No output in Mac Cubase Elements 9?

Audio Plugins
1

My plugin is working with every host on Mac (AU & VST) and PC (32 & 64 bit VST) that it’s been tested on, so I’ve been feeling pretty good. But tonight I downloaded Cubase Elements 9 for Mac to test that myself and I can’t get any output from it. The plugin is recognized, loads, UI works and responds, receives MIDI, but no output.

And to make it tougher, for some reason I can’t get any debug output after attaching to Cubase. I logged a few things to a file with no major errors…processBlock is getting called, etc…

I’m a few commits back on the develop branch, if that means anything, and the plugin (VST & AU) definitely work in Plugin Host.

Does this sound like anything to anyone?

1 Like
2

Cubase does so some odd things. I’ve spent two days debugging some weird behaviour with StereoSavage and cubase recently.

You should be able to get a debugger to attach though. Is it running the right binary (i.e. the debug one?) I’d clean out all your plugin folders and try again with the debugger.

PS. It sounds weird but do check how big the buffer is (i.e. getNumSamples, getNumChannels etc.) you are getting at processBlock

3

The debugger attaches…I can assign a breakpoint, but it never prints anything to the Xcode console, so going has been slow.

One user tells me everything is fine in Cubase, another gets very random crashes. And I can’t even get sound out. Crazy.

4

Regarding the console, I didn’t try Cubase, but for ProTools I realised after a long time, that I may as well run the binary from the terminal, which gave me a way better DBG / cout experience than in the debugger…
Maybe that’s worth a try, also from cmd, if you are on windows currently…

5

Just tried that with Cubase…it complains that it can’t find a bunch of stuff as it tries to start up.

I just went into the Cubase/Contents/MacOS and ran Cubase from there. Am I doing something wrong?

6

That’s how I would have done, just tried here, but I got only 6 months, which expired.
So unfortunately I can’t be of any help…

1 Like
7

I just tested and Cubase 9 starts up fine in Terminal on MacOS… but you have to execute the application file inside the Cubase 9 bundle. (Contents/MacOS/Cubase 9)

Does your plugin have any output metering? If so is there any metering at the output of you plugin?

Rail

8

That was the ticket…I executed from just inside Contents and it started up. Then I attached, and now I see output to the terminal. Awesome.

Yes, I have meters and a midi activity light on my plugin…I get midi in, but blank meters.

And now I can start digging. Thank you gents!

1 Like
9

Hey @pizzafilms did you ever get to the bottom of this? I’m having the exact same issues with my synth plugins. Audio effects work fine, but I can’t get any audio output from my VSTi plugins. processBlock() is being called, and as far as I can tell everything looks to be working just fine when I step through the debugger, but no output from the plugin in Cubase Elements and other flavours of Steinberg DAWs. The plugins work fine in all other hosts on both PC and Mac.

10

Hey @Rory, yes, I did fix it way back then, but as I look through my commits I can’t see anything specific that was the correction. Forgive my poor git habits. Funny…I can see the commits where I’m adding bits to debug it, but not the fix which means it could have been something very stupid on my part. I’ll look again later and see if I can find it.

11

Thanks. It won’t be me casting the first git stone, my git commit log is a crime against humanity! I’ll probably try to create a very simple example tomorrow and see if I can isolate the problem. If you do manage to dig up anything useful please let me know. Thanks again for the reply.

12

I just looked again and it seems my problem was pretty deep down in my code which lead me to create some bad values in the processBlock. It looks like I found it by looking at the values my processBlock created and looking for isNAN().

If I remember correctly, Cubase was the only DAW that reacted to it (with silence). Maybe the others have some error checking and Cubase doesn’t.

Sorry I couldn’t be more help. In my limited experience “it’s always f#$^ing Cubase…”.

13

I get that feeling with Cubase quite a bit too. In my case the problem was with the BusesProperties().withOutput() which I was passing a discrete number of channels to. I needed to change it to AudioChannelSet::stereo() to get it to work. Specifying 2 channels with AudioChannelSet::discreteChannels() causes no audio to be output.