FabFilter User Forum
Pro-C2 and Pro-Q3 crashing Cubase
I'm having an issue with Pro-C2 and Pro-Q3 in Cubase Pro 10.0.6 (both of which I use extensively) which started occurring today, completely out of the blue, whereby attempting to add an instance of either plug-in to either an existing or a new project, or attempting to open an existing instance of either plugin in an existing project causes Cubase to stop responding (although audio continues to play). The only way to stop it is to use Task Manager to end the Cubase process (which means I get no crash report).
My PC is an Asus ROG STRIX B550 motherboard with a Ryzen 5 5600X CPU with 32Gb of RAM and a GeForce 1080 Ti GFX card, running Windows 10 (20H2). Nothing is overclocked.
Everything was fine yesterday - finished working on a project, saved it and shut down, then fired up today and all of a sudden I can't open Pro-C or Pro-Q without freezing. I checked my GFX drivers, and nothing had changed (they were up to date a few weeks ago, and all has been fine up until today). I've checked that I'm using the latets versions of the plugins, and I've uninstalled and reinstalled Cubase, just to be on the safe side, but the issue continues. It doesn't matter whether I open an existing project or create a new one and It's not intermittent - it doesn't matter what I do, or how many times I try rebooting, as soon as I try to open either plugin, Cubase stops responding, although if audio was playing at the time, it continues to play.
If anybody has any idea what could be causing this, I'd be very grateful for an end to my frustration.
As an additional bit of weirdness, I just tried it again - I don't think that it's opening the plugin that upsets Cubase.. I just took a simple audio track in a fresh project tried adding an instance of Pro-Q3 - Cubase continued to respond to transport controls, starting and stopping as expected, but the Pro-Q window was blank (as if no audio was playing) and moving the cursor around the window resulted in no response. If I clicked somewhere in the window, as if to insert an EQ point, nothing happened on the screen, but by dragging the invisible point around the unresponsive screen I could at least hear the result in the audio as if the plugin was functioning even though nothing was showing in the plugin. It's when I subsequently try to close the plugin that Cubase stops responding.
Hi Russ,
Are you running the latest versions of Pro-C 2 and Pro-Q 3?
Could it be that you're using iLok protected plug-ins (e.g. Sound Toys, Slate)?
Due to a bug in the current PACE protection framework, iLok protected plug-ins can sometimes accidentally overwrite the memory of other plug-ins, like ours, which can cause these crashes.
Quoting PACE: "This behavior has been reviewed, is understood, and a solution made available to software publishers. They will need to release a version of their product that incorporates the use of the latest version of our technology. This will be required in order to resolve this crashing behavior."
SoundToys has already released a new update (5.3.4) that supposedly gets rid of this issue with their plug-ins. We are still waiting for other manufacturers to incorporate the fix. If you use Soundtoys we suggest you download their latest update from their website.
Cheers,
Hi Ralph - thanks for the quick response! I made sure I was using the latest versions of the plugins first (uninstalled both, and then reinstalled), and I uninstalled and reinstalled Cubase just to be on the safe side (I've also tried starting Cubase in safe mode, with no joy). I do use Soundtoys 5, but I also made sure I'd uninstalled and reinstalled that, so I'm using V5.3.4 too.
I'm pretty sure it's down to something between FF and Cubase rather than an iLok issue though - since I posted I've tried both plugins in Reaper and Ableton 10, and they work fine.
I don't have many things that use iLok aside from FF and Soundtoys - I'm just updating to the latest version of East West's Play 6, I'll try disabling the few other plugins that use it to see if that fixes it.
In the meantime, I obviously posted the same issue on the Steinberg forum, and a couple of people have already suggested that this is a known issue which was fixed in V11 (and thus probably ignored in V10.0!) so I'm going to try raising a support ticket with Steinberg at the same time.
I've become *so* reliant on Pro-Q3 (and to a lesser extent Pro-C2, as I've got to grips with it) - every single project has an instance running on every single track, I'm not even sure how I'd work without it now!
Hi Russ,
Another thing you could try is to disable graphics acceleration for our plug-ins. Please see here:
www.fabfilter.com/support/faq/18/how-can-i-disable-graphics-acceleration-on-my-computer
Please let me know if this helps.
Cheers,
Hello fabfilter.com owner, Your posts are always well-referenced and credible.