Upgrading 4.5.2 Project to 6.5 Results in Hard-lockup

Cubase
1

I recently created a new song on 6.5 for a collection that I’ve been working on. To ensure consistency, I decided that I wanted to go back to the other (4) songs and start “porting them” to 6.5 (64-bit) from 4.5.2 (32-bit).

“Porting them” includes a few steps:

  1. Open the project in 6.5 and resave it.
  2. Since I didn’t install all of the 32-bit VSTs that I had under 4.5.2, I convert the plug-ins to newer versions (64-bit when possible).
  3. Re-render MIDI tracks as audio and replace the audio clip on the original track to not disturb automation, inserts, and routings to group channels.
  4. Re-balance track volumes using automation if needed. (Typically not much is needed here.)
  5. Mixdown to MP3.

I own Komplete 8 (64-bit), which provides the majority of the VSTs.

My VSTs mappings for moving from 4.5.2 to 6.5 are:

NI Kontakt 3 → NI Kontakt 5
Kuassa Amplifikation One and Creme → NI Guitar Rig 5
GSi VB3 → NI Vintage Organs
NI Battery 3 (32-bit) → NI Battery 3 (64-bit)
Celemony Melodyne (32-bit) → Celemony Melodyne (64-bit)
BlueCat’s Freeware Plug-ins (32-bit) → BlueCat’s Freeware Plug-ins (64-bit)

I do occasionally still use Magneto (because I’m waiting for Little Radiator to be ported to 64-bit), but other than that there should be no 32-bit plug-ins in use.

On the first song I tried to port, I forgot to remove the Kuassa plug-in. On final mixdown (step 5) I received a lot of cascading message boxes around 53% saying that a pure virtual function call had been attempted. (Being a former C++ programmer, I know this is a serious thing.)

Realizing that I still had Kuassa in use, I killed Cubase, shutdown / restart, and restarted Cubase. I then replaced Kuassa with Guitar Rig, powered down the VSTs (Guitar Rig, Kontakt 5 and Battery 3) since I had audio versions of all MIDI tracks, and attempted to mixdown again. This time at 49% I received the “Cubase has entered a serious error” message, but the computer was completely frozen. I couldn’t launch Task Manager. Pressing the Windows key did nothing. Pressing the power button did not commence the shutdown process either. I had to press and hold the button for power off without shutting down.

Unfortunately, there was no log file created in C:\Program Files\Steinberg\Cubase 6 so I can’t attach it. Worse, Cubase no longer starts now.

I am running Windows 7 64-bit with 8G of RAM. I have a 250G (C:) and 500G (F:) internal hard drive. Cubase runs off of C: (which has 48.5G free) while the NI sample libraries are installed on F: (which has 305G free).

Please note that the song that I created from scratch last week, which also uses Guitar Rig, Kontakt, and Battery had no issues at all (during usage or mixdown) so I know the installation was good.

Thoughts on how to proceed?

2

Update: I rebooted again and attempted to run C6.5. I got a message saying “No valid License found. The program will quit now.”

My dongle hasn’t been touched in a few days at least.

After physically removing the dongle from the USB port, waiting 5 seconds, then reinserting it into the same port Cubase now properly starts up. I will try mixing down again, but I doubt it’ll have any different results.

Update: I disabled all channel inserts and the mixdown completed successfully. Also, playing the song through in its entirety in Cubase (with all inserts enabled) completes successfully. I’m now in the process of trying to isolate the problem.

3

Isolated: okay the problem seems to stem from a single, specific track using Melodyne as the only insert. I use Melodyne on 4 tracks on this song so it’s not the plug-in per se. What’s special about this track is that I copied some notes in Melodyne and pasted them back in the same place but changed the notes to get a harmony within the VST.

I’m going to try removing the copied notes and see if that fixes the problem.

Update: removing the copied notes still resulted in a problem (“pure virtual function call”) so I’m going to remove Melodyne and reinsert it to delete the data behind it, which I suspect is the cause of the problem. Stay tuned.