I own Cubase Pro 9.5 and Absolute 3 on Windows 10. I recently upgraded from version 9 to 9.5. In doing so I lost all of my Mediabay Ratings.
I eventually recovered my Mediabay by copying the entire contents of my %APPDATA%\Steinberg\Cubase 9_64 folder into the newly created 9.5_64 folder.
What if Steinberg had changed the design of Mediabay as part of this upgrade? Would this brutal copy and paste still have worked?
To clarify: this is NOT a backup issue. I’ve read extensively around Preferences/User Data locations, Profiles, and how to protect myself against data loss or corruption. This is an issue specifically concerning UPGRADES, where the installer overwrites the contents of Cubase’s internal settings that are out of my control. I’m focusing in particular on the “VST Sound” data, and the ratings I apply to any of Steinberg’s products that sit inside that structure.
Does anyone have direct experience of upgrading from one version of Cubase to another and retaining their “VST Sound” Mediabay ratings?
I was hoping to eventually rate all of my VST Sound content, but that would be many hours of work and now I’m afraid I’ll lose it if I ever upgrade to a new version in the future and I can’t just copy my old Mediabay over the top of the new one.
I rate my own mediabay sound design stuff and samples and I retained that when I upgraded.
However a lot of the steinberg stuff has the padlock icon which I’ve never fully investigated - is it something to do with that?
Also, are the ratings of presets in different instruments (when accessing mediabay) unconnected? When I rate a sound in Halion 6 for example it doesn’t seem to correspond to the mediabay ie it doesn’t update.
The padlock means that the preset is write protected.
This means that any changes will be written to the MediaBay database rather than writing to the file itself. This allows you to reinstall Cubase using the full installer (which writes over the content files currently installed) and still keep any ratings or other changes to the stock content.
The Halion 6 and Halion Sonic MediaBays are separate from Cubase’s MediaBay. They would probably load too slowly otherwise.
It’s possible to use the Cubase MediaBay to load presets by either clicking the preset browser to the top left of the plugin window, or by opening the MediaBay and dragging and dropping the presets into Halion.
So did I do something wrong when I upgraded from 9 to 9.5? I certainly didn’t retain any of my ratings - in fact it was as if 9.5 had been installed on a brand new PC that had never seen Cubase.
If you install for All users or The user, then there is a difference in where the files are placed. If you make a note on how you install/upgrade Cubase and do it the same way every time, there is a good chance that you don’t have to do anything when upgrading.
If Cubase is unable to import your old settings and MediaBay database for some reason, go to this folder: C:\Users{{USERNAME}}\AppData\Roaming\Steinberg
And look for these files from your previous version of Cubase:
Copy and paste them into the current Cubase folder (Cubase 9.5_64) and your MediaBay tags and ratings for write protected files will be restored.
For user content such as audio files and VST presets, the MediaBay tags and ratings are written into the individual files themselves unless you set them to be write protected.