So, I upgraded to Cubase Pro 9.5 and, once again, all my configuration settings were discarded. [For the record, it takes me about eight hours to rebuild my Cubase installation from the ground up. INFURIATING!] I understand there are some shortcuts to rebuilding a Cubase installation by copying XML files from a prior version but, without explicit confirmation from Steinberg, this scares the hell outta me. In particular, some of the plugins I used in C9 are now on C9.5’s blacklist. What might happen when these are forced into Cubase by way of a rogue XML file is anybody’s guess. I can’t afford to take that risk.
So, is there any formal documentation from Steinberg that verifies for certain that it’s okay to copy PluginManager.xml (and any other configuration files, for that matter) from Cubase 9 to Cubase 9.5? This will save me many hours of work but only if it’s 100% safe.
What might happen when these are forced into Cubase by way of a rogue XML file is anybody’s guess. I can’t afford to take that risk.
Well my guess (and previous experience) would be that nothing untoward will happen. Back up prefs, copy ALL of it. If you have any problem, replace from backup.
After looking at the mostly-empty default PluginManager.xml file in Cubase, I felt comfortable taking the leap and, yes, it appears to have worked fine. Thank you for the encouragement.
Now, if only there were a way to reliably copy over all of the other settings.
Rebuilding the Control Room and metronome are particularly frustrating because their settings don’t appear to be preserved in Preferences or in templates. You have to manually rebuild them and then Cubase preserves their state in the background (presumably, in another XML file). And with the Control Room, it’s particularly confusing because loading a template can re-establish some (but not all) of the I/O settings required to rebuild, but then parts of the Control Room configuration are stored permanently while your templates can override some but not all of it? Ugh. The only way I could wrap my head around it was to manually rebuild my I/O from scratch before rebuilding the Control Room. I tried loading a template but, again, it didn’t restore everything, so it just made everything more confusing.
Being that this is my third consecutive version of Cubase and no upgrades have yet succeeded in preserving my settings so far, I should probably submit this as a formal bug report / feature request. At a minimum, it could be noted in the documentation which XML files are verified safe to copy from which prior versions of Cubase. Rebuilding I/O and Control Room with a simple copy/paste would be an enormous help.