Cubase 9.5 hanging when selecting anything in MediaBay

Cubase 9.51, Win10 latest update on 12/14/2017, VS-100-most recent Roland Drivers

I have been gradually introducing myself to Cubase 9.5, starting a few songs, recording and editing just fine. Yesterday I added some ‘favorites’ to the MediaBay. Up until the last few hours, I have been able to select whatever in Mediabay, preview, and drag if I was interested. No new ‘favorites’ added since yesterday.

Now, I can start a project just fine, add the Cubase synth, record audio/midi, but when I go to MediaBay in the right sided zone, there are no selections. when I open MediaBay all the selections come up, but if I select any of them to audition, Cubase hangs, and freezes. mouse still moves but I can’t select anything. I can close out Cubase through Task Manager and reboot. Same thing has happened 4 times in a row now.

Seems like some .db /.ini file has been corrupted, or perhaps the whole thing needs to be reinstalled. Any direction would be helpful. I am doing a checkdisc on my content disc, but other programs that draw from it, seem to work fine.

If all else fails, how do I reinstall Cubase?
Thanks for the help.

perhaps a slightly better way of asking, what folders, files, directories, do I need to find and delete before i can do a clean re-install of Cubase 9.51?

and then what registry components will still be lurking that need to be deleted?

thanks

No need to mess around in the registry, or even reinstall. If you delete %AppData%\Steinberg\Cubase 9.5_64\ it will have the effect of initializing everything.

@steve

Thanks for the information. I will delete that file in the AM, and let you know if that corrects the issue that was showing up.

Deleting that file and letting Cubase rebuild it nicely cleared up the non-responsiveness I was seeing in the MediaBay.

Thanks much!

Is there a particular file or group of files that become corrupt in the folder %AppData%\Steinberg\Cubase 9.5_64\ ? So instead of deleting the whole folder, perhaps just delete the offending file. I thought I would ask just in case this ever happens again.

Thanks. I will keep that article referenced.

:smiley:

happens here too trying access EDM Tools

Allowing Cubase to rebuild the preferences folder helped the issue I was having. Being new to Cubase, I am finding some of the VST instrument presets will cause Cubase to freeze if the preset is selected without the VSTi being loaded into a tract. If the VSTi is loaded, selecting the preset in MediaBay just loads the preset. Which ones do this, I am not sure.

Seems like they shouldn’t be able to be selected from MediaBay without the appropriate VSTi loaded, but they are. Learning with a baby-step-sequencer this is sometimes!

Resetting preferences seemed to help for awhile. Yesterday was ‘freeze-up city’ mimicking the sub-freezing cold snap here on the East coast. Today started new empty project. No tracks, no VST’s, no VSTi’s. Just browsing through the F5 media bay, as the right zone media bay wouldn’t show anything. Now two freeze-ups in a row needed a reboot.

oh, and contacting ‘steinberg help’ has NOT been helpful, as other than the automated response, there has been no response. Reading through other posts, seems that Cubase 9/9.5 has been doing this with a lot of customers. Any other thoughts are helpful. And I do not have these issues with Sonar or with Samplitude with the exact same audio drivers, computer and controller hardware.

So I played around with this issue a bit today. It appears that MediaBay can only process so much information in one instance of running Cubase. Exactly what the limit is, I dont know. But I started by selecting a few folders with wave files to be scanned by MediaBay, maybe a total of 10,000 files. this appears to be way beyond Cubase’s capability as the program became totally non-responsive. Reboot, then deleted mediabay3.db from the preferences folder. Restart Cubase. MediaBay works at first as expected. I slowly added one folder at a time, but noted when above 10,000 files again, total non-responsiveness. So on the next reboot, deletion of MediaBay3.db, I only added a single folder with about 500 files. Added a ‘+Favorites’ and the program continued working. shut down the program normally. Saved under a different name the new MediaBay3.db and Cubase9.5_64 folder. Started Cubase, MediaBay working and added a couple of smaller folders, about 500 files. repeated the cycle of normal Cubase shutdown and copying and renaming the newer MediaBay3 and Cubase preferences folder.

I added under a 1000 files at a time to the MediaBay scanned files, and added a few ‘+Favorites.’ Each time the full MediaBay and right side MediaBay worked as expected. Repeated the normal shutdown and copying of the newer files/folder preferences.

It took awhile, but eventually I am able to have MediaBay scan all the wave, rx2, and midi files on my system, and I was able to add multiple ‘Favorites’ without the program becoming non-responsive. I dont have an exact number, but the total number of wave files, midi files, etc are probably over 20,000.

Right now MediaBay is working as expected and the ‘Favorites’ category in the right zone is working correctly.

My lesson is Cubase can’t handle scanning 10,000 files at one running of Cubase. Scanning small amounts and then doing a Normal shutdown and restart, and then add more takes a long time, but it does work and I haven’t had a total non-responsiveness episode all evening working with multiple previews of different wave files and midi files. The key was scanning just a small amount, shutting down the program, and then restarting it, and repeating.

Actually would have saved a bunch of time and frustration is Steinberg help offered this first on their one response to my ticket.

i read your issues … i had some issues with media bay sorting order on mac, so I made some tests.

On those tests, I realized that media bay is “kind of” slow when scanning files for the first time***. I realised this early, so I select my folders and then went for a cup of coffee. But maybe if I started using samples right away, without waiting for some time, maybe I could ended with problems like yours.

It’s just a thought … maybe it is a general issue and anyone should wait a little before starting with a project

***kind of slow compared with Ableton. Ableton isn’t immediate at all, but it doesn’t show files on the browser until they are scanned for good.

Hello balinas.

Got to this post rather late after seeing your question in the sonar forums.
I’m not sure if you tried this – it helped me immensely when I installed Cubase and set up media bay. I was having similar issues to yours.

First, I excluded all my sample paths from antivirus scanning. I did the same for windows indexing (this was key).
In the media bay options i unticked “scan only while media bay is open”.
I have well over a quarter of a million one-hits, samples, and loops indexed and it was fairly quick once I did this.

No, I haven’t tried that. Excluding from antivirus scan is doable. How do I exclude for ‘windows indexing?’
Thanks!

which version of windows are you on?

I have the latest release of Win10.

https://www.addictivetips.com/windows-tips/how-to-exclude-files-folders-from-cortana-search-on-windows-10/

This helps with folders, but it is more effective if you have a dedicated sample/sound library drive.

Thanks! I do keep audio/midi/samples and project files on a separate hardrive, so making these changes will be straight forward.

And this is a good reminder to update my signature to reflect what I am currently using in combination with Cubase!