vst instrument plugin that causes these crashes! These crashes are random when enabling vst instrument tracks, as in sometimes a particular vst instrument track crash when being enables, and sometimes it doesn’t crash. Even Steinbergs own vst instruments crash this way, sometimes.
It is not enough to inactivate/hide all the vst plugins that I don’t want to use anymore, because if some of those plugins are in a Cubase project I import then those plugins are still available to cause trouble. So again it might be wise to rebuild a template in any new version of Cubase, just in case some old trash data exist in the template.
Perhaps this old issue has something to do with asio guard or the asio driver out of sync or something. I have no idea but I have several hundred crash report files by now. I have looked in some of these crash report files with notepad++ but I cannot figure out by looking at those WHY Cubase crash. In my other DAW crash report are reported in a popup window, so the user is told what happened and why. This is something I miss from Cubase, so I still prefer writing music in my old and cheap DAW and then do my mixing in Cubase afterward and working with audio files only have never caused Cubase to crash here.
I don’t recall that these crashed were that often with my previous Cubase 8.5 version, but perhaps I should rebuild my huge template in Cubase 9.5, as some users have suggested. This can be done faster than expected with the “export selected tracks” feature.
I hope Steinberg Support read these comments, because I don’t bother reporting this issue to them again, because I cannot make Cubase crash every time I enable a vst instrument track - it is more like : 50% of the time I enable a vst instrument track, then Cubase crashes. It happens to any vst instrument with or without any vst fx.
My system is Cubase 9.5.21, Windows 8.1, Core i7 4ghz, 32gb ram, ssds.
btw. I have uninstalled all the plugins that I either don’t want to use anymore and the plugins that Cubase 9.5 have blacklisted.
I have reported this before, so I copy this post as a reply to my former post too:
Could you share(via Dropbox or similar) the crash dump file from Cubase 9.5.21, please? Could you try in Safe Start Mode (trash preferences)?
It’s danger to continue to work when the message appears. Something is corrupted in Cubase in that time. So you could have unpredictable issues after. Like Cubase can hard-crash (without saving), the project could become corrupted, etc. I would always recommend to restart Cubase.
Then I tested… tried to make cubase crash when using the cubase project file that crash so often a few days ago. Enabling+disabling different vst instruments tracks. After 5 minutes no crashes! Very interesting. Now restarting Cubase in normal mode, and trying the same old procedure of enabling+disabling different vst instrument tracks that often crash Cubase while doing so. Very weird no crashes either.
I have no idea if starting cubase in safe start mode alone have fixed this issue, or I have just been lucky in these small tests today. Perhaps the crashes were caused by some reverb plugins I had enabled on fxsend tracks. I did replace some of them a few days ago, although those reverbs have not crashed by themself - because the crash always have happened when I enabled or disabled a vst instrument track.
I have no idea. I do however have a lot of crash-log files.
I now send you an email with a zip file containing six crashdump files that were created by Cubase 9.5.21 when it crashed while enabling/disabling vst instrument tracks. I found your email address at your cubase-training website. I dont have dropbox and dont use filesharing websites because my antivirus blocks those.
Perhaps you can decypher those crashdump files, and figure out why cubase crashed those six times.
update : I have also uninstalled Cubase 7.5, 8.0, 8.5 and 9.5 and manually deleted some keys in the windows registration editor (regedit.exe), and then reinstalled Cubase 9.5, so this might have helped too? Cubase still crashed when I closed my big template project file, but it havent crashed when enabling/disabling vst instrument tracks for an hour by now. Promissing. However I am still interested in knowing why Cubase crashed before, so I can get rid of any plugins that caused Cubase crash, if that is the case.
I resolved the crash dumps and sent them to Steinberg (CAN-15058). Could you share your original Cubase 9.5 preferences folder, please? The one, you were using when Cubase was crashing.
A few minutes ago I testet if Cubase would cause a new crash while enabling/disabling vst instruments tracks, and Cubase crashed after enabling the 10th or something vst instruments track - I can send you the latest crashdump file AND the current Cubase preference folder. Is it this folder that is the Cubase preference folder ? → C:\Users(username)\AppData\Roaming\Steinberg\Cubase 9.5_64
I will send those two sets of files to your email addresse right away.
A few days ago I read somewhere that the film composer Junkie XL has suggested the rebuilding of a Cubase template after an upgrade. I didnt do this after I upgraded from Cubase 8.5 to 9.5, because my big crashing template have betwenn 1000-1500 tracks in many many folders, but all disabled tracks, so they don’t use much memory.
The past hour I have tried to see if the enable/disable vst instrument crashes could go away, if I start with an empty Cubase project and see how long it takes to crash.
First I opened the big crashing template, that crashes often.
Then I selected the content of a track folder with many vst instrument tracks, selected the tracks and exported them to a track-archive file.
I repeated this task with something like 10 folders, which include probably 200 vst instrument tracks.
Then I started a new empty Cubase project, and imported all those exported archive-file, and recreated the track folders and organized the tracks like in the big crashing template.
Then after a save, I did the enable/disable vst instrument tracks tests again with this new test-template, and it didn’t crash! I enabled almost every track and disables everything again, and simply no crashes.
I can see that there is still a difference between the two Cubase templates still, because the new template has lost the sendfx settings, but the insertfx survived.
Then I started a new empty cubase project again, and this time ALSO exported the FX tracks from my big template.
I started the new empty template and imported the FX track before importing any vst instrument tracks, because this way the sendfx settings in not ignored when importing.
Now I did the enable/disable test again, and this time Cubase crashed while using the clean new template. And it crashed by doing the same enable vst instrument track as in the big crashing template.
The different here is the sendFX tracks.
Perhaps the crashes are caused by a sendFX reverb or delay, which the vst instrument track that I enable has sendFX settings to?
I must test again another day - I have spend way too many hours today with this issue.
In addition to my latest comment above, I continued this testing by removing all plugins from the sendFX tracks from the small new template file I created yesterday in Cubase 9.5.21, because those were the only difference between the no-crash test and crash test I did yesterday evening. However Cubase 9.5.21 hard-crashed when I enabled the very first vst instrument track - so its not the sendfx tracks either. Again, this is just simply random crashes when enabling or disabling vst instrument tracks.
edit : I will downgrade to Cubase 8.5 and see if this helps.
edit : I now reinstalled Cubase 8.5 (using http://support.steinberg.de/ISOs/Cubase/8.5/Cubase_Pro_8.5_DVD1.iso ) and tested my big template with a lot of enabling of vst instruments tracks of different kind (ivory, nexus, omnisphere, kontakt, diva, zebra etc.) - Cubase 8.5 didn’t crash after 50+ enabled tracks nor after disabling them again. So the solution by now is to use Cubase 8.5 instead of Cubase 9.5. I did have to uninstall izotope neutron 2 and ozone 8 advanced and manually delete any leftover files from isotope containing “iz” “ozone” “neutron” from the 3 different vstplugins folders in order to be able to start Cubase 8.5 at all, but Cubase 8.5 was kind enough to tell me what went wrong during the plugin scan.
Hmm, interesting. I also find I have an occasional crash due to enabling/disabling tracks. I had not thought too much about it because it seems somewhat random, and also I just reload project and everything seems fine after that.
I think now I seem some similarities to Maximux situations. Tracks are disabled while in previous Cubase versions, then I don’t use them very much on latest Cubase 9 builds. They possibly have send fx data attached as well (I will keep an eye out for that, too).
When rebuilding the tracks in question (create a new track → manually transfer the settings and files) no problems after that.
My solution: Working on a bigger movie with all music cues in one project - File Project Size has exceeded 750MB = Resulting in Cubase crashes. Have deleted unused Deactivated tracks and reduced Project Size to about 550MB. Now no crashes at all when further deactivating instruments.
Might have something to do with Cubase 9.5 (win10) getting confused with all that data ?
Oh, do you mean it is possible that an already disabled track might cause problems when further disabling other tracks ? I thought an already disabled track is not really loaded (doesn’t even use fls slots) so in my theory it shouldn’t bother cubase at all until you enable the buggy track again …
Cheers, lokotus
+1 on this problem for almost a year now. I’ve sent my crash logs to steinberg and have been on the phone with them but no overall solution. It’s very random. Sometimes I can work a while and it never happen, other times happens a lot and on different tracks. Currently on Cubase 9.5.30, Windows 10, UR824.