I haven’t used Cubase for a couple of months, but I now have a large amount of work to do with it.
For the last couple of years Cubase Pro 10.5 and 11 have been very reliable for me, but suddenly I have a very strange problem.
Any VSTi tracks will not produce any sound. I see the MIDI indicators flashing when I press keys, but the output meters don’t move. This includes projects that worked fine in the past. Same thing if I use the on-screen keyboard attached to the VSTi.
My audio interface is a PreSonus Studio 192. I’ve tried the Generic ASIO driver just in case it was related, but it still fails.
Does anyone have any suggestions on what the problem may be or at least a way to debug this?
Here are some of my observations:
- There has been at least one Windows update during the period I was not using Cubase.
- Audio and MIDI tracks play and record fine. (But MIDI has no sound when routed to a VSTi).
- Sometimes Cubase will crash when I try to load a project containing VST Instruments. The project will normally load fine after restarting Cubase. I don’t recall ever having an actual crash with Cubase 10.5 or 11 prior to this.
- I updated SonarWorks Reference 4 to SoundID Reference. It works fine in other programs.
- I found some older posts here which sounded like a similar problem and the suggestions of disabling ASIO Guard or clicking the mute solo buttons doesn’t help.
- The VST instruments I’ve tried are HALion Sonic SE 3, which will occasionally work for a short time, UVIWorkstation and Roland VX-5080.
- I added the Roland VSTi very recently and had not yet tried it, so in order to eliminate that being the cause I’ve completely removed all traces of the Roland plugins. The problem persists.
- I was on Cubase 11.0.10 when I discovered this problem. I’ve now updated to 11.0.41 with no change to the problem.
- Rebooting the computer does not affect this.
- All the plugins play fine from their stand-alone player.
At this stage I can’t think of anything else to try apart from completely uninstalling and reinstalling Cubase and all VSTs. That’s a pretty drastic move that will mean committing to many hours of re-configuring which a really can’t afford to do.