Huge stability issue with Chord Events created from Audio (MEMORY LEAK)

This is the biggest bug I’ve discovered so far, please read carefully.

After creating Chords from Audio, the Chord Assistant starts to exhibit serious performance and stability issues when trying to edit multiple Chord Events at the same time.

And not to mention that it is currently impossible to edit multiple Chord Events with the Chord Editor, which is another issue that has been explained here. Nevertheless, the two issues are perhaps linked since this one requires multiple Chord Events to be selected.

So let’s dive into it, here is the reproduction sequence :

  1. Import or Record audio on a track (full song / long file is better).

  2. Do one of the following:

    • Drag the audio event and drop it on the chord track.
    • Right-click an audio event, and select Create Chord Events from the context menu.
    • Select Project > Chord Track > Create Chord Events.
  3. Select a bunch of consecutive Chord Events, except the first one (the Chord Assistant will not work - and so the bug - if the very first Chord Event is caught in the selection).

  4. Double-click one of the selected Chord Events to open the Chord Editor.

    Result → A progress bar shows up, saying that it is finding tens of thousands of chords, and that this will take a very long time, ranging from a few minutes up to several hours.
    The Chord Editor will eventually open after a brief moment, you won’t have to wait for that long. If you click Stop, the Chord Editor will instantly show up.

  5. Go into the Chord Assistant tab, then in one of the following sub-tabs :

    • The Detected tab, and enable Highlight Suggestions from List Tab.
    • The List tab.
  6. Try to tweak the Complexity, Mode, or Type.

    Result → Cubase will freeze.
    It will eventually unfreeze after some time, but not always.

Now, and this is the most critical part :
In step 3, if you select random Chord Events all over the Chord Track (with deselected Chord Events in between), then Cubase will get stuck into the frozen state after step 6, and the only way to stop it is to kill the process from Task Manager.

In reality, during these freezes or “loading times”, a memory leak is happening, which becomes even more obvious when there are many “gaps” in the Chord Events selection, just like in the following image, and when those gaps are bigger (for example a gap of 30 deselected Chord Events), the RAM will ramp up much faster.

If you leave it long enough it will ultimately fill all your RAM and start writing into the disk once it becomes full, and that’s exactly what happened to me while writing this post, I never thought it would do that ! I left Cubase in the frozen state for something like 10 minutes or maybe more, and suddenly my PC began to slow down. As I opened Task Manager to see what was going on, Cubase was taking 30 GB of RAM out of 32, but it also wrote 12 GB on my NVMe to compensate !

At this point the PC was unresponsive and I couldn’t even kill the process in Task Manager, nor take any screenshot of all this mess, and all of a sudden Cubase finally flushed the RAM and displayed an error message saying a serious error has occurred, and a crash dump was generated. Here it is :

Cubase 12.0.50.387 64bit 2022.11.3 19.57.50.672.dmp (988.2 KB)

The only image I could take afterwards was Chrome that ran out of memory and the page I was working on remained like this. “Out of Memory” :

I will not repeat this experiment anytime soon.