Problems w/ the New Steinberg USB Driver (2.0.2) On Mac

Cubase
,
1

I’ve loaded the new Steinberg USB Driver (2.0.2) on my Mac(OSX 10.15.1) and use the Yamaha MOXF for the sound card.

When the new driver is installed:

  • The MOXF Editor works
  • When in my DAW (Cubase 10.5), only MIDI communicates with the MOXF. No audio or even MIDI to VST instruments works
  • One VST (EZDrummer) indicates “Audio engine inactive”
  • No audio can be played from any application
  • The Cubase>Studio Setup>VST Audio System>Yamaha MOXF6/MOXF8>Control Panel>CoreAudio Device Settings displays Yamaha MOXF6/MOXF8
  • There is no longer an icon for the driver at the bottom of the Mac’s System Preferences window

When the new driver is uninstalled:

  • The MOXF Editor does not work
  • All sound and MIDI work in Cubase
  • All audio works across multiple applications
  • The Cubase>Studio Setup>VST Audio System>Yamaha MOXF6/MOXF8>Control Panel>CoreAudio Device Settings still displays Yamaha MOXF6/MOXF8 (see attached pic)
  • Still no driver listed at the bottom of the Mac’s System Preferences window
  • There are crackles and dropouts and Cubase’s Audio Performance monitor (F12) reports an excessive amount of load

How is it that everything works after the driver is uninstalled, albeit with poor performance? Is the uninstall function that comes with the driver not actually uninstalling it? If it is actually being uninstalled, what is being used as a functioning driver? Is there a place I can go to confirm what version of the driver is being used.

Any strategies for identifying and resolving this issue would be welcomed. This has me thoroughly confused.

Screen Shot 2019-11-27 at 10.28.33 AM.jpg
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2

UPDATE: I received Steinberg support today and it was determined that the problem may be with my Yamaha MOXF’s sound card. A help ticket was opened with Yamaha by Steinberg.

3

SOLVED (finally): There’s an article on the Yamaha Steinberg site that indicates that there is a system extension that’s blocked on Macs when installing the USB driver. I don’t remember ever seeing the warning messages that the OS presents during the installation, but even after applying the fix via Preferences>Security & Privacy, it still didn’t take, after which I would just uninstall the driver. This time, I rebooted my machine after making the change and it took. Who knew?

The only issue remaining is that the audio performance of the driver is pretty dicy. To compensate, I’m having to set and reset the driver’s buffer size between recording and play back. I’m hoping this will be resolved in future releases of the driver, unless anyone is aware of some other configurations I could change to compensate for this behavior.

Mark Johnson