Cubase Studio 5 Crashing after Metal Machine and EZDrummer Updates

[StealthMode]

I bought EZDrummer and a couple of metal expansion packs last year. I really enjoyed using them. As a guitarist I find it difficult to write without a drummer and EZDrummer fixed all that. I had recorded about 17 tracks for an album and then last week I decided I needed to get EZMix to get my stuff sounding even more awesome.

I logged in to my Toontrack account and noticed that there were some updates available for EZDrummer. Up until that day, everything had been running perfectly. Never a crash. Having huge faith in the TT software, I downloaded and installed the free EZDrummer update and then I installed the free update for Metal Machine.

Unfortunately, when I went to open a couple of my tracks, Cubase started crashing. I have now lost several months work simply because I upgraded to the latest version. I spent two days reading forums and searching for solutions and so far everything I have tried has not worked. I have managed to copy some of the tracks from an inactive project into a new active project in Cubase, but my mixes have been lost. Has anyone else experienced a similar issue with the EZDrummer and Metal Machine updates and are there any solutions.

I’m running Cubase Studio 5.5.2 Build 637 and OS 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard).

These are the updates I installed.
EZdrummer_Update_MAC_132
TT173_EZX_MetalMachine_Update_MAC_111
TT173_EZX_Metal_Machine_MIDI_MAC_110

Thanks
Dan

Topic

[StealthMode]

Further to this issue, I tried to downgrade the Metal Machine plugin using a backup from TimeMachine and for some reason the folders are now empty and any Cubase that I used MetalMachine on is now corrupt and crashes upon opening. WTF!!!
Where do I go for support? Things are just going from bad to worse.

[StealthMode]

Anyone got an idea how I can downgrade to my original EZDrummer Install? The EZDrummer 132 update seems to be what is causing my larger projects to crash, which is annoying as these are the one I have invested the most time creating.

[Scott]

You can contact support directly via the Support Portal:

http://www.toontrack.com/helpdesk/issue_view_portal.asp?ID=81

Scott Sibley - Toontrack
Technical Advisor

[StealthMode]

Thnaks Scott. Good advice. If anyone is interested, it turns out multiple versions of EZDrummer were loaded causing memory overload and therefore Cubase was crashing. Still not sure how I can rescue my projects, but at least I know what was causing the crashes.

[StealthMode]

In case this post is of use to anyone else:

I managed to fix this by doing the following:
I created a new project in Cubase 5. Then I opened one of the projects which had been crashing, but I did not activate the project. From the non-active view I could see that there were several instances of EZDrummer being used on different tracks. Further confirmation of this was that the blue usage indicator bottom right in the EZD interface showed well over 1200MB usage. One instance of EZD uses approx. 364MB. So that was the problem. I then unnasigned or deleted the extra EZD tracks which brought the memory usage down considerably. I was then able to activate the project concerned and save without further crashes.

Thanks to support for leading me to the solution. The way I understand it is, the previous version of EZD had some kind of built in limit which would not allow more than a certain amount of memory to be used. This limit was removed in the 1.3.2 update and is the reason my projects started crashing because I had a few copies of EZD assigned to different tracks. There is no documentation that I have found which teaches you to use EZD or shows good practice recommendations. It is a simple enough and intuitive interface so in most cases you don’t need any. But it would have been good to know that you shouldn’t assign more than a certain number of instances of the plugin.

Relieved to have found a solution!! m/

[Author]

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