Hmm, I think a lot of my messed-up projects have disabled tracks. I’ll test this. Thanks
I’m afraid to use C8 at the mo…two different projects that work fine in 7.5 just became unusable in C8…just froze solid,had to force a shutdown…spent a 82quid for that… 
just got to wait till Steiny actually finish the $%$#$% product
Yeah, it seems like Steinberg’s internal testing and beta testing pool could do well to have more “envelope pushers” on board; high plugin counts, on over-clocked, high-spec’d machines, running at 90%+ ASIO utilization, and from a wide variety of vendors.
After all, they did invert the VST spec. It’s a monster they created.
If anyone can figure out how to stabilize a 3rd party plugin, it should be Steinberg leading the charge.
Cubase should never “not load” a project.
Cubase should disable any ill behaving plugins when it loads, giving the user the ability to find a replacement.
Cubase should never crash due to an ill behaving plugin, it should sandbox it and shut the process down allowing the user to find a replacement and carry on.
I don’t expect a new version of Cubase to work perfectly with every older plugin (it would be nice, but I don’t even expect that).
But I do expect Cubase, at best, to gracefully identify problems and disable those plugins gracefully; at worst, to employ memory-sandbox-protection techniques to expose problems without losing work and without having to relaunch or reboot.
This should be a “feature” of Cubase so that marketing can get behind it and put more resources toward it. Bass amps and EDM soundpacks are nice, but like the saying goes for a person and their health, “health is everything.”
A crashing Cubase is like an unhealthy person with misplaced priorities.
The first step is owning up to the plugin community they invented, warts and all.
well said 
So I checked for disabled tracks. The mix that had become unusable in Cubase 8 will open in 7.5. I finished the mix, but I couldn’t fugue out why the guitars were so loud.
Turns out C8 had renabled my disabled guitar tracks! What the?!
Cubase 8 is a disaster.
mh, well - as I stated in the Nuendo board - I am currently mixíng a 250 track album in C8… 20 songs in one project. So far no bigger issues and no crashes… some smaller issues, like broken mouse wheel scrolling in the mixer (vertical) which is anoying… some things I dislike (still hovering, some “design issues” still not fixed/modified)… but overall no problems.
what I learned in the past:
It is not a good idea to open and work on a “quite finished” mix in a new version. I did all the time stuff like “recording in Version X, mixing in Version Y” - maybe I will use Nuendo 6.5 for recording till Nuendo 7 comes out…
This mix came from Logic and I set up a blank project, building a first template for future use - importing all the files etc… so that project has never seen another version than V8…
Going back and forth between versions always causes for trouble.
AND it is a good idea to use the new features “conservative” - that means - I will not go crazy with VCA faders yet - I will not build up a mix on a feature which might change the full mix when I HAVE to go back or when settings are not recalled 100% etc…
Sounds awesome, hope things continue to go smoothly.
With respect (not picking on you here), I think this is the heart of the problem, the long Cubase tradition conflating “number of tracks” with “number of plugins” when pointing to “large projects” working well.
I feel it’s this general ethos that shapes decisions at Steinberg. It’s why we haven’t seen the insert count increase since the late nineties.
We’ve had the ability to play back 96 audio tracks since 1998, on those ancient and almost hilariously underpowered computers (by today’s standards).
Your 250 track requirement, by 2014 computing capabilities, is child’s play (even at the highest bit depth and sampling rates).
That’s not a big project, technically-speaking. I’m not talking about audio tracks.
I’m talking about raw plugin counts, complexity of plugins (i.e. not stock plugins) and overall size (RAM) of the project.
The kind of large project I’m talking about is around 200+ of complex, premium 3rd party plugins, and 5GB+ (RAM) Cubase projects. With many of those plugins running live on group busses with lots of routing, sidechains and real-time fx.
Templates with over a hundred group channels running live fx.
Agreed, for the sake of finishing a project within a timeline.
But, technically, one shouldn’t have to start fresh each time. If so, I’m in trouble. I have an extremely complex project template that would take a very long time to recreate.
I know, because I was testing 4 different DAWs last year and recreated the darn thing in each DAW, for apples to apples. It was a year-long “spare time” project.
Agreed. But in this case, it was for testing only. It was also required due to the bug related to “Disable Track.” It certainly wasn’t by choice.
And in this odd case, rather than cause trouble, it solved it.
Good advice.
Hi Jalcide,
great post - thank you!
mh… well… there is a lot to optimize in the application and plugins - esp when it comes to 3rd party plugins… I often max out the CPU, even on my current machine (built this year) - having 90% CPU use in the Asio meter - but in the taskmanager only 30% or something like that is used…
That year I had a 750 track mix running fine on N6.5, track means not “audiotracks” - it means including excessive grouping/bussing and FX tracks etc and well. I do not get your point 100% - you mean - a bigger project should be no prob for the application? Of course not. I will not see any CPU load when running a 750 track project with a reseted mixer… Well, today I can insert maybe 1.000 RCL compressors (never tried) - in the year 2000 (or something like that) I was able to run ONE or two of them on a Pentium 2 system So there happened a lot. A programm running only stock plugins usually performs well… but I barely use stock plugins - exept channel eq and some others here and there or for “unimportant” tracks… Most likely I would be able to slam all the slots of that 750 track project with Studio EQ and VST dynamics and I am sure that there will be no stability issues.
[quote=“Brandy”]
It is not a good idea to open and work on a “quite finished” mix in a new version.
[/quote]Agreed, for the sake of finishing a project within a timeline.
But, technically, one shouldn’t have to start fresh each time. If so, I’m in trouble. I have an extremely complex project template that would take a very long time to recreate.
I know, because I was testing 4 different DAWs last year and recreated the darn thing in each DAW, for apples to apples. It was a year-long “spare time” project.
ah! understand! Ok, interesting project! And the only way to really compare apples to apples. But as I know - usually you just open an old full blown 90% CPU project in the new version to compare and see what happens I did so as well
Recently I tried to nail down a bug with Plugin Alliance plugins (Nuendo freezes when opening projects with more than - lets say 10 - Plugin alliance Plugins… till I remove the VST3 files temporarily. And of course I had no issues in a blank and new project when just loading 30 plugins… I would have to build a full mix, using all kind of plugins… but I can not afford 2 days just for testing…
Yes, exactly. This is why it’s so hard to isolate problems.
Many of these bugs are hard to reproduce for others.
I haven’t tested the issue I found (the Disabled track, any track, locking me out of the Freeze feature, until it’s re-enabled or removed), but suspect the issue would not manifest itself in a clean, blank project.
In fact, I would not be surprised if this “bug” (of unknown culprit, but probably Cubase) is never found by Steinberg. It may be destined to be a lone, corrupt, ghost in my project file. Forever keeping me from using the Disable Track feature.
Forcing me to, as you say, recreate this project from scratch or not use the combinations of plugins I’ve used.
Okay, now I’m getting depressed. 
Good luck with your Plugin Alliance plugins. I’m running many here in v8 with no problems yet.
Cheers.
I guess my question for Steinberg (not that I expect an answer) is: is it technically possible for a 3rd party plugin to corrupt a project file?
And if so, would the act of saving and reloading the project “clean” itself?
Or, could there be a project file in state of corruption, that seems to load and work fine, but is secretly creating things that look like bugs (i.e., this Disable Track appearing to be buggy, but not due to some corruption)?
Know this would help to narrow down the issue for those of us running into problems like this.
Well, I am usually working in Nuendo - recently I had two sessions where I had such a “ghost” in my projects… In one project ( the big one, with 750 tracks) it was an error which caused to prompt “want to save changes” always when I want to close a project - even when I just saved it. I had to save twice ( just to be sure) then close clicking " don’t save changes"… Not a showstopper but I never had it again and before. In another session I had always a “an error occurred and was saved in Nuendo.log” error when I closed a project which forced me to close Nuendo and reopen it as well. This was an error deep in my template which I had when mixing these songs - it came when mixing the first one, it stayed there till t he end
Talking about C 8:
I am at day 7 of that mix. CPU around 70% - about 2 dozen Kontakt Instruments, one dozen UVI instruments, zillions of plugins, mostly softube, uad, sonnox, waves and slate. Fortunately no issues so far * knocking in wood*
I avoided the use of fancy features like bounce in place, disable instruments, vca faders etc for the moment - I saved when using duplicate tracks etc…
Maybe it was just a good idea to build the project from scratch in an empty C8 project, importing only midi and audio. The project with that error log issue was coming from a client and was recorded in C5 artist or something… And her you have it. In my experience it is even not a solution exporting tracks archives for re-building because it seems to me that some ghost stuff is propably traveling there …
Yeah, it would be great to get a definitive answer from Steinberg on what “rebuilding / cleaning” Cubase does, if any, on load.
Cubase seems smart enough to deal with missing plugins (showing the “!!!plugin!!!” message), but how much internal rebuilding does it do on load for other possible areas of corruption? That’s the real question.
The best case would be if Cubase is granular enough, that if it sees malformed nodes in the project, it would reset them to some obvious-to-the-user default state (a clean blank channel, for example). But I’ve never seen Cubase do this “good” thing. It seems to only just “crash on load” (which may not be due to corruption at all).
It sounds like you may have some anecdotal evidence that corruption can live within a project file.
I know for Studio One, there was a version released that when loading a previous version with frozen tracks, would crash upon the unfreezing of them (was quickly fixed in an update). This was a sort of “corruption” that could live in a DAW file, so it’s of course technically possible.
It’s a common problem with files that grow large and complex (Microsoft Access data files, Outlook .pst files, etc.).
Yikes, do we need a Cubase “Rebuild / Cleaner” tool? As that would be a marketing nightmare, it will never be coming from Steinberg. But I think there should be no shame for Steinberg if Cubase, itself, does this when loading projects – that’s just good programming best-practices to solve the real-world potential of a file on a computer getting corrupt (for whatever reason).
Good luck with that mix, sounds awesome!
I’m in a similar place with a mix, but aside from this one hiccup (in this post), the only other issue has been ASIO Guard going into a stuttering effect, or wall of sound, which just takes a reset from the device panel. It doesn’t happen often, but is something I hope they discover and can fix.