Sounds like you’re experiencing the same exact issue I’ve described and not the one linked by Martin. It’s crazy that a company like Steinberg with a team of programmers allows for critical bugs like this to happen, while Cockos who make Reaper consist of two dudes who write the code and have 20000000x less issues with their software, while selling Reaper at a fraction of Cubase Pro price, lmao.
I would like to reiterate that Steinberg should be paying extra attention to proper sandboxing of VST3 plugins such that they are physically (logically) unable to take down their host by any means.
It’s too much of a risk to allow thousands of developers to do things that should be “illegal”, things that would cause the DAW to be destabilized. Cubase needs to be able to detect when a plugin its hosting is doing something wrong, alert the user, and if telemetry is enabled, instantly send a report with all the details back to the mothership at Steinberg, which can then be auto-forwarded to the developer in question, if applicable.
If a fundamental flaw is revealed in what the VST3 format allows, that should be patched.
We are bumping up against the predictions of complexity theory here–that paradoxically predictability goes out the window with systems this potentially complex. So Steinberg must get a handle on the pandora’s box it has opened for the sake of stability and performance.
VST was a game-changing format and created a whole new industry, but this industry has been notorious for failing to do things correctly at various times. I even remember when brainworx ¶ had a critical flaw in ALL of their VST3 plugins that they knew about but did not announce, because reasons. I only was able to isolate it by halving and halving again and again my plugins that would load, finally realizing that this one developer was responsible for ALL their plugins causing crashes! They acknowledged and fixed it about a month later. But the damage had been done: countless hours spent trying to isolate it, added stress, loss of sleep, etc.
The quality bar really must be raised in this industry, and I will keep hammering that point till those able to make necessary changes start to make them in earnest.