I use Kontakt 8 to power a fairly large orchestral ensemble. I installed C15 a few days ago. It’s been going OK, until today. This morning, I replaced a failed secondary monitor with a brand new one. That’s when it all happened.
I played back my project from the beginning. It was going great, until my 2nd instance of Kontakt kicked in. Then it was nothing but spikes and dropouts. Then Cubase crashed. ChatGPT blamed it on a mismatch of monitor DPIs, and we spent several hours chasing that rabbit. When that didn’t work, we switched to KT8 being unstable, and the only solution was to eliminate KT8. I reverted to KT7. THAT didn’t work. Now the AI says that the whole Rack Instrument container is corrupted, and it persists from project to project. Then it says the only solution is to stop using Rack Instruments and go only on Track Instruments.
So finally, I sent the AI to bed. So, does anyone here have any better ideas as to why everything seemed to go downhill after the monitor installation? Is it coincidence? Is it a known issue? Should I try going back to C14? Should I reinstall C15? I’m being cautious, because I don’t want to spread any potential corruption issues to other parts of my Cubase system. Any thoughts?
If the AI was intelligent, it would’ve probably suggested some sensible troubleshooting steps like testing with only one monitor to see if the problem persisted, instead of jumping to the conclusion that the Rack Instrument container was somehow corrupted by connecting a second monitor.
I’d take @raino ‘s advice–and if that doesn’t help, test the monitors separately to see what happens and go from there. If you still have C14 installed, it won’t be harmful to your system to check if the issue is present there.
No, we went through all the steps. We were at it most of the day. AI said the problem was caused by a renegotiating of the video protocol due to the addition of the new monitor. Once that occurred, it could not be reversed. I tried a System Restore, but Windows had set a new Restore Point at the time the new monitor was installed, and cleaned out the old points.
You go to the NVIDIA website and search for (specifically) studio drivers for your card. If there are any, you’ll get a list. If not, they don’t exist.
The reason ChatGPT blamed it on DPI is because there’s a known bug in Cubase where some Native Intruments plugins will not show their UI when you have monitors with different resolutions, scaling and dpi. This just prevents the UI of the plugin from loading and it’s a Cubase issue which cannot be solved by changing your drivers or your graphics cards, with a workaround being having only your primary monitor on when you launch Cubase then turning the other panels. It shouldn’t crash the whole DAW with it.
Not sure if this is relevant but a few KT versions ago I stopped using Rack Instruments because KT could not keep up and would crash especially in mixdown. Now when I use KT8 I only load one instance per instrument and all is well.
That I’ll have to test. I didn’t have a version of Cubase with Rack instruments when I encountered the bug. Iny case , it was only some specific NI effects plugins like Solid Dynamics and their UI would simply refuse to open. I haven’t seen the bug since despite running the same multi monitor setup with one main 1080p main monitor and one 1440x900 secondary.
Without knowing the full details, if you’re having a problem involving monitors and you’re using a three year old graphics driver, upgrading the driver to the latest version should be one of the first steps. Even if something has been stable previously, there are any number of bugs that can be caused or exposed by new versions of Windows, new features used in software, and similar. I’d still be surprised if that’s the issue here, though. Have you tried without the second monitor plugged in?
These things absolutely can be a coincidence, though: if you don’t reboot frequently then installing the second monitor might have been accompanied by a Windows update, for example. Even if you do update frequently, it could have still been something else changing in the system.
I’ll echo other people here, though, in the general case: ChatGPT isn’t going to be reasoning through your actual problem, it’s going to be predicting language based on previous issues that people have had. It can sound very confident, but for this kind of situation it will often lead you down ridiculous rabbit holes.
Have you tried taking Cubase out of the equation entirely and loading Kontakt independently?
I use the old driver because updated drivers were causing crashes. But I can try it.
Yes, I’ve tried it with each monitor separately and in every possible Cubase, Kontakt, and Windows display configuration.
There was no Windows update at the time.
Oh, I know about the Chat. The best part about troubleshooting with Chat is that it shows me all the wrong ways to fix something so that I finally see where the actual problem is.
Kontakt works fine as standalone. It also works “better” in C14. In C14, I’m still getting Kontakt-related audio dropouts, but at least I can control Kontakt through the UI. In C15, the UI is completely broken. Clicking anywhere in the UI only toggles between Classic View and Default view.
This was an incorrect assessment. Actually, the problem there seems to be a mis-match between the position of the UI text and where Cubase thinks the mouse pointer is. In other words, there’s an offset in the UI controls. So if I move my mouse to the right of, say, the View menu, I can actually access the menu. But that’s not particularly helpful.
Does anyone here know what Steinberg did in C15 that would greatly upset the order of graphic display, different from C14? I have a feeling that THAT is the base cause of my current issues, and I think that maybe I need to upgrade my graphics card.
