IMO, Cubase is the best DAW. I’ve used many others, but consistently used Cubase since the the early 90s when I hand built and hand tuned god-awful Windows PCs to get decent performance – I hate Windows!! (I still believe it’s an OS specifically designed to give you RSI… How many clicks to do one thing!!!???)
But, like the fabulous Apple products I use now, it feels like we get new and amazing features from Steinberg – that we may or may not want – but certain underlying issues never get fixed…
Case in point – there’s still a nasty and unacceptable bug – still as of Cubase 15 Pro. I’m posting this both to help others, and remind myself of the fix, for next time it happens…
And yes I have reported this to Steinberg years ago…
As far as I can tell, when Cubase crashes, or somehow gets disconnected from the audio sub-system, it overwrites the External Plugins.xml file.
On a mac, you can find this here – /Users/Username/Library/Preferences/Cubase 15/External Plugins.xml
How annoying?
I have three external ADAT racks, with mono and stereo assignments stored in this file, and it is a big F**KING pain when this file gets corrupted and I have to re-assign the IO for 24 effects units..
The fix, I think (but defer to the experts who know the software arch) is to add this external FX panel settings – and maybe the same for the external instruments(?) to a preset – simple.
My workaround, is simply to configure my system and copy this .xml file to a backup location for WHEN the next crash happens.
Painful. Hope this helps someone else out there!