Cubase project died

[swilow11]

I've encountered a strange issue. A project of mine nearing completion has been rendered completely non playable. It was approaching maximum complexity with a passage of several automation sweeps and started nearing peak load. I began freezing tracks, doing little tweaks to decrease RAM consumption and after a point Cubase itself froze and I had to force quit. Helpfully, back up project was created- but this project cannot even play for over a second before peak load meter hits the red and audio cuts out. Nothing I can do makes the slightest difference. Without any audio playing or being processed at all, the peak load meter is red. I deleted it track by track and no difference was noted. It's permanently corrupted and not seemingly based on any input I can recognise.

I went back to the original project, minus a small passage that wasn't captured and have replicated all my automation/stuff (but better!) and hit about 70% usage. So there is no great loss here at all, but I'm curious what has exactly happened in this back up project to cause this behaviour as I would like to avoid a recurrence.

I should note that I was also switching ASIO guard settings before the crash. Curious if anyone has any thoughts here. Let me know if I've missed any relevant details.

[zvenx]

So no direct useful info.
I haven't had a corrupted Cubendo project in years, but I still manually do an incremental save every 30 or so minutes or whenever I do something considerably new as I am working on the project.

I did however see recently someone had a corrupted project and once they moved it off to another drive (they were working on their C drive which I never keep projects on) but once they moved it to another drive, it opened and worked fine.
I am not sure why, but you can try that for your own curiosity.

But yeah I would suggest manually doing an incremental save every 30 or so minutes or less (I sometimes end up with like 50 incremental saves by the time I finish a project
rsp

[swilow11]

I have auto save enabled, what's the advantage to manually saving as you suggest?

Anyway, despite losing a bit of work, it was pretty shitty and take 2 has turned out much better. Just curious how it happened.

[zvenx]

Only advantage is I save when I have done something worthwhile that i think needs saving rather than an arbitrary time.

rsp

[Weasel-Boy]

Years ago…maybe when I was using Cubase 4, 5 or 6, I found that engaging auto-save would result more times than not, a corrupted Project file…and not just the newer auto-saved file but the currently loaded file. So I stopped using auto-save and like Zvenx, began a discipline of saving every 30 minutes or after a major change.

To this day, I do not trust Cubase’s auto-save feature.

[jancivil]

Years ago…maybe when I was using Cubase 4, 5 or 6, I found that engaging auto-save would result more times than not, a corrupted Project file…and not just the newer auto-saved file but the currently loaded file. So I stopped using auto-save and like Zvenx, began a discipline of saving every 30 minutes or after a major change.

To this day, I do not trust Cubase’s auto-save feature.

Lately, this is Cubase Pro 12, the auto-save has Cubase creating a -01-appended project if it autosaves at the same time I'm saving it. I think it's supposed to be temporary as I watch it on the drive disappear if my save works; as opposed to it hanging and here's a zero bytes -01 file as I have to force quit it, losing (hopefully only) a few minutes worth of changes. I may turn auto save off because my luck is so bad with this "feature". It hasn't corrupted a project this iteration as far as I can determine but my most recent effort has been difficult for a reason I cannot grok at all (I won't go into it again here).

[middle_color]

...Curious if anyone has any thoughts here...

Perhaps you project files are saved directly to some "cloud" service folder?
I make music projects exclusively inside a cloud folder, and I encountered corrupted project files BY DIFFERENT DAWs when saving to the same filename.

[jancivil]

A project [..] approaching maximum complexity with a passage of several automation sweeps

I tend to doubt this is it at all, anyway. [My last proj before this has appx 220 lanes of Host automation not counting volume levels (& excl. MIDI). and the whole of it plays back in real time not taxing the CPU (I have to watch memory pressure and mitigate some load) much.] Unless your system is struggling.

[swilow11]

^Maximum complexity relative to the project itself. And yes, the system was struggling somewhat.

[jancivil]

note the 'anyway'. some plugins may not automate trouble-free, but...

it doesn't seem to me cubendo likes a lot of switching ASIO guard but you already sense the same I'm guessing.

I can say this, when a machine is hot, running constantly for a while - cf., "struggling" - project files can get hinky.

[swilow11]

^I think you're right there. I was recently looping a 4 bar pad sound using Gatekeeper to create a stuttery effect with midi triggering and did the loop-for-hours thing. CPU usage started to sky-rocket. After a break, it settled down (and I never ended up making anything useful during that whole period, there's a lesson there).