Post your crash free plugins you use in Cubase

I’m just in a nightmare scenario where my project crashes in the middle of nowhere for no apparent reason. Constantly. Every 30 minutes or so. Every day.

So, everyone’s going to jump at me and say its the plugins fault to which I wave a white flag and beg of you to tell me what plugins you use that you find to be stable with Cubase.

I’ll go with my list (used in my current project):

  • VEP
  • Valhalla Vintage Verb
  • NI: Guitar Rig, Replika, Battery 3/4, Kontakt, SuperCharger, Transient Master
  • iZotope: Alloy 2, Nectar 2, sometimes Ozone 7 module
  • Reaplugs: Reajs (various), Reacomp, ReaEQ
  • Steinberg: Compressor, Stereo Delay, Reverence, Revelation, Multiband, etc. All cubase plugins.
  • ADT

I’ve decided to remove all ReaPlugs and an ADT plugin from my project. I’ll let you know if things change. Meanwhile let this thread be a repository of stable plugins people use in their crash-free setups everyday.

You are going about this the wrong way… (Out of my perspective)

While it is nice to see that you are taking a positive and optimistic “glass is half full” approach, it would make more sense to list plugins that are causing you problems…
(Or, write to the devs of the plugins first and try to resolve the issue)

Exactly.

I think you’re missing the point. The problem IS that I don’t know what plugins are causing the crashes.

If folks post plugins they use on their stable setups we will all get an idea of vendors/manufacturers with tried-and-tested plugins instead of crossing our fingers when we make a purchase.

If I see for instance, waves is being used in many setups that don’t crash I’ll more favorably consider Waves.

That would be an impossible big list, that should include the exact version numbers, OS version and what else could make one plugin being perfectly stable on one system and failing on another.

This problem is not unique.

What I would do is move every 3rd party VST to a temporary non-scanned folder so when opening Cubase it can’t see them.

Then open Cubase in safe mode, or trash the preferences and then re-start and let Cubase re-build. At this point work with Cubase and make sure it doesn’t crash. The only VST’s that should exist now are the Steinberg factory VST’s. If you still have a problem then it probably isn’t a VST.

Then, process of elimination, move perhaps 50% of your VST’s back and re-start Cubase. Spend some time to see if any VSTs are causing a crash. If it is, remove half of them. If not, then add back some more.

It’s tedious, it’s not fun, but the only way to determine which VST, assuming it is a VST is causing the problem.

Good luck.

I noticed this announcement on the Steinberg SDK forum; VSTScanner… (coming to Cubase 9…?)

Alert all your 3rd party devs now (if they haven’t already got hold of it/aware of it) to check compatibility, moving forward.

Win/OSX - VST2 and VST3 (64bit only).

Puma

Not necessary. A general idea would be fine. For instance, I can tell you Omnisphere is stable.

At least why not get the ball rolling? :neutral_face:

Ah - So just having the plugins in the folder can cause crashes, even if you don’t use them in your project?

Then open Cubase in safe mode, or trash the preferences and then re-start and let Cubase re-build.

Didn’t realise there was a safe mode - how to do this?

At this point work with Cubase and make sure it doesn’t crash. The only VST’s that should exist now are the Steinberg factory VST’s. If you still have a problem then it probably isn’t a VST.

Then, process of elimination, move perhaps 50% of your VST’s back and re-start Cubase. Spend some time to see if any VSTs are causing a crash. If it is, remove half of them. If not, then add back some more.

It’s tedious, it’s not fun, but the only way to determine which VST, assuming it is a VST is causing the problem.

Good luck.

That sucks because I don’t know what the trigger of the crash is. Even in the 50% that “works” i wouldn’t know if it truly does because I could have just gotten lucky when testing those. What if the crashes occur in the next 25% but actually lies with the previous 25% set?

The crux of the problem is that there’s no known trigger to cause the crash. Hence the uncertainty in knowing what plugin does what.

From you list - which I have most of - Replika causes crashes on my system, luckily I have echoboy and psp608 so its no big loss.

Well, to Peakae’s point, Omnisphere is one of the few plugins on my system that’s almost guaranteed to make a project crash (especially when reloading it). It’s so bad in fact, that I created an Omnisphere crash recovery template that I load before loading projects that contain this plugin.

Firstly you need to show your system specs and setup, soundcard, Asio settings etc.

You need to start with your project loaded, remove or disable the plugins and add them back in one by one over a period of time, keeping an eye on your resource meter, you should be able to pinpoint the problematic plugin.

You have some pretty power hungry ones in your list, certainly the first to look at would be Replika and supercharger. You should also check the RAM used by your Kontakt libraries and Battery, you could try freezing those or rendering to audio track to free up resources. If your using those along with ones such as omnisphere, they could all be streaming from disk putting extra strain on your system. Do you have all those libraries on the same drive, is it SSD etc etc.

The more info you give on your system/setup the easier it is for others to be constructive helping you troubleshoot.

Thanks - I’ve updated my signature to reflect my setup.

Omnisphere/EW/Kontakt runs in my slave. I run few VSTis in my primary - battery, Halion SE, couple Kontakt. That’s all. The rest are effects like compressor/eq/etc. from izotope and stock plugins.

I don’t want to jinx it but after removing most ReaPlugs and ADT plugin I haven’t seen a crash in 4 hours.

To my knowledge, just having a plug-in reside in the folder will NOT cause a crash. Anyone else know of any exceptions?

My apologies as I read your OP wrong. Since you have an existing project I would do what Outsounder suggested. It’s really process of elimination and it can take some time to figure out.

Oh well, my enjoyment was short lived.

Today Cubase randomly crashed again (after 12 hours woohoo! a new record), though I eliminated some dubious plugins out of my setup. I have just highly reputed manufacturers’ plugins.

There has GOT to be a better way than a brute force method of elimination… :-/

There are a ton of variables but maybe the OP’s question should be…

Post your plugins that are known to cause Cubase to crash.

I wouldn’t want a plugin to get a bad rap just because it is posted but, if enough users post the same plugin then… maybe it would be helpful to users and the manufacturer would take notice.

Regards :sunglasses:

The VST which crashes my sessions the most (by far) is Halion - particularly if browsing flex phrases which is an almost gaurenteed crash.

My experience is that most of the plugins I use do not cause crashes. The exceptions are the uhe VST3 plugins. They cause almost immediate crashes or freezes. Luckily I use the 2.4 versions which are fine. Some vendors have not been able to get VST3 to work reliably. Kontakt has been an issue for me - mainly with spking if I use the multi-timbrel version,

Ooh I use halion sonic se. The base assumption is all Steinberg plugins are stable - if that’s out the window then I maybe looking at the wrong place the whole time.

Apart from being a memory hog, halion is quite stable here.