Let's talk saving

Cubase is fantastic and I use it every day.

One of the stumbling blocks, for me, is the way it saves files.

1 - Autosaving, it’s crucial, but it can really slow you down if it pauses for 5+ seconds every 5 minutes

2 - If there’s a dialogue box open within VE PRO, saving will crash.

3 - The number of times a save will have been corrupted and it has to be rescued.


Devs - is there a way of speeding up the save times? What is saved in a CPR file?

Can we split the dependencies across other files, so the autosaves only save the changes, rather than the whole thing?

Interested to hear other thoughts / experiences

Where is it saving your backups?

I must admin Cubase has never frozen or paused for me while autosaving I never notice it doing it. Regular saving does freeze display a little.

Are you working with huge .CPRs? Maybe try an SSD?

cheers

Alan

Hey Alan,

The CPR files are around 25mb, which is easy as soon as multiple instances of kontakt 4 are loaded up.

I’m using the fastest SSDs available, the intel 750s, with a 1200MB/s write speed. It’s the software that is slow.

T

I have those pauses when it auto-saves but they are not too long and do not really interrupt me and I have never had a crash that way. I have done a bit of plugin development so I know a little of what happens: when Cubase saves it saves its own data but then it asks every plugin one after the other if it has data to save. Each plugin then provides a block of data that Cubase includes in the save file. It may be in your case that one particular plugin is saving crazy amounts of data, Cubase has no control on how much is saved. Might be worth seeing if it is particularly slow with one specific plugin in use.

Thanks Keith, that’s really helpful.
I can see by the project development that Kontakt is probably saving several megs of data on each instrument, which would account for it slowing down. I know that writing the data isn’t a speed issue, so it could be the CPU churning as a potential issue?

I wonder if there’s a way to find out if the saving process is multi-threaded?

I am having the save “problem” too. Part of it is my fault though.

I built a 1000+ track composition template all built out of individual instances meaning tons of Kontakt’s. I disable all the tracks and then when writing enable those I want to work with.

I did this to avoid VEPro and having to buy and maintain multiple computers yet have the advantage of a large template configured and ready for action.

In general this works fine except for the saving which now takes some 20 seconds, and Cubase becomes unresponsive during the process sadly. I have auto-save turned off of course, I guess I live dangerously…

Hey InLightTone -

You might actually benefit from having VEPro, you won’t have to disable the tracks either.

If you click on ‘decouple’, the VEPRO data isn’t saved with the CPR file, which means your CPR file will be much smaller, and will not take long to save. You can manually load the VEPro data, or set it to always load by default.

If I was working with a fixed template, this would be teh most efficient use of resources.

Hey InLightTone -

You might actually benefit from having VEPro, you won’t have to disable the tracks either.

If you click on ‘decouple’, the VEPRO data isn’t saved with the CPR file, which means your CPR file will be much smaller, and will not take long to save. You can manually load the VEPro data, or set it to always load by default.

If I was working with a fixed template, this would be teh most efficient use of resources.

I looked into it but I don’t like having to work with midi tracks AND audio tracks for each instrument. I also don’t like having Kontakt’s full of instruments, just one plugin per instrument with stereo out. This is way more straight forward to my way of thinking (which could be faulty). The way I have this template going the only thing that shows up in the mixer are my group tracks and any instruments I activate/enable.

I may have to cave in though as the saving thing is annoying as I’m a Ctl-S maniac…