ARA destination folder?

Nuendo
1

Where do files that have had ARA extension applied permanently reside?
I have a folder named ARA in my project folder but it remains mysteriously empty after making the process permanent?

Am I missing something?

2

Crickets…

3

Have you looked in your Media Pool?

4

I’m not sure I understand “applied permanently”. There are 3 scenarios I can think of with respect to ARA files (from Cubase – I don’t have Nuendo, but I’m guessing the behaviors will be the same):

  1. If you bounce the clip(s) with an extension on it. Those just become normal audio files like any other audio clip, so they’ll be in the Audio directory for the project.

  2. If you use “make Extension Permanent”. I don’t generally use this, so I’m not positive on this. However, I seem to recall that a different subdirectory in the project directory may have been used once or twice when I tried this – maybe something like Edits.

  3. When working with the extension live, where data is stored depends on the ARA extension being used. To give one example, Synchro Arts RePitch gives the option of storing the data in the DAW project itself (e.g. the CPR file in Cubase) or “in a local file”, which, on Windows is in a subdirectory under C:\Users<YourUserName>\Documents\RePitchVst3\AraAudioCache. The actual subdirectory name is based on a date/time stamp of the form “YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss”. Melodyne stores its data under the documents folder in Celemony/Separations. I seem to recall that, in the distant past, one of the ARA plugins I used was actually storing the data in the ARA folder under the Cubase project, but I haven’t seen that behavior in some time, and I’m not sure if the change was for a specific plugin or something in Cubase’s ARA in general. (I wish that were the behavior, though, as these folders don’t get cleaned out by the ARA extensions themselves, so it is necessary to clean them up from time to time as they can grow quite large. The size is also a reason I don’t like using options that store the ARA cache within the projects themselves as it then makes for huge projects and interrupts workflow when automatic backups are created.)