IMHO, I don’t care if it’s Nuendo’s or plugin’s blame. Steinberg, as developer of a professional tool, should provide the mechanisms to avoid such problems (isolating plugins, protecting memory, whatever). And, if they can’t/don’t want do it better, should provide more protection for the project itself.
Hoping this thread won’t de-generate into yet another “bash-Steinberg” thread (although I fear it’s already too late…), and having wasted time in the past reconstructing a corrupt projects (I know exactly what you’re going through, Antonio), I have to agree that project integrity and reliability is paramount. No matter what happens, short of catastrophic hardware failures, a project should always survive or permit quick reconstruction.
- It should be possible to load a project bypassing all plugins.
- Nuendo should be more specific with regards to what has failed (auto-diagnostic).
- Nuendo should be preemptive by offering the user an optional rigorous testing of all plugins and VSTi’s for optimal compatibility and stability.
These would help a lot.
But from Fredo’s recent comments about memory usage in another thread, it seems that plugins are not just “plugged into Nuendo” but handled within the OS as well, and so puts the plugins’ operation and stability out of the control of the Nuendo’s programmers. The fact that some plugins won’t give up memory after they’ve been instantiated and removed points to a fundamental flaw in the way these plugins are written. There should be rules an guidelines that make this impossible, but from what I understand no one can impose them. It seems that this problem is near impossible to resolve.
There was a time when music software programmers wrote their own OSes. Perhaps it’s time to consider this again. Or at least look for exhaustive solutions that could resolve the problem, like a complete rewrite of the VST architecture…
But in absence of these complex solutions, at least it should be possible to find ways to minimize the damage the plugin problem can cause by insuring the integrity of projects. Here’s a concept: let’s consider project stability, survivability and recovery new features. I’d pay for them. 
+1
Any official statement?
First off I don’t want to belittle your problem but these problems are probably down to memory usage. I have 5 minute autosave on, and on the 32bit version of Nuendo at most I would lost maybe 5 minutes of work if I pushed plug-ins over the memory limit and the project became “corrupt” (or crashed).
Waves plug-ins can use slightly more memory than some however I’ve found them to be some of the most stable plug-ins out there so I probably wouldn’t point the finger of blame at Waves.
For what it’s worth I have pushed PT to the memory limits too and ended up with projects that would no longer load (without any warning about it being corrupt). The only real solution that I can see if you’re dealing with memory intensive sessions is to migrate to the 64bit version of Nuendo.
Be aware that many things in Nuendo can take up memory such as number of tracks, waveform data, Variaudio processing, control surface requirements, plug-in GUIs etc. It is easier than you might think to hit that upper memory limit especially with larger sessions.
From another thread I posted in:
On 64bit windows, any 32bit process can use 32bits of address space i.e. 0x00000000 to 0xFFFFFFFF in hexadecimal, 4GB in decimal. This memory is then used when you instantiate a plug-in, when the host needs to create tracks, send control surface information etc. You will see Nuendo crashes when Nuendo runs out of 0xFFFFFFFF address space.
Don’t bother using the regular task manager to monitor memory usage as that doesn’t tell you the total amount of address space the process is using. To check memory related crashes download Process Explorer and make sure “Virtual Size” is showing. Keep Process Explorer running while using Nuendo and if a crash occurs when the Virtual Size reaches 4GB then it is memory related.
Good comment about memory.
That drives me to a BIG question:
How stable is the 32 bit plugins loading in Nuendo running at 64 bits in Mac? Any feedback about this?
Thanks.
Sorry, I overlooked that you work with a Mac.
I have no experience with that OS or hardware as of the last decade.
On PC, 64bit OS is working very well with all my plugs and softwares w/o corruption of larger projects.
Mind you, I don’t have any of my Wave bundles and no extra bit bridge installed on any of my machines , though…
To your above post… Nah, I think, it too many manpower to even out the shortcommings of a gazillon of third-party developers. I am sure, SB does keep an eye on the protection of projects. But there is still this human and technical factor on the user side, too. That makes it difficult …