Does mediabay autoscan?

I’m finally organizing my samples in the mediabay. I always thought the option for 'Scan Folders Only When Media Bay is Open" meant that when that was off it would autoscan in the background.

What I’ve seen is that it will find new folders that get put into existing locations, but it doesn’t scan the contents. If so then what’s the point of that option? Since you have to scan manually why would you care about it scanning in the background?

I believe the background scan only is applicable to folders which you have selected to be scanned. If you’re talking about folders available to you within the Media Bay. And to my experience, that’s the way its always worked.

So if you add a new folder to a directory and open Media Bay, it isn’t by default going to scan the new folder. It has to be checked first. Then if you were to add more media files to the checked directory, they should be automatically picked up when you re-open the program. In the background if “Scan Folders Only When Media Bay is Open” is off, or only when you open the media bay if that feature is turned on.

Which rather makes sense because it would be a performance hit on the CPU and also affect the overall performance of the program to potentially scan every folder on your system for media files in the background.

Hope that helps you out

This is sore topic for myself and a few others.

The behavior changed a few years ago.

Keep in mind regarding user folders:

The change is that now when you open Cubase, Media bay does an automatic scan of every user folder. With the automatic scan, it will also by default check any box that you have purposely left unchecked. The result is more mouse-clicking and taking time to navigate and filter out things that should have already been filtered out, had there been no auto scan.

Or another way to explain it is when you open a preset, and the tree is open, you have to uncheck multiple boxes, just to see what presets apply to any given project.

They know about this. They say it’s by design, but I can’t think of any logical explanation other than it sort of “dumbs down” media bay for inexperienced users. Personally, when I want something left unchecked, there is a good reason for that.

Hi thanks. That makes sense. I did add a new file just now and saw it did get scanned automatically. What’s interesting though as that new folders added to an existing folder that’s checked come up checked too but not scanned. That seems a bit odd as they should show unchecked in that case.

Also the manual is confusing here as it says if you added new files you must refresh views but in my case it just did it automatically.

Thanks yes I had come across this when searching out this issue. In my case I was mostly looking at sample behaviour but good to know about this too.

Cheers

Yep, totally agree with that logic and I have no idea as to why or if that wasn’t taken into consideration when it was designed. From what I can tell, the scan process as it pertains to check boxed items are only applicable on the initial check and scan. Files added afterward to those checked directories (both at the parent and their inclusive sub-directories) will or should always get detected.

Oddly enough though as you’ve already noted, the rule doesn’t seem to apply to any files in sub-directories that are added after the initial check of the parent directory. The directory it detects but the enclosed files it won’t.

I’ve just adapted to the behavior by right-clicking the sub-directory when thats the case and select to do either a “quick rescan disk” or “refresh views”. You should only have to do it once though for any newly added sub-directories

Thanks, yes been doing the quick scan too. Isn’t too bad but you just have to be on top of it as to not forget. Finally I really wish there was a way to re-order ‘favourites’. They get automatically alphabetized in the bottom view of the sidebar Mediabay but the main drop down menu and ‘star’ icon areas aren’t. Seems such a basic functionality. Even on the plugin manager you can reorder folders and files within a collection but not the collections themselves.