A small utility program that converts old formats (.sng .all .arr) to .cpr

Cubase
,
#1

I used Pro24III back in the 80’s. It worked so well that I never upgraded to Cubase. I spent my money on keyboards, because computers and software were too volatile then, but Pro24III was rock solid. I kept using it until I got married in '94 and spent the next few decades raising kids. As a result, I have a bunch of old .sng files that need conversion to .cpr to work in Cubase 10.5. I only need Elements for now, but eventually I’d get Pro. This suggestion is a result of this thread:

https://www.steinberg.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=284&t=189981

I’ve already converted the .sng files to .all files using an old Cubase on the STeem Atari emulator. But now I need to put these through SE3 to get them from .all to .cpr. Two problems…

1 - I need 10.5 Artist to get a license to load SE3 (I only want Elements for right now)

2 - I may need an old XP machine or an XP VM to run SE3 if XP Compatibility in Win10 doesn’t work.

All this just for the sake of converting a bunch of .sng to .all to .cpr I don’t want to convert the old files to .mid because I want to preserve all the patterns/parts.

How about if Steinberg were to create a small standalone utility program that converts all the old formats to .cpr? Then we wouldn’t need to deal with Atari emulators, old XP machines, license issues, and whatever.

How about it, guys?

#2

+1. Alternately, Steinberg might consider publishing the specification of the file formats of early versions, then the community could undertake the process of development.

#3

too much work for such a small user base that would need to use this.

#4

Why not just take the existing SE3, comment out (or delete) all the code for all functionality except for the ability to import .all / .arr files and save them as .cpr

Or just have this functionality in Cubase, period. Why did they ever take it out? I can understand they don’t want their users saving their projects as .all / .arr …but why did they ever get rid of the ability to at least import them?

#5

As I say, all Steinberg would really have to do is publish the specification of the file formats of earlier versions.

#6

This would only help if they would also publish the specification of the .CPR format, which I doubt they would as it is still in use.

#7

See my full post on my post
[Solved] Convert old Cubase files (ARR and ALL) to CPR format