TLDR: don’t use migration assistant to move to your new system. Install everything fresh.
For some background, I’ve been an Apple Systems guy since the Mac II (well, that’s what I started on at least), and have been troubleshooting and dealing with Apple systems ever since.
A couple of days ago I was helping a friend with his new MacBook Pro laptop (with everything Maxed to the max: CPU, memory, disk space - let’s just say money isn’t an issue in this case) and it was behaving in a truly bizarre manner. I had never had a machine this new act like this. I thought it might need to go back.
He was coming from an older Intel MacBook Pro (pretty old actually) to the new Silicon laptop. I had a Mac Mini M2Pro that has been rock solid so I couldn’t figure out what the heck was going on. Even spelunking in the terminal didn’t help.
Turns out some guy used Migration Assistant and that brought over all sorts of old crap, and with plugins and the like that can really screw stuff up with your new platform with time-sensitive tasks like audio and video.
So just install everything fresh.
If you’re like me and picked up numerous “Free” plugins over the years. You’ll discover that many of them aren’t coded particularly well or even ever updated. And Cubase has to load every plugin at startup (the first time) so if you have some corruption in your system, it’ll show up in bizarre loading behaviour and even wackier behaviour in the program.
Install the latest plugins from the publisher’s website so they’ll be the most compatible and up-to-date. There are probably a bunch of plugins that you never use and this is a good time to clear that out.
I can be a bit of a PITA getting your Cubase prefs to be the same as they are spread out all over the place, but you’ll have a much more stable system in the end.