Project corruption

Sometimes, when I’m working in big and complex projects, they get corrupted.

I’m in the middle of an important and big project. IS THERE ANY way to recover projects from corruption?

Exporting and reimporting tracks don’t seem to work.

This situation is absolutely painful and, thought it’s not common enough to avoid using Nuendo, makes me lose A LOT of time and makes me feel VERY frustrated. :imp: :imp: :imp: :imp: :imp: :imp: :imp: :imp: :imp: :imp: :imp: :imp: :imp: :imp: :imp: :imp: :imp: :imp: :imp: :imp: :imp: :imp: :imp: :imp: :imp: :imp: :imp: :imp: :imp: :imp: :imp: :imp:


Any suggestion, before start crying?

Thanks.

Corruption means: plugins have wrong settings, project does not sound as expected, SoundToys plugins don’t load, Nuendo incorrect behavior, and so on.

Is it a session that was originally created in 5.1 or earlier?

They don’t seamlessly work in 5.5

There is no fix or acknowledgement about this issue

It ended up costing me $4000usd

That reminds me that I have one created in Cubase that crashes Nuendo all time (it’s a 3,5 hour live gig), but now I’m talking about a brand new 5.5 session with a 20 minutes of music in 150 tracks and a bunch of plugins (Nuendo, Waves, UAD and VSL plugins mostly).

IMHO, Nuendo should be VERY careful with project corruption. I remember the old Logic Audio reconstructing damaged projects. I REALLY MISS that in Nuendo, and that should be a PRIORITY in something used for big mixes.

A least, I’m not the only one.

Hmmm…
No corrupted .npr for the last 12 months, or maybe even longer.
And those who went bad were connected to bad or corrupted plugins, bitbridge problems, missing licensing updates or format missmatches and the likes. Not very likely that it is a pure Nuendo problem…

This is a nasty task, but you probably have to play SheerLuck Holmes within your softwares and maybe bridges.
Hope, you can sort it out, soon!

Cheers, Big K

The problem is you’re probably running out of memory and you get project corruption. All those issues have “magically” disappeared for me in the 64bit version of Nuendo.

A lot of the new plug-ins are memory hogs.

But, is there any way to recover it?

If there is I haven’t found one. On PC you can use Process Monitor to see exactly when you’re approaching the 32bit application limit. I’m not sure if a similar solution exists on the Mac.

I discovered something while writing a reply to this thread. I was starting to experience some strange instability with one of my N5.2.2 32-bit PC projects and last night I checked in Task Manager and took note that the memory footprint was over 2 gigs in size. It hadn’t crashed, but screen redraws were slow, sometimes I had to wait a while because the keyboard wouldn’t start playback, and there was some other oddities going on in the editors. I was going to slim it down first thing this morning.

After reading this thread, I started N5-32 to see what the base memory footprint was. It was 172 megs when the loading stops, but it doesn’t stop growing: it keeps incrementing by 256k every 8 seconds or so.

After loading last night’s project, it used 1.638 gigs. Last night it was well over 2 gigs in size when I stopped working. And the 256k incrementing continues after the project is loaded without any other activity on my part.

It could be Nuendo, or it could also be something Nuendo pre-loads, like Waves’ Waveshell, media player, etc… I don’t know for sure, but this doesn’t seem normal to me. Looks like it could be a memory leak.

This would make a case for stopping work every couple of hours to save, quit Nuendo, restart Nuendo and reload; that might be a stopgap solution for now for avoiding corruption in 32-bit projects. But if this in fact the problem, then how close your project sits to the max mem limit of a 32-bit project will determine how much time you have to work.

BTW: What is the EXACT memory limit of Nuendo 32-bit running in Windows 7 64-bit?

2 GB

There is no exact memory limit. The OS takes some and leaves about 1.6 gig for “everything else”.
That is Nuendo and the plugins. The amount of memory that plugins take, Nuendo has no control over that. Even worse, when a plugin loads memory via the host (through Nuendo), Nuendo can not release that memory on behalf of that plugin, even if the plugin has been removed. That is the nature of how the OS deals with memory.

BTW, there is an algorithm that prevents Nuendo from creating corrupted project files (like on the old days when a project simply refuses to open), but that doesn’t prevent a plugin of the OS to screw up the project file …

Fredo

Thanks. So we’re still in the dark regarding the corruption. I know from experience that some plugins can throw all kinds of wrenches into the works; I’ve always maintained that Steinberg should put some stringent testing routine to insure plugin compatibility… could make it a user choice as to how stringent it is to allow tinkerers to take their risks, and pro’s to not!

But regarding memory, I wonder if this patch would work with Nuendo 5-32? It purports to allow up to 4 gigs of memory access for a 32-bit executable under W7-64:

How to Increase the Memory Limit for 32-bit Applications in Windows 64-bit OS

NTCore Patch Home Page

I’m going to copy the project file before I try it… :ugeek:

Mine always crashes at 3.2GB.

DG

I recovered the project.

What I did was look for every plugin with wrong params and change to a new one. It happened to be the Waves, what was messing up everything.

It a pretty big projects, but I use a template for it, so this was “easy”.

Great Antonio! Was it a particular Waves plugin, some of them, or all of them? Thanks.

In this case, I had to change several H-Comp, Aphex and RVerb.

Thanks Antonio. I’m going to start a new thread on the memory questions; seems a bit OT here.

I’ve had few corrupted projects and all of them had Waves plugins… Strange and frightening…

Bye / Tumppi

Well, I have to say that I have two different kinds of project corruption:

  1. Projects that load with plugin messing things up. That’s what I just fixed, finding out which were the ones messing around.

  2. Projects that loads and crash very often. I have some of those too. I don’t know how to fix them. The last one that I’ve got, was one that I started in C6 and then move to Nuendo 5.1 and then move to Nuendo 5.5. My best guess is that Nuendo-Cubase project format is not solid enough.

I don’t trust too much to Nuendo auto versioning, so I have projects with 200 version. The big issue here is that when you are working a whole day in a project, you don’t realize that the projects is corrupted until the they after or until it crashes, so maybe you have been working for 10 hours with a corrupted project.

It seems like I’m not the only one, so what I request is a way to RECONSTRUCT those projects, to avoid hundred of hours lost, and an improved file format.

BTW, I don’t like to start PT vs Nuendo s****y wars (I use Nuendo, so I like it much), but, in this case, in my whole career as professional mixing engineer and producer (+10 years), Pro Tools NEVER corrupted a project.

Is it Nuendo or sloppily programmed / incompatible plugins in the chain?
Maybe waves and the “usual suspects” are more careful with RTAS format, or those are simply easier to programm.
But VST has its advantages over RTAS… and it is not being terminated.
:wink:

Big K
modestly celebrating the 20th anniversary of my studio and the 30th year in the job this year