Mediabay freezes Cubase 13

Awesome, glad to hear you got it sorted. Cubase 13 now supports their server. Here’s the original post :

Joerg

Nov 2023

With Cubase 13 the MediaBay was switched to a client / server implementation. That was done for HALion 7 in advance. Now there is only one database, and tags are in sync across those apps.

The process that is scanning your content is the Steinberg MediaBay Server, you can see it in the Windows Task Manager / macOS Activity Monitor. Cubase starts the Server so the permissions are passed on.

Regarding performance: The MediaBay supports a concept of Volume Databases: Do a right click on a volume in the MediaBay Tree in Cubase / Nuendo and select “Create Volume Database” - best before scanning!!! That will separate your scanned library content from the all the preset and VST Sound content. If not creating such a Volume Database all media is put into one database and browsing presets can become very slow, depending on how large your libraries are.

Btw. those Volume Databases are shared between products (even between C12 and C13), but they do not immediately communicate updates between the products, as the MediaBay Server does. (e.g. edit a Rating in HALion 7 and see the “real-time” result in Cubase 13).

Note: Volume Databases are created in a “.steinberg” folder in the root of the drives, so write permissions must be granted for the feature to work.

Deactivating Antivirus / creating exclude rules only for your libraries (after manual AV check) is a good idea. Checking the permissions on the volume is another good idea. If trouble persists I can help with activating logging and analysis of logs.

The appearance of hidden files is something we can fix, I’ll talk to our planners for next actions.

I’m still not sure why this isn’t a sticky here in the forums, this is critical to the workflow in Cubase 13 now.

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Totally missed all of that hah. I’ve had the previously mentioned trouble with Media Bay like freezing up selecting a file, and after it finally lets up and works again, its corrupted the file and it blows up from a 1MB drum loop to a 4.29GB piece of junk heh. Wonder if this might help that .

Hadn’t seen it in awhile and thought perhaps it was gone, but ran into it again a few weeks ago…

Yes, it should. Effectively, this makes mediabay much faster now.

Im just try this , I right click (Mac) and select create a volume database , which I thick it did . I wait a while and try again to check and get a dialog the 2nd time …

how can I check it worked the first time ? I can’t see anything different within new Endo I’m not sure whether it’s creating this volume database file ?

Thx
Andy

OK so after quitting and reopening new Endo I now see the new icons :). Still not 100% sure where these database files are stored for the volumes.

incase this helps other , if you create volume based db , mediabay3 file for that Volume (on a Mac) is a hidden file which is located on the top level of that drive or volume .

Creating a Volume Database.