The media bay has never been the snappiest most responsive part of cubase for me, but lately its gotten extremely slow.
Clicking from folder to folder it can sometimes take up to 3 minutes for the entire folder to load! I know this may have to do with simply the size of the folder so…
Is there a setting anywhere to turn of folder rescanning?? I suspect that part of the issue may be the folders rescan every time i click on a new one.
Any help you can offer would be much, much appreciated!
I used to love the media bay to search my library. But recently it has become extreeeeeeemely slow! How can this be fixed?
Everytime I type in a search criteria it’s like Media Bay needs to scan the whole library instead of just checking the database or something. Is there any way to “reset” mediabay or anything?
I have noticed a bug that may be related to this.
MB will often not complete it’s scan unless you click rescan disk (the parent) and you must let it complete it’s scan.
If you do anything like start fiddling with a project the scan will not complete…
Other than that it works fine for me and I have over 300gb of samples and it runs nicely.
Just now I booted Cubase without preferences (hold ctrl+alt+shift while Cubase is booting). I went directly to MediaBay, found my sound library folder (with subfolders) in the “locations”, did a scan and it worked right away. It took under one minute to scan (I “only” have 133GB of samples) and then it worked as it should. Snappy and fast. I closed Cubase, booted it again (this time WITH preferences), went to MediaBay, didn’t have to rescan or anything, and now it works again.
Simply rescanning without the no-preferences boot didn’t work for me.
IMO each drive with managed locations should create it’s own database by by default, but it doesn’t.
In Media Bay:
Make sure you can see the Define Locations area (shift + F2)
In the Define Locations area, right-click each drive that has Managed Locations (checked checkboxes) and choose “Create Volume Database”. Make sure you click on the drive letter itself and not a sub-folder.
Media Bay was unusable until I did this but now it’s snappy…
Did not work well on my desktop 3 terra library…
I just purchased a 500gig SSD drive. I’m going to transfer my sample library without any kontakt library’s and associated files… Then I’ll see what happens… to be fairly honest I do not believe that Cubases Media Day is capable handling a huge library. If this works, then I will try to partition my 4 terra drive and see if the volumes database idea works Next.
So I transferred slightly under 500 gigs of samples and loops to a dedicated solid state drive.
I Created a Volume drive and scanned the files. It took about 2.5 hours.
I have to say that Media bay is lighting fast. It is unbelievable.
If you are using a hard drive with spinning discs… toss it out.
There have been times were I have waits 5 minutes or more for a folder of 50 samples to open using a HDD…
I am going to try and transfer my Midi file collection to a smaller SSD Drive I have.
I will see If this makes a massive difference too.
Thanks for the tips. It seems they helped with the craziest lags, but didn’t solve everything. I don’t wanna buy a separate drive 'cause i’m using a MacBook and don’t wanna have additional hardware to take with me (and simply refuse to buy one just because of Media Bay having huge performance problems compared to Ableton Live’s browser, for example).
I experienced that the two things taking the most time, now are:
Opening a Media Bay window and
navigating folders on your hard drive via Media Bay
What i did to improve on that and what one can try as well:
Tag all stuff as much as needed in order to navigate only by tags while staying in a “root” folder all the time (avoiding navigating the hierarchical folder structure on your drive)
Leave the Media Bay window open all the time (i’m using the “Media > Sound Browser”). I have it set to not stay on top, so it automatically hides when i click somewhere in the arrange window. If i hit the key command to show it again, it doesn’t re-open the window (and therefore doesn’t do any re-initialization) but just pops the window to the foreground.
If someone is dropping by here in 2018 (or after) and needs some more MediaBay life-hacks, just ask, or pm me! Volume Databases are definitely a way to speed up searches when you have to deal with large media libraries.
When I open a project, MediaBay works fast and nice. But playing a short song from the beginning to the end is enough for MediaBay to become tragically slowly; Media window on the right slows down equally badly also. It’s a nightmare.
I have heard that removing some file helps, because a new one is created and that one isn’t corrupt. For some time.
Are you playing the project, or a file in the MediaBay previewer? What exactly is slow? Can you send me screen recording… video quality does not matter, can be a mobile-phonerecording… with your description alone I can’t picture what exactly is happening.
One performance related pitfall I recently stumbled over: Check if the Deep Results Button is checked, if not the database is bypassed… that mode is used for navigating folders which are not under Database control.
Last night I made Rescan Disk in MediaBay. It cured everything. But today I played one of my PROJECTS, tweaked it a bit, and the whole devildom started over again.
Three things:
The Media on the right, where loops and all that stuff reside, is not showing any results. It takes ages for anything to show up.
MediaBay does the same.
Plugin’s “Load” is super slow.
In addition to all this, saving and exiting Nuendo results in very long times, while “the applications is not responding” is seen if right clicked on Nuendo icon in Doc. I think these things are interconnected.
So, “slow” is loops, fx Load in plugins, MediaBay showing results after long minutes of waiting + save and close project is super long. Sometimes I just Force Quit Nuendo.
What and where is “Deep Results Button”? I can’t find it; the Manual has no info about such a thing.
In these pics you can see those animated cubes in according fields idling with no results.
The grey counter indicates that stuff gets written to the database. That means that scanning is still in progress.
Can you send me a picture of the tree section? Video would be better though …
Btw. I would prefer to do a TeamViewer session … if not possible, we can continue here and I will ask more questions about your setup and actions, step by step.
Deep Results on: all known and scanned files in this and all subfolders are retrieved from the database
Deep Results off: all folders and known files of only the current folder are retrieved from the database if they are scanned, if they are not scanned, known files and folders are read from the harddisk
The latter mode allows to navigate folders in the result list by doublecklick
