I am planning to upgrade from Cubase 4 to Cubase 7. Will the old eLicense dongle for Cubase 4 work
for Cubase 7, and are there any downsides to doing so (as opposed to buying the new style dongle) ?
yes it will and no there isn’t 
I thought I saw somewhere that there was some kind of performance benefit from a newer eLicensor dongle although this doesn’t make sense to me if all its used for is license management/authorization.
buy a new one if you want but most people are still using their old dongles , im still using my sx3 dongle with 7 licenses on it , some people think there is a difference in performance but there has been no confirmation from Steinberg on this , all usb licensers work as they should .
Yes there has been confirmation on this. The first generation dongles hold less licenses and perform a little bit worse than the newer ones.
A Cubase 4 Dongle might not be a first generation dongle though
I stand corrected but they still work
Of course they do…
And to say it more correct: the newer (shorter) dongles have a faster ptocessor, and can have a different performance on big projects.
I think the question here is the Cubase 4 dongle not the harry the aardvark dongle from 1835 so it will be the shorter dongle anyway
Probably yes
Yikes guys, had no idea when I ask what I thought was a simple question !
It didn’t make sense to me there would be a performance issue since I thought when you booted
Cubase it just looked statickly for the proper dongle for authorization and once it was found and
the key matched the dongle was out of the performance loop.
Apparently NOT .
In any event, thanks for the informative replies. And indeed the dongle is from Cubase 4 so I
assume its the short, better one, and not the Aardvark from the 1800’s.
Bob