MediaBay loses attribues

Sometimes it will happen that all of my attributes assigned for various files (mostly audio files) get lost. Thankfully, I keep backup, but I have no idea how to restore those attributes. As far as I understand, all of the attributes user assigned are written to mediabay3.db when file doesn’t support writing of attributes to it (so track template will have all of its attributes written to it, but audio file won’t)

Is there any way to export and import metadata in MediaBay? Please, I lost tags for over 10000 files and I can’t invest time to keep fixing this manually (this has happened before, but with smaller quantities)

Please Steinberg, help me…I payed you good money for Cubase Pro and its updates. You can’t possibly expect for me to keep on losing time making attributes multiple times for such a huge collection of samples. It’s just not normal for a program to delete my work…

Ok I found the cause (well, two causes) of the problem

Attributes are written to .wav files and I copied those same .wav files from my backup driver over edited samples which resulted in attribute loss. So that was my mistake for thinking that MediaBay wrote attributes in database file instead of .wav files itself.

However, the same thing cannot be said for .mp3 files. My experiments showed that attributes are not saved into .mp3 files so it’s probably best to use some kind of other format instead of .mp3 file. It seems that .flac is good for saving attributes and saving disk space…the only problem is that to import it you need to have your project setting set to 24/16 bit cause it won’t work with 32 bit float setting :frowning:

All in all, most of this was caused by me having certain wrong presumtions and not directly by the program itself.

It would be nice if Cubase manual specified which formats are valid to have attributes written too, because at the moment this is the only thing that I could have found in Cubase 8.5 Pro Manual at the page 583:

Cubase stores all media file information used in the MediaBay, such as paths and attributes, in a local database file on your computer.