Steinberg's Cubase is my DAW of choice and has been for some years now. It's a big and powerful product and it has to be said that it has its share of issues.  Many issues are environmental; they are casused by factors outside of Cubase itself, but when you have a problem, well, you hae a problem irrespective of what causes it.  Over the years I have kept a notebook of Cubase fixes and I am now going to use this page to keep track.  There are many resources out there for Cubase - visit the forums at www.steinberg .net/forum for much discussion but be warned, it can get a bit negative over there at times.

_OK - but it still happens.  Search the web and you will find hundreds of people complaining bitterly about bugs and problems.  Sure there are bugs, too many of them, but dig deeper and you will find that many of these problems are caused by hardware incompatabilities, many others by plugins.  There are so-many plugin downloads available that I find myself installing stuff that I don't need almost without thinking about it.  Once installed I'll often open a new toy to see what it looks like and how it sounds in whatever project I'm working on (I know...!) and then forget to remove it (yes, I already  said it, "I know...!"). I recently completed a mammoth and very dull session editing a bass track, saved the project and went to bed. When I went to open it the following morning I got the "Good Morning Andi, you have a Dead Project" message. I tried the old "save under a different name" trick, then I tried the slightly more panicked "backup project to another folder" trick, then the "System Restore just in case" trick, then I made coffee and worked back through the backup files (you know that you can rename a .bak file to .cpr and it will open right?) and found one that opened, but it locked-up if I tried to save an edit of any type.  I opened the mixer and removed all plugins that are not either native to Cubase or that I haven't been using forever and the project saved OK, edited OK and opened OK.  Had I been in a mood to play I  would have removed the plugins one at a time, as it was I just did the lot. Here's the tip - don't add strange plugins to live projects, save a project with a different name BEFORE you add anything at all, and keep a note outside of Cubase of what version is which ( I have well over a hundred versions of some project files).  If you have to revert to a previous version, you may find that you can still open the mixer and channels and plugins and take a screenshot that can allow you to manually re-create settings with minimal effort. Alternatively, remove any new plugins from your plugin folder and open Cubase to allow it to re-scan.  You may find that your project will open but with errors complainig that your new toy can't ber found.