Has anyone found a reliable way of moving the installed content from the C drive to another installed drive?
Also, does anyone know why the content is scattered all over the place? VST sounds, VST3 presets, VST Plugins etc seem to be in various places; Documents, AppData, Program Data, Program Files seem to be the main ones.
Apart from VST Plugins paths which can be set in the plugin manager, are there any ways to change to the defaults?
Failing that has anyone tried using a symbolic links with MS-DOS ‘mklink’ command? That would seem to be one way of shunting it all elsewhere and freeing up C drive space.
If you mean Steinberg content such as Halion and groove agent I just went through this with tech support.
Apparently Steinberg doesn’t realize that SSD drives are still a bit expensive and with increasing content with every new version this can be a problem. Besides, all other samples is on a separate E drive so why should Steinberg be special?
Create shortcuts in the C drive for every file in the content.
Put your actual content in another drive.
If you are a Cubase Virgin, and have never installed Cubase before I’m told you can select your drives for your content, but once you have selected your drives I think you are stuck with that unless you mess with the registry. It doesn’t matter if you have updated, upgraded…once you initially install with locations, you are stuck…until you reinstall Windows or delete files in the registry.
If I’m wrong about any of the above I apologize since Louis has attempted to help me here. I eventually had to go through tech support and they suggested create shortcuts.
Well, the VST Sounds (Hallion/Groove Agent) are a big chunk of it (multiple Gs).
But also, any VST Presets I create are being sent to the C Drive - not a real space problem, but I would have preferred to have them on a different drive.
I don’t see why there couldn’t be a single ‘Cubase Stuff’ folder that you get a choice where to locate on install that contains a directory structure for all the VST content; sounds, fx, presets etc, rather than stuff all over the C drive in different folders.
Thanks, so just normal shortcuts are the way forward? Fair enough, I guess.
Note: if you create shortcuts, the original data MUST remain in the original location, on the C drive, which is where Cubase will be accessing the data from. Which kind of defeats the purpose of making the shortcuts in the first place…
As far as VST Presets you can put those on another drive, just not sure why you would want to…
All my original data has been moved from my SSD C drive to my E drive. I’m referring to the samples for all Halion, Groove Agent, LoopMash, Reverence Impulse Library etc. It totals about 12 gigs. (The stuff that was in the Steinberg content folder.) The only files left in the C drive Steinberg content folder are shortcuts for every file.
Are you talking about standard shortcuts, or hard links?
Hard links are the better of the two, but using a program’s own method is always better. Hard links fool the OS into thinking that the files are still on the original drive, and will report that in disk space used, which used to screw up OS upgrades in the past, as it sometimes made the OS drive look like it did not have enough spare space, when it did. This was because the calculation for free space was total capacity - total size of files, rather than adding up the free space directly.
What are the registry settings to change? It is a lot faster for me than reinstalling!
Is this the same as using the ‘mklink’ command? I’ve just done this with iTunes so my iPad gets backed up off the C drive. It creates a single shortcut in the original folder on the C drive to the location on my other drive where I want the backup. Good point about the calculation of disk space - it would seem to be a waste of time if the OS still thought the data was on the C drive as I’m assuming it would never let you write to the free space.
I noticed this when I set up the iTunes shortcut the first time - so reset it all and did it again and the second time the c drive capacity didn’t drop when I ran the backup - so I was assuming the OS was correctly identifying that the folder only contained a shortcut.
Clearly, the above suggestion from @johnstaf to reinstall and specify paths is probably the way forward.
It would be useful if all apps, and the OS for that matter recognised the growing need to possibly keep supporting stuff off the C drive if it’s SSD. I have a top level Dir on my D drive called AppFabric, under which is CubaseFabric, Proshow etc etc and under Cubase is a dir for each VST Lib and such like.
It would be useful to have a built in “move” but for things like Halion, HSO etc I did find a re-install and override the defaults worked for me.
With Windows 8.x, you can specify another location for:
Desktop
Downloads
Favourites
Music
Pictures
Videos.
Open the Location panel of the Properties dialog for the folder. The OS even moves the current content over to the new location. I just wish that it would work this way for any folder.
I even have my VSTPlugins pointing to my M: (projects) drive, via hard links.
Yes, though I use free MS SysInternals’ junction.exe, as it handles listing, creation and deletion.
It is surprising how many hard links Win uses. Try:
Which is what I said in the above post. “The only files left in the C drive Steinberg content folder are shortcuts for every file.”
And my prior post. “Create shortcuts in the C drive for every file in the content.” I should have clarified “content that has been moved to the E drive.”
Perhaps I wasn’t clear enough. Content from C drive is moved to the E Drive. Shortcut files all pointing to the E drive remain in the C drive. For me that cleared up 12 gigs off my C ssd drive. It does work.
But as mentioned above it’s not the best solution since you end up with lots of shortcut files in the C drive.
Once the content was placed in the E drive I was able to create separate folders for Halion, Groove Agent, Reverence Impulse Library etc. This is much more organized than the Steinberg C drive content folder that contained a hodgepodge of different files such as LoopMash and Halion in the same folder. I haven’t discovered any drawback to this organization so far.
The main question for any user is they probably want to verify all content is showing up in Media Bay and available for use. Since I just went through all this last week I emailed Steinberg Tech support and there should be roughly 14,000 files in the VST Sound folder. (Don’t forget to subtract the number of files in your User folder from the VST Sound folder.)
I’m far from knowledgeable on this stuff, but with Steinberg Tech support help, I just moved the content folder last week and it does appear to work.
The standard method for this with any application is to use directory junctions, so move the entire directory to another drive and then run mklink with the /J parameter.
First, move the Content directory under AppData\Roaming\Steinberg to a new location, and then run something like
So the first directory is the one that used to exist, but doesn’t anymore. The second part is pointing to where the moved directory now actually resides.
Thanks for this. I asked this question in various fashions in the past weeks, but not knowing this stuff well enough to formulate a reasonable question, never got a solid answer.
Has anybody done this and found that Cubase 7.5 or 8 is happy enough with mlink/J to play along? I have heard there are registry items involved, from a mod I believe, and I wonder if making this link would not actually make changes at a deep enough level to keep the wolves away … ?
[EDIT] For people that might know as little or even less than I do about computer stuff like this (in the unlikelihood there actually are any people in that boat): business
I find that that article doesn’t explain it at all well.
There are shortcuts, symbolic links, hard links and junctions, with the differences being rather subtle for most users, but Win only exposes the shortcut in the GUI, as it is least likely to create ongoing problems for neophytes. Unfortunately, it cannot be universally used for redirecting access to content, because many programs do not see the content to which they point.
I actually use just the junctions, and it is the mechanism that Win 8.x uses for its libraries (Music, Downloads, etc), as it can be used across drives and partitions, and almost all programs cannot see ANY difference between content on a drive and that pointed to by a junction. junction.exe is good for this.
There are fancier tools for doing using these things, but I tend to get a bit confused by the terminology they use, and have got the link and target folder parameters back to front, and so created a link from instead of to the target folder.
At least with Win 8.x, Windows Explorer now puts a little arrow on junctions, just so you know that their content isn’t local. However, from there you cannot see or modify their target.
Yes around 14,000 files is what the Steinberg tech support person told me. Keep in mind I have been using Cubase full versions forever. So perhaps I could have some old content that a person who just purchased and installed C8 won’t have?
What other resource is there to know for sure that you have all the included content properly installed and showing up in Media Bay? Are others coming up with different numbers?
