This might help for those having constant freezes in simple tasks in Cubase 10 or 10.5 like I did.
Try disabling all MIDI Sends. There seems to be something wrong with them.
There wasn’t any loop in the project where I found this issue. I could play and hear normally what I was playing, but every time that I was doing a recording of about 2min 15s of piano (classical music with many notes), after pressing stop, Cubase would cut the sound: the MIDI meters were on but I could not hear any more sound. After that, I couldn’t close Cubase or change the sound card: Cubase would freeze.
The steps leading to the audio engine crash (both on 10.0.60 and 10.5.20) were dead simple: arm many midi tracks at once, record 2min, stop.
I was able to isolate the issue: I had 6 MIDI sends that were sending notes to a virtual keyboard plugin. It wasn’t a problem with the plugin itself because I ran the same test with the plugin playing the notes directly (without a MIDI send) and it didn’t freeze. After disabling the MIDI sends, the problem disappeared.
Thanks for your reply. Sorry, I have never done that so I need more information. Which arguments should I put in the command line? procdump64 or procdump? When should I do this? When Cubase freezes? Before?
Please download ProcDump64 from Microsoft (~650kB) and extract the archive to a local folder on your harddisk.
Run Command Prompt (cmd) as administrator (right click and select “run as administrator”)
Navigate (in the Command Prompt) to the folder with the extracted procdump file.
For example:
cd C:\Users<username>\Downloads\Procdump
Note: the dmp file will be written into that folder.
Launch Cubase/Nuendo. You can work as usual. At any time, change to the command prompt and start procdump, to monitor Cubase/Nuendo for unexpected behavior (see next step).
The -h option will write a dmp file in case of an application hang. This might kick in too early sometimes, in case some action takes a little longer. Feel free to skip the “-h” option, if you are only up for fetching crashes.
The option -e will catch exeptions and the option -t terminations of the application.
Prodump is now monitoring the Cubase/Nuendo process and will write a crash log, in case Cubase/Nuendo crashes or hangs. Perform the action that causes Cubase/Nuendo to crash and send us the generated crash dmp.
Share the DMP file via Dropbox or similar service, please.
I bought a new sound card and I wasn’t able to replicate the issue when I added again the MIDI Sends. Cubase seems to be stable now. I’m sorry for not being able to tell you exactly what was the problem but it looks like the sound card driver could have had a role in it (it was an old card whose drivers are not updated anymore). Thank you for your help. I will use your instructions to generate a DMP file if anything happens again.