I’ll be researching this more when I get home tonight, but in lieu of having being able to get support on this issue, I hope someone here might shed some light.
What happened is I opened a new Cubase 6 project I’ve been working on, which has 20+ VST instruments in it, and all the track names for the VST instruments had changed from names I had given them to completely random names - for example, a MIDI track that had been assigned to Kontakt 3 and was called “Synthesizer 14” is now called “Home”. Weird, huh? I had been working on this project since upgrading to Cubase 6 from Cubase 4 a couple of months ago. In the prior couple of weeks, I had no issues at all, other than Cubase 6 crashing repeatedly when attempting to import older (Cubase 4 or older) projects, hence why I started this particular project from scratch.
Obviously, this doesn’t affect the sound in anyway, and it’s just a matter of renaming the tracks back to their original names. Of course, then Cubase 6 might just change again.
However, the reason I upgraded from 4 to 6, the main reason, anyway, was because I had a really annoying problem in 4 that is slightly similar to this one in 6, only much worse. That problem was a seemingly random reassignment of VST instruments to the tracks they belonged to every time I opened the project. For instance, say I had a project with 4 instances of Absynth or PLAY or some other VSTi - so it would look like this in the VST instrument panel:
1 - Absynth 5
2 - Absynth 5
3 - Absynth 5
4 - Absynth 5
etc.
4 unique Absynth instruments, with 4 different VST channels, assigned to 4 different MIDI tracks. I’d then freeze the tracks, save the project, open it up later to find that every instance of Absynth used in the project, according to the channel’s MIDI settings, is assigned to “1-Absynth 5”. And since the tracks are frozen , you can’t changed it without unfreezing the tracks, which in this case requires that you unfreeze not just the VST instrument the MIDI track is SUPPOSED to be assigned to, but also you have to unfreeze the instrument that Cubase has randomly reassigned to that track. It was a real pain in the neck to deal with, particularly with using something like PLAY, where you actually have to take notes on what instrument is playing what track(s) - Steinberg support completely punted the ball when I contacted them - they never heard of anything like the problem I was experiencing, and I searched the interwebs far and wide - no evidence of anyone else having that problem either.
I only mention the Cubase 4 issue to illustrate what my concerns are for Cubase 6 and the track name changing issue. That I’m the only one reporting this problem because there is something unique about my setup. But there shouldn’t be - I’m running the latest Windows XP SP3 (yes, I know Cubase 6 is not supported in XP, which is why I’m hoping for help on this forum) - I’m using a common Intel motherboard - every part of my system is chosen to be the most commonly used and available hardware at the time.
The one thing that might be an issue is that, for my DAW, I disable a number of Windows services to improve performance, but the services I disable are the same ones any PC audio optimization guide would tell you to disable.
So what going on? Any guesses?