How easy to mess N or C up [my fault!]

Nuendo
1

A salutary note
This applies to both programs… [N5.5 or C6 - or earlier]

I had spent the day yesterday tracking, using various plugins - Sup Drummer 2, Virt Guitarist 2, Garritan Horns, and 2 slave computers running VSL Ensemble pro.

Started up this morning, loaded the project and boom, “nuendo needs to stop”. Tried various options, all to no avail…looked like the project was jinxed with a day down the tubes.

Eventually, I removed all the plug-in dll’s to a storage folder…project loaded fine! So, one by one I added back in the dll’s, until I found that Sup Drummer was the culprit. Ah Ha! I remember messing around with it yesterday - trying to add in locations for various libraries - and might have got 1 wrong. So I moved the dll back into the vstplugin folder, started a new project, and deleted any references to libraries other than my core ones, which I knew to be working.
Saved this as a dummy project, exited N, restarted, loaded yesterdays project and everything worked fine!!
So, half an hour’s work got me back up and running and - saved a day’s toil!

Moral of the story - be careful with your plug-ins. I know it’s been said many times before, but really - messing with them in an innocent way can lead to lots of trouble down the line.
Also, some people would be ranting here – “Nuendo corrupts project file”…sure it can happen, but this time it was on my watch…I’m happy to admit responsibility, and am just glad that I was able to fix it!

Happy recordings!

2

I’ve been very wary of some plugins as they’ve caused me much grief in the past too. The process of elimination trick worked for me as well.

But, there must be something that can be done in the longer term so that a misbehaving VST plugin doesn’t take the whole program down. It took many years for Microsoft to make it difficult for that to happen to their OSes, so hopefully over time, Steinberg will make all their DAWs relatively bullet proof as well.

I’m sure with intelligent design and specification, the VST standard could eventually have built-in safeguards that can disable any misbehaving plugin before it takes the project down. It’s not a very glamorous feature, but it is IMO a most essential one which would be especially important in Nuendo, promoted as a professional’s tool.

What could be more professional than absolute reliability, and pre-emptive crash management? :smiley: