A question about deleting preferences

Cubase
#1

I think I understand the reason to do delete preferences - some weird preference setting is presumably making the program behave badly, and it needs purged before things can be right again.

But - does that mean all the hard work in setting up preferences prior to that point is lost? I make a point of saving my preference file when I make changes, but … isn’t it true that I won’t be able to use it/“reimport” it to C6 because it might have a bad setting?

I think I may be missing a basic point, thanks in advance for any help -

#2

When you trash your preferences you (hopefully) do it by moving the user specific cubase directory somewhere as a backup. The folder and its files are then recreated from defauls inside the Cubase program directory and you can start to move back files which contain user made changes from your “backup”, carefully checking that your problem doesn’t reappear. Should one of the files you want to rescue contain an error, your could go through it with a text editor and try to find some abnormality, then manually repar or remove it. Either that or just recreate your presets or settings inside Cubase as well as you can.

You can of course do it backwards if you suspect what file is causing troble, just move that one out of your user directory and let cubase recreate it.

/A

#3

OK, thanks TwinOak, hopefully I don’t have to delete the preferences, sounds like it’s no small time commitment to move forward from there …

#4

Often, the file responsible for problems is “Defaults.xml”.
I also take screenshots of anything that demands a lot of re-setting up.

#5

vic_france - Thanks for that. Does “Defaults.xml” contain the settings for the “default.cpr” project? And or more?

Thanks -

P.S. The fact that you have learned this suggests to me that you may have had to delete preferences fairly often …? Any thoughts on whether there are a few actions that are more likely to cause this than others?

#6

There is no connection between Default.cpr and defaults.xml.
Think of it this way… every .cpr does have some settings saved with it (and which get reloaded with every Project.
Defaults .xml stores the majority of settings that are not saved with the Project.
I would tend to trash defaults.xml, if Cubase has crashed, and it subsequently behaves strangely. If that doesn’t cure it, then I’d let Cubase rebuild Preferences from scratch, then put back just my stored Key Commands, templates etc.

#7

As a little exercise, you should spend some time and open all the Cubase xml’s in a text reader, just to see what’s in them. It’ll give you a good idea of which parameters each pref is actually responsible for and can help in making a less invasive selection when confronted with the possibility of a Prefectomy®.