after now a couple of months of working regularly with Cubase 15, I have to say that when it comes to starting and closing Cubase 15, it’s not working reliable.
This thread is more about the closing problem. I already wrote another thread where it’s about the starting issue.
So what happens quiet frequently is, when I close a project, sometimes Cubase will bring me to the “Cubase Pro Hub” and sometimes not (it just closed everything). From all the case where this happens that it closes everything, sometimes (~10% of all those cases) it’s even worse, because when I open Cubase again (sometimes after a restart the next day, sometimes a couple of hours later in the same Windows Session) all my plugins in the plugin inserts of the Control Room are gone, which is very annoying because there’s no option to save those plugins as default. So I always need to load all my plugins manually - also for my second monitor speakers. When this problem happens, usually there’s also appearing at the start of Cubase this box, where it says that Cubase “froze” the last start, but then there’s no other hint then that.
Does anyone see this sporadic issue as well and knows why this happens?
Also as a background information: I bought a new audio PC where I installed only VST3 plugins and everything from scratch. So the PC can be considered as very clean. No pollution from other installs before beside Cubase 14, because I did this installation from Scratch in June 2025.
What you are experiencing is a “silent crash”, ie Cubase crashes on unloading the project. This can have multiple causes, sometimes it’s a problem with plugins, sometimes with Cubase itself. When that happens, sometimes Cubase cannot write its preferences correctly to disk, which might explain why your control room settings are gone, or corrupt.
(by the way, you can save your control room settings as presets in the audio connections, that also saves all the plugins in the control room.)
When Cubase crashes, it produces crash dumps in your “Documents\Steinberg\CrashDumps” folder. Please upload one or two of them to dropbox/google etc and post a link here.
Hey @fese . Thanks for your detailed reply. Also thanks for the info that I can save the control room settings. That’s a life-saver for me.
Here are some of the more recent crashes. I’m not 100% sure if these are matching the error-case I described, because I also experience other crashes sometimes which are more related to sudden crashes while I’m in a session.
I know that some crash related to what I wrote happened in the last 3-4 days, but the last crash dump is from 07th of February which means, in my error-case it didn’t even create a crash dump but let’s see if you can figure out something.
I can’t see too much in the last of the crash dumps but… maybe it is nothing but you seem to have four different versions of the WavesShell installed. Can you maybe reduce this to one? I assume the latest one WaveShell1-VST3 16.7_x64.vst3 would be best.
Hey @Johnny_Moneto . I think that’s not an option, because if I deinstall the older versions, some of the my needed plugins will disappear. Waves plugin management is really a great mess.
I see. Even though Waves has very nice plugins and the prices during sales are more than reasonable I keep my computer free of Waves because I don’t want to have to deal with their ecosystem. Steinberg already keeps me busy enough, don’t need another one.
Waves is indeed a tricky one if you don’t want to go with their subscription-like “coverage” model. I simply ignore all “update” hints for as long as possible. I have to jump through hoops to install old plugin versions with a legacy installer although they are all vst3 and there’s no update with regard to functionality. Still, they try to lure me into their “coverage” model over and over again. If they stop working without renewing coverage I will simply cease to use them.
Hmm, never seen crash dumps like this, to be honest. Seems to be related to a Windows graphics rendering component.
You could try opening a support ticket with Steinberg, but they’ll probably send you through the same hoops that we do here ;=)
The first thing to do is to delete the UserPreferences File.
Hit Win+R, paste “%APPDATA%\Steinberg” into the field. Then locate a folder named “Cubase 15_64” and make a backup copy of it, to be safe.
Then remove the file “UserPreferences.xml” from that folder and start Cubase. You can also do that from the Safe Mode Dialog, but that doesn’t give you a backup copy.
You lose some settings here and there, but use Cubase and see if the silent crashes reappear.
If that doesn’t help, the next step would be to delete the whole Preferences folder, which can be a pita, because all your settings are gone then, although that can be mitigated a bit by saving a profile before and reloading it after.
Edit: You could also create a whole new Profile (Edit→Profile Manager→New) which has the advantage that you can easily switch back to the old profile…
Hey @fese . Windows graphics rendering component sounds interesting because I have only the CPU-GPU of the Ryzen 9950X and for my third monitor I’m using a USB-to-HDMI adapter. What happens sporadically is that also the GPU is getting corrupted in Windows and then it falls back to where only one monitor can be driven from the two which are connected to the CPU-GPU and then I get a AMD driver error and the AMD Radeon™ Graphics device in the device-manager is deactivated. But when this error happens, it most of the time happens independent of Cubase. So most of the time when it happens I have not started Cubase. Usually it happens more frequently when I’m in the Firefox webbrowser. I also have a Thunderbolt Ex4 card installed in the second full PCIe slot of my mainboard where I have the UAD-2 Satellite external dsp card connected to. My feeling tells me that this Thunderbolt somehow can overload the busses and maybe this also has a negative side-effect on the GPU? Don’t know.
In Bitwig also some plugins will freeze from time to time when I have enabled the GPU-supported function. Maybe it’s somehow an instability of the Mainboard and the CPU-GPU?
I’ll try what you wrote regarding the “UserPreferences.xml” and let you know in case the error re-appears. Thanks.
A new crash happened right now, but it was a complete freeze again while I was in a mixing session. I had to kill Cubase with the Windows Task Manager. Cubase didn’t react to anything at all.
It’s also not related to this thread, but I’ll put the freezedump into the same dropbox location. Maybe you can have a short look again if it’s the same root cause as the other ones.
This time the Hub appeared normally when I closed my project. Then I closed the hub, no sign of any problems at all. Then I powered down my PC, came back after lunch break and started Cubase - The dialog appeared that an error appeared (without any crash dumps available in the folder) and no hint why. Then after reloading my last project, it happened again. All the control room plugins were gone again.
I have no idea, how to analyse this error and what to do about it. The hint from @fese helped to at least reload the missing plugins from the control room. But anyway, this error is very annoying.
Does anyone has a similar error and knows where it might could come from?
On Windows, there are 3 services that must terminate before you power down otherwise next time you start Cubase it will appear it crashed with an error.
On my PC, this takes 30 secs or so.
-Steinberg Licensing Engine
-MediaBay Server
-object server (something close to this).
You can either just wait a while or open Task Manager and watch these terminate.
I toyed with a .bat file that waits for these to close but never finished it.
Not sure but I think maybe waiting for just MediaBay server to terminate will do.
Thanks @microapp . I’ll have a closer listen to this in the next couple of days/weeks and see if that might be the problem. Usually when I close Cubase I normally don’t instantly shutdown my PC, but I’ll have a look on it.
At the end of the day I typically shut Cubase down followed immediately by a machine shutdown. I’ve never paid any attention to remaining Steinberg processes.
Cubase always starts normally the next day.
Looking back at your posts on this thread, you clearly have an unstable machine due to your graphic issues. Clear that problem up and you may find that your Bitwig and Cubase problems disappear. Trying to diagnose a problem on a machine that is already unreliable is generally an exercise in futility.
Hey @KT66 Where you this instability come from? As I wrote this is a brand new PC and I’m not even using an external GPU, so I don’t see how I can change something here. The only thing what then could be if it is like you say, that the whole brand new PC / CPU or Mainboard has already a hardware defect or the Thunderbolt PCIe card (which is an original ASUS as my mainboard) makes problems.
I experienced similar issues also on my older PC which I had in use for 3 years before I bought this new machine. So I doubt that it is a hardware defect.
this time under the same scenario I got after a restart of my PC a dmp-file.
So I was working on a mix in Cubase yesterday, then I closed the project and I couldn’t see the Hub to further close the entire application. Then I went into the Task Manager and could see that Cubase.exe was still visible. I did this after ~5 Minutes after I closed my project. Then I shutdown the PC until this morning.
Now I wanted to work on my mix again and then this crash-window was coming up and was leading me to the dmp file. So if someone of Steinberg support or someone else could have a look into it? I would be happy to see if there’s a hint to the root cause.
Supplement:
Ok now after I confirmed the window with the crash dump, it got’s even worse. Now also the start into the Hub is not working anymore. The Cubase Logo hangs at “Initializing: MIDI” and never enters the Hub. Very annoying. So as I wrote in my first post. It’s not only unreliable when I close the application but also when starting it (e.g. after an error has appeared). When I looked deeper in the Task Manager which task was hanging, it showed that it was the licensing. Also it created two additional log files now.
I won’t be able to tell much from the Cubase dump, unfortunately.
Same question I’m asking others here: Do you use any third-party MIDI drivers, specifically Korg or m-audio/midisport?
There are issues with both the Korg USB MIDI drivers and the midisport driver. In moth cases, those drivers aren’t actually needed unless you have a truly ancient midisport with the serial port on the back (it pre-dates USB MIDI 1.0 Class)
See here for uninstalling them if this is the case.
Yes I have a USB Midiman Midisport 2x2 device installed. It’s a very old device from more than 20 years ago. But it doesn’t have a serial port on the back. I also have a Korg nanoPAD2 installed but I didn’t install any drivers specifically for it.
And yes @KT66 I think that some of the crashes have something to do with the Midi 2.0 services roll out. Yesterday I had suddenly no midi devices available in Bitwig and Ableton. In Cubase I could still access them. Then I installed in Windows the Preview Stuff which the updater was offering to me and after a restart those issues were suddenly gone. No clue what’s going on there. Also it looks like even the startup of Windows is not 100% predictable and reliable. Sometimes it’s able to show my Focusrite Control Panel when I right click on it, sometimes it’s showing only two lines of “Show Notification / Windows Sound Panel”.
I’m really going crazy with these unpredictable behaviours. The frequency of such events where I can’t spot any logic behind has for sure risen over the last 10 years.
The last three dumps are all related to wdmaud2 which is the Midi2 service.
I suggest you delete the Midisport driver, disconnect the device, reboot your machine and then reconnect the device again. It should pick up the class-compliant driver from the new Midi stack.
If the Korg has no vendor provided driver then in theory it shouldn’t be affected.