So I know allot has been said on the Midi Remote issue and I just want to say that my midi keyboard works fine since they released the fix in CB 14.0.40. However I am still having a small issue. The number of Inactive Instances keeps changing. I deleted over 40 the other day and now I am up to 90. It doesn’t seem to affect anything so I might just leave them. Any ideas?
I am on Win11 running CB Artist 15.0.5.
Cubase assigns each MIDI Remote Device a unique identity number. This remains the same as long as it is the same device. All of these IDs and the underlying definitions and settings (Mapping Page, i.e. MIDI CC<=>Cubase functions) at the time of saving are also written to the project. When you open another project, the devices it contains are reloaded, too. If there is an ID that already exists in the current session, the existing one is automatically deactivated because there can only be one active instance of a given ID. When the current project is saved again, all IDs (active and inactive) are saved with it.
In this way, a large number of inactive devices can accumulate, which are displayed as “Shadow Devices” in the MIDI Remote Zone.
Thanks for replying. Makes sense. So the bottom line is, don’t worry about? Should I clean them up once in a while?
If you want to remove them from a project, you can:
Of course they will re-appear if you open any other project that has duplicates. IMHO, it’s a design flaw at the very least.
K I’ll give it a try, thanks again for the info. 
(1) I haven’t found any adverse effects of having lots of shadow devices, except that it’s annoying and looks stupid. Cleaning up via “Remove Controller Surface“ is rather pointless unless all projects are cleaned up as well, which can be quite time-consuming depending on the number of projects, since there is no more elegant method than creating fresh projects and transferring the content (!), as explained in (4).
(2) What I did, however, was create a standard project template that does NOT contain any MIDI remote devices. A fresh project in a new Cubase session based on this template only stores the devices that are currently present in that session.
(3) One method of saving a fresh project template COMPLETELY WITHOUT MIDI Remote Devices is to TEMPORARILY deactivate the scripts of the MIDI Remote Devices which are present, in the MIDI Remote Manager. These devices can later be reactivated by activating the scripts again and executing “Reload Scripts” once.
(4) That said, there doesn’t seem to be any way to remove MIDI Remote Devices once they’ve been saved in project files; method (3) doesn’t work in this case! Devices can only be added, by saving them automatically with the project from sessions in which they are present. Of course, this can lead to a large number of device entries in project files, many of which then appear as shadow devices.
(5) For those interested in the relevant details, here is a brief description of the MIDI Remote Device Definition block in a .cpr file:
green: Start, yellow: Data, red: End, purple: Device IDIn the upper example, no MIDI Remote Devices are stored, while in the lower example there are 3 of them.
Attention: Don’t even think about editing the .cpr file in an editor to remove the MIDI Remote Device definitions. Editing would completely destroy your project template, use the method above in (3) instead!
And one more thing, folks: make a backup of the MIDI Remote folder - one day you’ll be glad you did!
Final note: I’m aware that all this artifice should be actually completely unnecessary, but may be helpful until Steinberg gets the whole mess with the MIDI Remote Devices eventually under control.
