Cubase highjacks the soundcard HELP PLEASE

selsong

Member
HI
Im finding in the last few days if play a wave or mp3 using Foobar or windows media player for eg...., its all
fine, but as soon as I open Cubase it highjacks the sound card and cuts
off the other players. Even if I close down Cubase the sound card still
wont play with the other players......

I have ticked the box to release soundcard when in the background in
Cubase/soundcard options,.

If I reboot Windows 10, it seems to be fine for a while then it reverts to the above

Does anyone know why this happens with Cubase, and what I can do to fix this. ?
Many thanks
 
Weird. I don't use Windows 10 yet. Because of things like this I am not leaving W7 until I have no other choice.

I don't recall having that issue when I used one PC for everything, but these days I use a monitor controller and two PC's. One one for studio only and the other for whatever.

Sounds to me more like a device issue in Windows. Have you made your interface the default? Actually, what are you using for a soundcard? External or the one in the computer?
 
I had a similar sort of experience earlier this year, although the symptoms were a little different-- I was getting a popup in Cubase about a problem with the Yamaha-Steinberg driver and that Cubase was preparing to install the driver, but then nothing would ever happen and I would end up having to terminate Cubase with the Windows Task Manager.

But I had been having problems even before I started getting that popup-- after opening and then closing Cubase, my sound card would apparently stop working. I didn't start to get the popup until I started mucking around in the Cubase audio settings to try to resolve that issue, and switched drivers thinking it might help.

As an aside, shortly before all of that I'd bought a Yamaha keyboard that has a built-in USB audio interface in addition to its USB-MIDI interface, and I'd had to install the Yamaha-Steinberg USB driver so I could send and receive audio data between the keyboard and my computer-- which worked flawlessly, and even allowed me to select the keyboard as my audio output device in Windows. But then when I tried to use my keyboard in Cubase-- which isn't my primary DAW, so it had been a while since I'd last started it up-- I started having the weird issues with the sound card. The popup was especially frustrating because I knew that I already had the driver installed!

Anyway, after searching for help in the Cubase forums I found some threads about problems with the Yamaha-Steinberg ASIO driver that were occurring after a major Windows 10 update (last year's big October update?). I forget what the exact steps in the recommended fix were, but it worked like a champ. I'll see if I can find that thread and post a link.

Note, I'm not saying that your issue is being caused by the same problem. However, you might want to check your audio settings in Cubase to see what driver is being used, and see if trying to select different drivers either resolves the issue or causes the "real culprit" to raise its ugly head.

Another thing I've discovered about Windows 10 is that the whole "audio management UI" has changed somewhat and can take getting used to. It's actually nicer-- easier-- but it can be a case of "I didn't know they put that there" where your lack of awareness can lead to problems; then once you know what's going on and what to do you're happy with the change. What I'm talking about in particular is that when you click on the little speaker icon in the system tray of the Windows Task Bar you'll see the name of the currently-selected audio output device just above the volume slider. If there is more than one audio output device available, there will be a downward arrowhead that lets you drop down a list so you can choose which one you want to use. It might not even need to be a physical device-- for instance, I play games in Steam and the drop-down list on my desktop computer lists "Steam Streaming Audio" (or something like that) among the available audio output choices, which at one point was causing problems for me because it had somehow gotten selected (but not by me as far as I can remember) as the audio output device, after which my speakers no longer worked! Oddly enough, I also have Steam on my laptop, but for some reason that "Steam Streaming Audio" thing doesn't show up as an option on my laptop.

Anyway, you might want to check that speaker icon in your system tray to see if it shows multiple choices for an audio output device-- and if it does, make sure it's set to the correct one.

I don't know if any of the above is relevant to your particular issue, but I hope you get it sorted out! :)
 
While searching for the information, I remembered that it didn't happen as I described above-- the popup wasn't in Cubase at all, it was in MuseScore! But at the same time I was also having problems with Cubase causing the speakers to go silent, and it was all connected.

I think the thread that tipped me off to the solution was this one:

Musescore 2.1 goes into install mode and hangs after recent windows 10 update | MuseScore

The solution is to completely uninstall the Yamaha-Steinberg USB driver, then reinstall the newest version of the driver. Even if you had the newest version already installed, there was something about the 2017 Windows 10 Fall Creators Update that caused a problem with that driver. Leaving the Windows Update alone and just uninstalling/reinstalling the affected driver fixes the issue.

This solution was also mentioned by Steinberg in connection with some other program that I don't have:

Windows 10 - TOOLS for UR: 'Preparing to install' – Steinberg Support

Remember, I'm not suggesting that your particular problem is being caused by the same issue. Rather, I'm suggesting that the problem might be something more than just checking or unchecking the option to have Cubase release the audio device while it's running in the background-- something related to a problematic driver, or a driver that somehow got affected by a Windows update, etc.
 
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