Hi, I’d like to know if I should be removing Cubase 4 from my system before installing the Cubase 6 upgrade I purchased?
You don’t need to remove it, just delete your preferences. If you search around, you’ll find a reference to the location of the folder.
Hi metrosuperstar -
I have SX2, SX3, Cubase 4, 5 and 6 all happily residing together - in separate folders of course. I have no real reason to delete any of these, so they stay where they are. And on XP too!
I don’t think it’s necessary to delete the prefs either, unless you suspect that the they are causing some instability. Have gone from 4 to 5 to 6 and never deleted any prefs, not when installing and not otherwise.
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THanks for the answers…maybe you can also give me some guidance on where to install the VST instruments? Do you install the ones included with C6 in the same location as 3rd party VSTis? I was planning on installing C6 on the internal drive and the VST instruments on an external drive but if I recall, you can choose to put the .dll files in one location and the actual sound banks in another?
Any clear guidance here for optimal use would be much appreciated! 
The VST 3 instruments as you may know are not installed in the same directory as the VST 2.x. The default directory for the legacy VST 2 plugins, if I remember correctly, will be placed in a VSTPlugIns folder under the Cubase 6 folder but I don’t know if these differ in any way from those supplied with C4, I moved them and replaced the old ones just to be sure. Don’t think you’re supposed to move the VST 3 files though, might breake something.
Moving the actual .dll:s to a separate drive make very little difference, you might win a few ms loading time if the disk you’re moving to has better read times than your system drive but no performance gain while running the actual projects. The content for sample based instruments, however, will benefit from being on another drive than your project audio files. Don’t know if you win that much from moving it from the system drive unless, as stated above, the new drive is faster. Maybe if you’re short on memory and the page file gets used alot.
I saw somewhere that you can choose where to place the content during installation but I didn’t bother. If you miss it and need to move the content afterwards, I’ve found no other way to relocate it than to copy the folder structure to the original location and create shortcuts with matching names into them. Hacking the registry to remove the automatic appending of the word “shortcut” will save your sanity when doing this (google will help you).
But be warned, with both Cubase 5 and 6 installed my system drive is littered with content folders, preset data and whatnot and if you start messing about you might have more loss than gain. I’d leave it as it is unless I start noticing performance problems.
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OK thanks for the tips…I’ll give it a go…
…but why are so many users keeping multiple versions of Cubase on their system? I’d rather just have one…
Just in case issues arise while testing new versions/ updates.