where does sx3 store song specific plugin presets?

Cubase
#1

hi.

i recently had a hard drive crash, but thankfully it wasn’t the drive that held my project files. there’s two relevant drives, here. the first had two partitions: an os & program file partition and an “install partition” that held all kinds of install scripts. i had a script running on shut down that backed up the cubase user directory to the install partition. i might have backups, but i don’t want to start cramming things together until i understand how this works.

the drive with my project files is entirely unscathed. but, what is going to happen when i launch the cpr file (presuming all the relevant plugins are installed)? is all the information it needs to reconstruct the plugin settings available locally in the cpr file, or is this information that i lost in the user folder of my operating system?

to be a little bit more concrete, i had some guitar tracks connected to guitar rig. i didn’t actually save the preset anywhere; it’s not something i was going to re-use anywhere. did cubase know how to reconstruct the setting in the plugin by consulting the cpr file, or did it go looking for that information in a user directory somewhere?

i mean, it makes sense to me to think it should be in the cpr file, and all i’ll have to do is reinstall the plugins. but i don’t want to accidentally overwrite the values by confusing the program by telling it to look for information that doesn’t exist.

related question: if it’s stored in a user file, and i’m able to reconstruct the data, it’s only going to be by pulling information out of files that were deleted and salvaged using an undelete type program. i can’t just copy this over, i need to go into the xml files or whatever, find what i want and copy and paste it into the new configuration files. suggestions on how to do this?

jess

#2

ok, looking through the cpr file in text mode has given me enough of a clue to conclude that at least some of the data is in the cpr file. for example, i can see the name of one of the amps i’m using (although i’m not sure if that’s going to map to the guitar rig preset or my modified version of it, that i never bothered to save in it’s own preset and that wouldn’t help me right now if i had).

but, that brings up another question. i had some drums running through quadrafuzz, and did save them in presets. i now have an unscathed cpr file (exactly as it was when the other hard drive physically died) that is going to want to load a preset that was lost (on the other physically trashed hard drive). is it going to go looking for a missing preset and load defaults or something, or is the information from the gone preset saved in the cpr? what does it do, exactly, when it looks for a preset and can’t find it?

i suppose i could copy the project to a new directory, launch and see. but even that worries me without knowing what it’s going to do. i’m concerned that it might set a global value or something, rendering the data in the preset meaningless.

logically, i have to think it’s in the cpr. consider the following scenario: somebody opens up a project and modifies a preset that is shared across two projects. modifying the preset from project a should not automatically modify the setting as it is loaded into project b. that should be behaviour that is forced by the user; that is, if the user wants the newly modified preset to be applied to project b as well, it should have to reload it manually. the only way that is possible is if the settings are loaded as an inherent aspect of the project, which could only mean saving it in the cpr.

can somebody verify that i’m making sense, or school me on how this actually works? google isn’t turning much up…

jess