Making old projects work on new computer

[epwspower]

My HDD failed and I’m in the process of setting up Cubase 8 on a new HDD.

I kept all my important Cubase files and I’m reinstalling various plugins.

Back in Cubase 5 (only a few months ago, before I upgraded to 8), I would share projects with a friend and when I would open his projects, even though he had the same plugins as I did, his Cubase projects on my system would not load various plugins.

For example, his project would tell me that it couldn’t find FabFilter Pro Q so there would be a greyed out !!FabFilter!! in the inserts. There was no way to point to where I had my FabFilter plugin located so I was unable to fully get his projects working with his EQ and other plugins. His directories, and even some of his .dll names were different than mine (even though the plugins were exactly the same), so Cubase immediately just greyed out the plugin slots instead of asking me where mine were located.

My question is, many of my reinstalled plugins will likely have different directories and possibly slight .dll name changes. When I open my projects that I saved before the HDD crash, should I expect this issue again? Or does Cubase 8 have an option to point to where “missing” plugins are located?

[svennilenni]

@epwspower

My HDD failed and I’m in the process of setting up Cubase 8 on a new HDD.

I kept all my important Cubase files and I’m reinstalling various plugins.

Back in Cubase 5 (only a few months ago, before I upgraded to 8), I would share projects with a friend and when I would open his projects, even though he had the same plugins as I did, his Cubase projects on my system would not load various plugins.

For example, his project would tell me that it couldn’t find FabFilter Pro Q so there would be a greyed out !!FabFilter!! in the inserts. There was no way to point to where I had my FabFilter plugin located so I was unable to fully get his projects working with his EQ and other plugins. His directories, and even some of his .dll names were different than mine (even though the plugins were exactly the same), so Cubase immediately just greyed out the plugin slots instead of asking me where mine were located.

My question is, many of my reinstalled plugins will likely have different directories and possibly slight .dll name changes. When I open my projects that I saved before the HDD crash, should I expect this issue again? Or does Cubase 8 have an option to point to where “missing” plugins are located?

VST 2 Pluginpath in Cubase 8 can be set in the Plugin-manager. If you have done that already, and Cubase does not recognize them, they are probably a different version numner, or maybe one of you uses the VSR 2 version, while the other uses the VST3 version.

[epwspower]

Thanks, svennilenni.

I did an early run (not all my plugins are installed yet) on my old project from the previous hdd and Cubase 8 did a perfect job finding where all the plugins are located. Cubase 5 did a horrible job but thankfully Steinberg fixed those issues since. Whew.

[Parrotspain]

I just imported a project from C5 into C8.5.20. It only used Cubase VSTs and VSTis. Halion Sonic SE has taken over from the old Halion player, but you can find the original preset name in the new instrument and that works fine.

All the effects plugs worked with the exception of the de-esser, which showed up as missing. This was easy to sort out, but a little bit odd. I hate de-etherz anyway, zo it wath not a great losz.