# The Mysterious Cubase Bug That has Persisted for Years - VST Tracks Stop Working



## labornvain (Mar 22, 2020)

I first remember noticing this phenomena with Cubase 7.5. And it has happened ever since--through several different builds, different mobos, different Windows versions, different interfaces, different drivers, and different versions of Cubase.

Sometimes, a VST track will just stop playing. 

Specifically, what appears to be happening is the midi part stops triggering the VSTi. I can still trigger it with my midi controller. I can even open the troubled part in the midi editor and trigger the VSTi with the piano roll or by clicking on notes.

But when I hit play, those same notes do nothing.

Sometimes, soloing up the track makes it work again. But only when it's soloed.

I've discovered that sometimes, duplicating the track will (temporarily) fix it. Sometimes not and the only remedy is to create a new track and copy the midi part over. And sometimes, even that isn't enough for the corrupting element seems to survive the copy/paste process.

As I've said, I've been living with this problem since version 7.5, which is what, 7 years now? I'm not the only one either. This issue has been raised on the Steinberg forum many times, going way back. (See here, here, and here.) I myself have raised the issue there multiple times over the years. 

Steinberg has had no response. Ever.

So I thought I would see what the wise and learned folks at VI-Control might suggest. I have, at this point, very low expectations.

Again, in terms of troubleshooting, let me repeat: several different builds, different mobos, different Windows versions, different interfaces, different drivers, and seven plus different versions of Cubase.

In fact, the only thing about my system that hasn't been completely replaced in the last 7 years is my mouse (I love this mouse.)

I've also done all the usual stuff to troubleshoot this --updating drivers, reinstalling Cubase (50x), deleting preference file, removing all plugins, etc. etc. etc. For years.

So while I have low confidence that anyone but Steinberg can solve this problem, I am very curious why no one else at VI-Control has reported it (I've searched and searched.)

I mean, what are the odds that it's something about my setup when my setup has been completely replaced several times over now? It's a mystery, wrapped inside a shitshow. Seriously, 10.5 seems to be even worse in terms of frequency. I can barely work sometimes.

Anyway, thanks for listening.


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## Henu (Mar 23, 2020)

Check out your master solo/mute buttons at the upper side of the project window! The bug seems to put the track to accidentally to mute without showing it, and toggling the master mute button off seems to solve it in 95% of the cases.

That being said, make sure that you remember which tracks you had muted earlier because this _will _unmute those as well.


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## labornvain (Mar 23, 2020)

Henu said:


> Check out your master solo/mute buttons at the upper side of the project window! The bug seems to put the track to accidentally to mute without showing it, and toggling the master mute button off seems to solve it in 95% of the cases.
> 
> That being said, make sure that you remember which tracks you had muted earlier because this _will _unmute those as well.


Brilliant. I look forward to giving that a try.


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## victoria (Sep 22, 2021)

Sorry that this is an old thread, but did you ever find out what caused it? It's driving me insane and seem to only affect some plugins. Like, I can leave a session open over night and in the morning a VST has stopped outputting sound for no apparent reason.


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## labornvain (Sep 22, 2021)

I'm afraid I still have no idea what causes it. Nor does Steinberg I presume. I have found that occasionally if you switch your routing to none and then reassign it to your output bus that will fix it. But even that is not guaranteed to solve the problem.

I have found a solution though, and that is to just use VEP.


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## victoria (Sep 22, 2021)

That's too bad! Every new version I hope they have fixed it, but nope :( I know now that I'm not alone, that's a little comforting at least. I was sure it was something with my setup at first, but just like you I've replaced basically every component in my computer over the years and re-installed Cubase to no end. Sigh.


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## Lionel Schmitt (Sep 22, 2021)

The cause is Asio Guard. At least for me. Made a fairly detailed breakdown of this in another thread https://vi-control.net/community/th...-cubase-major-development.104244/post-4787942


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## victoria (Sep 22, 2021)

> It's easy to miss subtle but important elements in dense multilayered cinematic tracks. I may be wondering why the track sounds a bit less rich than I remember it

Oh my god, that's so me! "Hang on, is that.. what... there's something not quite right here" and then you realize a track has gone silent. ARGH! I'll try turning ASIO guard off and see if that helps, thanks! 

From your posts I see that we have the same UR22 audio interface running on Windows 10, I wonder if that's one contributing factor as well. I have the first iteration of the UR22 (not the MkII) and have had to downgrade the drivers to the very first release, as running anything current introduce noise and random stuttering, very annoying. It never occurred to me that ASIO could be part of the problem, now I'm more than ever seriously considering buying a new interface...


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## Polkasound (Sep 22, 2021)

I run into this problem every once in a while using Cubase 9. I never investigated the cause, but I use a variation of Henu's advice to get the track playing again. A glitch in Cubase is muting the track without lighting up the mute button. If you know which track is not playing, toggle the mute button on that track to get it playing again.

If you don't know which track is not playing but don't want to use the master mute button, then you can find the culprit track by muting and unmuting each track, one by one. If you hit the mute button on a track and the mute light does not come on, you've just found the culprit track.


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## victoria (Sep 23, 2021)

Unfortunately it turns out ASIO guard wasn't the fix for me, and no fiddling with the mute button help either. I can get it to start playing again by duplicating the track and remove the silent one. But, yeah. Ugh. If I wasn't so invested in Cubase I'd switch DAW in heartbeat, this has been a headache for so many years now...


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## Rich4747 (Sep 23, 2021)

I also have a similar bug, and one that messes up the graphics of vst's


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## Anthony (Sep 23, 2021)

Not sure if you saw, but SB just released a Cubase update (11.0.40).

https://forums.steinberg.net/t/cubase-11-0-40-maintenance-update/741088


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## Polkasound (Sep 23, 2021)

victoria said:


> I can get it to start playing again by duplicating the track and remove the silent one.


That's what I used to do, too, but in my case it turned out to be the unlit mute button.



victoria said:


> and no fiddling with the mute button help either


That sucks. I trust you've hit the suspect unlit mute button more than once, because you'll have to hit it two or three times to "unstick" it and get it toggling normally again.


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## Lionel Schmitt (Sep 28, 2021)

victoria said:


> Unfortunately it turns out ASIO guard wasn't the fix for me, and no fiddling with the mute button help either. I can get it to start playing again by duplicating the track and remove the silent one. But, yeah. Ugh. If I wasn't so invested in Cubase I'd switch DAW in heartbeat, this has been a headache for so many years now...


too bad... 

Is track count related to the issue? I usually only get it if I have more than 60-70 tracks going. 
My projects are usually very large, almost always 200 tracks on average, so I always have it 

I'm not sure if you've seen the "constrain delay compensation" thing already but activating and deactivating always solves it for me. I assigned it to a keystroke. Without that I wouldn't be able to work properly I think... https://vi-control.net/community/th...-cubase-major-development.104244/post-4750923


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## Lionel Schmitt (Nov 2, 2021)

I have no more silent tracks since upgrading to Cubase 11!!
People struggling with it should try the trial to see. Maybe it was just one of the latest updates though and not yet fixed when you tried it... maybe using the trial of another version of Cubase (Artist or Elements) is an option. I doubt that the bug was just in the Pro version.


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## Lionel Schmitt (Mar 7, 2022)

I upgraded to Cubase 12 and after just a few minutes of working on a project, EVERY SINGLE TRACK except one went silent.
It happening after soloing and midi editing on a track.
It shows the volume signal on the silent tracks but no sound is coming out.
After re-instating the audio driver and changing the asio guard to high some tracks started playing again but many others remained silent.

Muting and unmuting doesn't fix it, the "constrain delay compensation" trick doesn't work.

Only disabling and enabling the tracks works and strangely enough - inserting a new plugin!

It's just madness because it worked fine in Cubase 11 after struggling with it in 10 and 10.5.
Now they basically made it worse after fixing it!

The only thing that was different is that Asio Guard was set to normal in 12 rather than high in 11.
The issue does seem to be related to Asio Guard. So maybe I'll try setting it to high and see if it still happens. But I'm prepared to go back to 11 just minutes after trying 12. 99 bucks well spent.


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## samphony (Mar 7, 2022)

I had that in the past too. The only annoying solution I’ve found was to duplicate the track and if this didn’t work I had to create completely new tracks and copy the data over. 

Did you try to create a blank project and import all tracks from the other project?


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## Lionel Schmitt (Mar 7, 2022)

samphony said:


> I had that in the past too. The only annoying solution I’ve found was to duplicate the track and if this didn’t work I had to create completely new tracks and copy the data over.
> 
> Did you try to create a blank project and import all tracks from the other project?


oh yea, that works too. In the past it always fixed the problem when just using this. https://steinberg.help/cubase_pro_a...To avoid Cubase to add,mix as far as possible. 

I assigned it to a key command. 

I'm not sure about the blank project/import. Usually it worked again after re-opening the project.
In the recent case with the many silent tracks the play now again as I re-opened the project.
Too scary to loose elements when doing stems etc.


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## Anthony (Mar 7, 2022)

This one is not just annoying, it's also incidious if the track that becomes silent is not very salient -- i.e., the bug may change your project without you immediately noticing it.

I've had this happen a few times after bouncing my project to stereo and doing a quality check. While listening I'll think, gee, the orchestration is a bit sparse here, I'm surprised I didn't add something else. Oh, wait a minute, I did! What happened to it? Oh yeah, Cubase...nice!


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## leegee (Jan 7, 2023)

Just in case more info will help someone (ideally the Cubase devs):

Only just getting into Cubase (after a break of 20+ years). Started seeing this yesterday on a 20-track project. Am now seeing the problem on a two track project.

The problem started after muting one of the tracks, then accidentally muting the other, then using the 'all mute'/'all solo' buttons, which I may have clicked in an illogical order -- maybe I clicked 'all mute' when my tracks were muted.

In any case, when no solo or mute lights were lit, only one track sounded. Some combination of clicking solo/mute seemed to work. Then I paint some MIDI notes, copy/paste some blocks, and when I activate 'monitor' on one of the two tracks, the other is muted. When switching tracks has activated the track's record mode, unselected 'record enabled' makes the magically-muted track audible again.

Sometimes, just clicking the active track in the arranger fixes the issue.

I'm have no idea how anyone can work like this. If Bitwig had native support for video, I'd go back there and consider Cubase Pro a write-off. But surely not every user of Cubase can be dealing with this? It must be something I'm missing.

It's not plugins, as I'm not using any. Doesn't look like the VST, as it was fine before yesterday and fine in Bitwig.


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## Anthony (Jan 7, 2023)

leegee said:


> Just in case more info will help someone (ideally the Cubase devs):
> 
> Only just getting into Cubase (after a break of 20+ years). Started seeing this yesterday on a 20-track project. Am now seeing the problem on a two track project.
> 
> ...


Sadly Cubase has become a bag of bugs over the last few years. Steinberg now regularly creates new bugs with *every* major and minor release. It's likely no longer even possible for them to address the huge number of _existing_ problems because they're constantly forced to divert resources to correct newly created (serious!) bugs.

I love Cubase's feature set but no longer start any new projects in it because it got to the point that my workflow was largely comprised of myriad, very time-consuming and annoying workarounds.

I hope things work out better for you, but the steep and persistent decline in quality made me abandon Steinberg/Cubase.


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## leegee (Jan 7, 2023)

Anthony said:


> I hope things work out better for you, but the steep and persistent decline in quality made me abandon Steinberg/Cubase.


Maybe an unwelcome question here, but...what are you using now?


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## greggybud (Jan 7, 2023)

leegee said:


> Sometimes,


Intermittent?

My guess is that this issue is not possible to replicate...even 25% of the time let alone 100%. If there were a numbered step-by-step reproduction to manifest this issue, it would be possible to fix.

If anyone can offer a repro, please do!

Yes, it's incredibly frustrating. It's never happened to me, but most of my projects are in the 100-200 track range not that track number even has anything to do with it.

If you can't reliably replicate the issue, how can you fix it?


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## Dr.Quest (Jan 7, 2023)

How are Hans Zimmer and all the other main guys using Cubase than?


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## leegee (Jan 7, 2023)

greggybud said:


> If you can't reliably replicate the issue, how can you fix it?


If I ran the dev team, I'd build in a feature to record the last 100 actions to a file that could be submitted for review by my team -- not a revolutionary idea. However, if the product was extremely successful, there is only a very slim chance that Those In Power would approve such a feature.


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## Anthony (Jan 7, 2023)

leegee said:


> Maybe an unwelcome question here, but...what are you using now?


I use a few different DAWs including Studio One, Bitwig and Cakewalk by BandLab.

Cubase is still installed on my system but I only run it when I want to listen to an old project originally created in Cubase. Cheers...


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## novaburst (Jan 8, 2023)

My experience with this issue of notes not sounding

If you are on a project with quite a few tracks and you retitle the project and *save as *this can mess up the project in notes not sounding,

*In saying this only certain library's and plugins are effected * 

The best way forward for me is to go back to the original project or start the project again,

I think this is a nightmare and and the worse thing that can happen when playing back,

Thankful when practicing the above i don't get the issue again, 

All the missing or none sounding midi notes happened when *save as *kicked in and continued on the *saved as* version of the project*.*


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## novaburst (Jan 8, 2023)

Dr.Quest said:


> How are Hans Zimmer and all the other main guys using Cubase than?


Its true that certain plugins would be effected, in any case we don't know if they are experiencing 

The same thing, and also they also maybe are using other DAWs as i am not sure they would tolerate that kind of DAW behaviour.


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## novaburst (Jan 8, 2023)

Also using midi tracks, or instrument tracks could play a factor, stability seems to favour instrument tracks


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