What could be more nightmarish than trying to re-open a mix that you’ve spent hours working on, only to encounter a fatal error that means you cannot open the .song file?
We all know that sinking feeling you get when you first realize you may have lost hours of hard work. It’s especially painful if you may have lost a client’s work, or a once-in-a-lifetime performance. If you are unlucky enough to find yourself in this awful position, there are (fortunately) some things you can try to recover your work.
There are three main reasons for a studio one song to fail to open. They are:
- a bad .song file
- bad services
- bad plugins.
Crashloop
If you are stuck in a crashloop because you have set studio one to automatically open the corrupted file, we have to go under the hood to stop studio one from doing that before we can proceed. If you can open Studio One to the start page, skip this step.
We need to modify the behaviour from the Studio One .settings file. That file is found in:
C:\Users\(Username)\AppData\Roaming\PreSonus\Studio One 3 (WIN)
~/Library/Application Support/PreSonus Software/Studio One 2 (MAC)
Make a copy of this file in case you need it later!
Right click the file: Studio One.settings, and open it with a text editor. You will need to edit the following section:
Section path=”Configuration
<Attributes>
<PersistentAttributes x:id=”values”>
<Attribute id=”Application.DocumentHandler.startupAction” value=”1″
set “Application.DocumentHandler.startupAction”;
Change the “value=1” to “value=0”
This will allow you to open Studio One to the Start page, and allow you to start troubleshooting the problem.
Bad Services
Make a backup of the song in case you need it. Name it something like “MyBrokenSong_backup.song“
In Studio One, go to Options/Advanced/Services.
Try to make an educated guess as to which service may be causing the problem. Did you use melodyne in your song? Or Audio Bend? Or Do you have a video in your song? Try disabling the services one at a time and attempting to open the problem file. This can be tedious, but repeat the process until you have pinpointed the problematic service.
Bad plugins
The song may fail to open because of a bad plugin. To check this, disable“Scan at startup” in the Studio One options window. If that fails, remove your VST plugins folders. This will allow you to launch Studio One with no third party plugins.
If you determine the problem is being caused by a bad plugin, you may re-add your plugins one by one until you hit the crash again.
If none of these solutions work, here are some other things you can try:
Try to open an autosaved file ( SongFolder/History)
- Clear the Cache folder (SongFolder/Cache)
- Run Studio One as administrator (WIN)
- Run Studio One in compatibility mode (WIN)
- Copy your song to the desktop and rename is so that it only contains letters