Hi everyone,
Found a lot of old songs that I made in Cubase VST3/4/5 on a PPC Mac.
Meanwhile I have an Intel Mac and use Cubase6.
Is there a way to open these old projects?
Would be nice to hear them again and maybe mix them with better tools.
Thanks in advance!
I would say NO. There are features in Cubase VST5 that dont even exist in Cubase 6. One example is that there are different track types. In cubase VST5 there was a very nice feature called chord track. That does not exist in cubase 6. But sure, you can probably do a basic move. But you will lose information.
Thanks for the replies,
I’ve tried SX3, but the main “problem” is that they were made in the “classic” environment
That means OS 7/8/9 for MAC or even earlier.
What was the same with VST 3/4/5 is that audio tracks were recorded in a particular sequence (in a Cubase screen that looked quite the same as even the early Atari’s running Cubase)
I’ve red somewhere that even for the tracks, recorded with Atari’s, running Cubase there’s an emulator to run the app on a modern Mac, so I hoped that there’s such a thing for Cubase VST 3/4/5 as well.
I quite frequently convert old CubaseVST3/4/5 and Atari created PRT., SNG. and .ALL files to run on C6 with great success. Because this is a Mac thread, these are Mac solutions. Go here and download this particular version of SX3:
As long as your eLicence software is current, this version will launch.
Before you launch SX3, take your VST Plug-Ins folder and move it into another folder with another name like: “VST Temp Hold” or something. You can leave the VST 3 folder alone. SX3 will most likely fail to launch if it sees any “modern” plug-ins. Do this and I promise you SX3 will launch on an Intel box…
You should be able to recover all of your audio VSTi and MIDI tracks minus plug-ins. And there should be enough info in the launch prompt to clue you into what’s missing giving you clues as to what you originally used and where, making it possible to reload some of the original plug-ins and/or reasonable substitutions. Once the file loads, don’t screw around with it. Immediately save the file as a brand new .CPR, which will load into C6. Taxing SX3 on an Intel by opening editors and stuff is a recipe for crashing. Load it, take notes, save it. Then Quit SX3.
Don’t forget to move the VST folder back to its original position after quitting SX3 and before you launch C6. Yes, there may be some esoteric pre-SX features you used which will not come back…but the bread and butter stuff will. You have to treat this process like an archeological dig for dinosaur bones. You may not find everything…but there should be enough to get the skeleton up. An old mix of the tune may give you a ton of clues as to what was used. If you saved the original with drum maps, you’ll find those come back too.
As to the Lion issue…you early adopters are not totally out of luck using SX3. If you absolutely have to reconstitute an old file, you will have to create a bootable drive (internal or external) with 10.6.8 and SX3 on it. If you have a brand new Mac that shipped with 10.7 on it, you’re going to need access to a pre-10.7 machine. The new boxes won’t run 10.6.
Thanks Weasel! guess your’re not really a “junior” member 
I like your remark about the archeologics: I know what you mean: I’ve done this with old SX3 songs
I’ll go try it later, when I have more time.
Thanks again!
Great post, great advice. I searched the Googles (because the forum search did not yield any useful help) and found this thread. I’m digging up an old VST5 song to remix as I was never happy with it then. Cubase 6.5 is an infinitely better and easier program to use. I love it. I really hope this technique will help me revive the ‘skeleton’ of this track and let me add some new flavour to it.
cheers
mm66
That IMHO is an understatement.
Weasel is da man’
{’-’}
For posterity’s sake I will add my experiences I endured today for the betterment of anyone going thru the same thing in the future, at least as far as MacOS is concerned.
The Cubase SX 3.1 download will only work for those with the full Cubase license. For those who need to convert songs from Cubase VST into Cubase Artist they will need to download Cubase SL 3.1 as (almost) explained in this post
http://www.steinberg.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=230
I say almost as I missed this point the first time I read it and not until it was pointed out to me by another member did I understand the correlation.
Also there is a bit of a song and a dance to go through in regards to the eLicenser, at least for me it was. I had to uninstall the eLCC app from my system, and go to http://www.elicenser.net/en/download_archives.html and download an earlier version (6.0.4 in my case). Once that was installed, I installed SL3.1 (making sure the USB dongle was not plugged in).
I was then able to launch Cubase SL and then I could reinstall the most up to date version of eLCC. Not sure why this was the case, but Cubase SL was looking for some particular libraries that must have been named differently in earlier eLCC versions. Go figure.
The final step as was suggested here was to move all plug-ins out of the /Library/Audio/PlugIns/VST folder into a **Disabled folder I created. Otherwise Cubase SL did indeed crash.
It took me all day installing and uninstalling various versions of software to finally get to a solution that worked for me. But I’m really happy to ay that I was able to import the Cubase Song and Arrangements and save them out as .cpr files flawlessly. There are a number of VST effects that were missing due to renaming (chopper2, metalizer2) and not being installed (Waves, GRM) but I have a workflow to get around that. Fortunately SL is able to export a text file of all instances of missing VSTs to make it easier to keep track of.
Finally there was a lot of finding of missing audio files, but that was pretty flawless, just time consuming. When that was all done everything was in order (except for the missing plug ins).
Thanks for all the expert help that got me through this today. Hope these additional notes help somebody else in the future.
To get my tracks back to where they were in VST5 I created the following workflow. It’s a bit convoluted, as I could not get the Save Preset .fxb to work from one platform to the other. That would be ideal. However I had to go through every track in VST5 and open its track window, and opening the edit window for any insert effects I had. With these windows open I took a screen grab, for each and every track in the mixer, and the same for any send effects used. With this database of reference images and the missing plug-in text files I can go back and recreate the effects structure of my song.
Good times
Yes the .app is called Wineskin and runs on a modern Mac. More info in a post I submitted earlier (see link).
I’ve got SX3 installed on my girlfriend’s Windows 7 laptop (small problem with the dongle software) but it just won’t import the old VST 5 stuff properly, always tracks missing. Thank God for Wineskin.
http://www.steinberg.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=146&t=59271&p=370678#p370678
Only in 10.6.8 or less. Lion, Mountain Lion and Mavericks do not support PPC applications.