I have just installed Cubase, which I did whilst logged in as administrator, but now using it in my non admin User account, as is best practice for IT security reasons.
However, when I load the demo projects, I get lots of messages about missing sounds, e.g. starting vstsound:\ then followed a long number and \Audio Files\LoFi Dreams.… I have searched for these files (with an admin account) and cannot find them anywhere on the PC
If I run the projects whilst logged in as admin, there are no missing files reported!
I raised a support ticket 5 days ago and no response (not impressed). Can anyone else help?
As a aside, if I run the project as admin, I cannot get it to work with my UMC404HD audio interface, yet it works fine as an ordinary user! Can’t win either way!
Presuming the Library manager is the same on Windows as MacOS, it will show you the full path where your .vstsound files are located. Library manager lets you locate each library wherever you want it (which is nice) but let’s presume it’s under your C:\ProgramFiles\Steinberg folder. First thing I’d do is make sure your non-admin user has permissions to read (maybe write) to the files/folders through Explorer. I suppose you’ve formatted that guy as NTFS?
Fese,
Thanks for your reply. Everything was installed and it all works when logged in as admin. The files are somewhere presumably with permissions only for admin, but I just cannot find them, despite searching the whole PC using the names of the missing files.
So I found a load of stuff stored in ProgramData\Steinberg. Whilst there was ‘User’ read/execute access to much of this, there were some files without this permission. So using admin rights, I changed the permissions for the Steinberg directory for users to allow this permission and set it to ripple through the directory structure and for new files to inherit the same permission.
And it worked!
Most strange that some areas had access and others didn’t, but hopefully fixed for the future now. Still don’t know why Cubase referred to wav samples under a “vstsound:\\” address.
That syntax is commonly referred to as a “UNC,” or “universal naming convention.” The benefit of that manner of reference is that it allows for system-wide registration of a “protocol” (in this case, vstsound:\) to be associated with a particular application. This manner of reference is what allows you, by way of example, click the UNC of “http:\something_dot_com” and have your system automatically open your default browser and then load the referenced resource. It’s so that you can share that reference throughout your system. This is how multiple non-DAW app-stacks (Wavelab, SpectraLayers, etc) know how to handle the file-type reference. Pretty cool, really
OH! P.S. They aren’t really “wav” files when stored on your hard drive as vstsound collections. It’s a manner by which Steinberg (in this case) isn’t making piracy trivial. And I think it’s fair. Ableton does the same thing with AIF files included in Packs - you can’t just drag them out and copy them - you have to work at it
My guess is that you installed those libraries after-the-fact under the admin user, and thus, when permissions were added only the admin user had access. This is what @fese meant by installing/updating/maintaining libraries as your operative user and using “privilege escalation” (UAC in his case) to have the installation process execute with escalated privileges while launching within the overall context of the user.
The odd thing is that I installed the whole Cubase 14 stuff (which took ages) logged in as admin and did not add anything else afterwards. Because there were lots of different installs/downloads, maybe they were treated differently to each other. In any case, it is all okay now.
