# Is it possible to read Cubase dump files?



## Mr Greg G (May 3, 2020)

Hi, I'm currently in the middle of a project and have been facing regular crashes of Cubase. It generally happens right after the project has been loaded but sometimes it's after a few minutes. It always happens during playback, the audio starts stuttering and Cubase ceases to function while the audio still stutters. The stutter stops when I click OK on the Windows error message (Cubase has stopped working -> Close the program).

Unfortunately I can't open a ticket support at Steinberg because I'm using Cubase 6 which ihas been deprecated. I've never felt the need to upgrade to the newest bloatware version of Cubase, that's why I'm still running C6.

Everything has been running smoothly during all these years (C6, W7 64, i7 2600K, 16GB RAM 1600MHz, SSD Samsung 950 Pro 200Go + 5To of Seagates 7200tpm, GTX 970, Steinberg UR242 interface up to date.

Cubase generated a bunch of dump files I can't open with programs like WhoCrashed but even if it did, I'm not sure I would be able to fully understand them.

I installed recently a bunch of free softwares to do screencasts like OBS and video editing like Davinci and hitfilm express. I can't say if this has messed something up in my system but it's worth mentioning.

Like I said, I'm right in the middle of a project so I can't do a clean install of everything.
If you've got any pointers, that would be really helpful.
Thanks!


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## labornvain (May 3, 2020)

The first thing I do in your situation is drag my two (VST2 and VST3) plugins folders onto my desktop. Then, I relaunch Cubase with no plugins, reload the project, and confirm that the crashes are plugin based.

Then I gradually add back in plugins in small sets until the project starts to crash again, thereby identifying which plugin is causing the problem.

This is a somewhat tedious process, and sometimes it can be avoided if you already suspect who the culprit is. Then you can just remove that plug in by itself to test.

Of course, it may not just be one plug in. It could be an ASIO driver issue or memory overload, or something like that. But in all the years I've been using Cubase, any time I've had issues it's almost always been plug-in related.


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## Mr Greg G (May 4, 2020)

This is exactly what I would do if the crash was happening every time I started Cubase. The thing is it doesn't happen all the time, I have been able to work for several hours yesterday evening without Cubase crashing. I also have not installed any new plugins for several months or years.

Yes that can be also ASIO related. That's why I reinstalled my ASIO driver yesterday even though it was up to date. Regarding memory issues, my memory sticks are almost 10 year old but I don't know if they can get corrupted overtime.


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## NYC Composer (May 4, 2020)

My template with VEP is where I usually start, and there is often a Cubase crash on first load attempt . It’s pretty immediate so I start up again and everything loads. Strange. However, this is new to me since 10.5.12. Cubase 6 never did it in my remembrance.


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## shomynik (May 4, 2020)

Ugh, such a random behaviour is really hard to track down. Especially as you are using old daw and os.

Sorry for not being able to help, but I can offer an advice for the future. Save an image of your os partition (I use free acronis reflect) with everything installed. That way, in the future, if ahything like this starts happening, by loading that image file you are back on track in half an hour.

Hope you solve this now and continue with your work.

edit:
Now, after trying getting the plugins out of the picture, I would start closely monitoring task manager and cpu, drive, network (if you use it) and memory behaviour, together with LatencyMon. Those usually reveal to me any culprits causing the problems.

If task manager doesn't have enough info for you, you can download Microsoft's Process Explorer. It's free and gives much more detail picture what's going on. Not sure if it works with win 7 tho...


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## msorrels (May 4, 2020)

You can open your crash dumps in Visual Studio but I'm not sure I'd recommend that for most people (install Visual Studio 2019 Community edition, use it's File->Open menu to open the .dmp file and then start debugging natively, check the call stack for what crashed).

If you zip the .dmp and put it on the net and post a link to it, I'll take a look. If it's a plugin directly crashing it will be obvious. If it's just Cubase and/or Windows there won't be enough data to work anything out though, but their might be a clue what the problem is.


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## Hadrondrift (May 4, 2020)

Mr Pringles said:


> my memory sticks are almost 10 year old but I don't know if they can get corrupted overtime.


They can. Defective memory chips are sometimes exactly the reason for the problems you describe. I recommend that you run a memory test, just to exclude this possible cause of error.

Windows 7 has a built-in tool for that: https://www.howtogeek.com/260813/how-to-test-your-computers-ram-for-problems/

Better yet are external free tools like "Memtest86"


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## Mr Greg G (May 22, 2020)

msorrels said:


> You can open your crash dumps in Visual Studio but I'm not sure I'd recommend that for most people (install Visual Studio 2019 Community edition, use it's File->Open menu to open the .dmp file and then start debugging natively, check the call stack for what crashed).
> 
> If you zip the .dmp and put it on the net and post a link to it, I'll take a look. If it's a plugin directly crashing it will be obvious. If it's just Cubase and/or Windows there won't be enough data to work anything out though, but their might be a clue what the problem is.



Thank you for offering to attempt reading my Cubase CrashDump files. At first I didn't want to bother you with this but honestly Cubase crashes at least once a day and since I'm in the middle of a project I don't have time to reinstall everything. So I'm going to take you up on your offer. I uploaded the last 3 dump files. 90% of the time it happens less than 5-10 min after opening a project so I don't loose much work. And it always happens 1s after I press the space bar to playback the track. After reloading the project it behaves as expected with no hassle.

Here is the link:


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## msorrels (May 22, 2020)

Every one of your crashes is caused by a Cubase 6 DLL zplanelib.dll Based on the name my guess is that 
Cubase 6 is using this to do audio pitch/time stretching. And most likely this bug (it's dereferencing a NULL pointer) was fixed in future versions of Cubase (or maybe even future versions of the zplanelib.dll but I'm not sure how exactly you could get that or if it would work with your version of Cubase). 

I found this thread when searching








zplane error, please help!


Hello, I’m on Cubase 6 and after a few minutesmaking music, i get this error: AppName: cubase6.exe AppVersion: 6.0.0.229 ModName: zplanelibs.dll ModVer: 0.0.0.0 Offset: 00008b59 Someone to help me? Thanks




www.steinberg.net





Your crash says you are running Cubase 6 version 6.0.7.364 which Stienberg seems to believe fixed some zplanelib crashes. But the zplanelib DLL doesn't have a version number (reports 0.0.0.0 in the crash) so I can't tell if you have the "fixed" one or not. Perhaps you have the wrong DLL and it didn't update?

The idea that some ancient version of OS/software is going to be "better" is only true until it
fails. Like here. In this case you really need to consider updating or you may see this crash a lot. You are also running Windows 7 and a lot of older versions of things.

You might be able to stop using any audio time stretching features to make Cubase more reliable. But only you know what you're using there (and if you could stop). Updating to a modern version of Cubase would most likely fix this specific problem. Of course it could introduce a bunch of other problems. Updating everything to the most recent version of Windows, your plugins, your Cubase, etc is really recommended.

The zplanelib that it is loading is being loaded from the Cubase 6 directory, so I don't think this is a conflict with multiple versions type problem.

Not sure that really helps you all that much. All your crashes are nearly identical so I'd guess unless you get a new version of Cubase/zplanelib you aren't going to solve this. 

Good luck.


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## Mr Greg G (May 22, 2020)

Thanks a lot, this is helpful, at least I know exactly what's causing the crashes. There are indeed a lot of Time Stretching and Vari Audio edits in these projects. This is the first time I'm encountering this issue even though I also used Vari Audio a lot. Maybe not that much with the whole project Time Stretched to a different tempo (I was making tests and am now recording the final takes at the final tempo).

I am running W7 indeed and I'm planning to upgrade my main computer later this year (around August / September) so I was thinking to upgrade to W10 at the same time even though I'm not fond of this OS (all the settings are really misleading). Or I'll wait until December to upgrade everything and switch to Cubase 11 or whatever version they will release at the end of this year. I'm pretty happy with C6 though. I like this interface better.

As for the plugins I tend to only update when necessary or forced to, especially when everything is running smoothly. I'm pretty happy with some "old" plugins (Pro 53, Omnisphere 1, Battery 3, RMX and so on) and don't feel the need to upgrade these.

Would you mind explaining how you managed to read these dump files? That would be awesome for future debugging! Thanks again.


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