I’m currently running Cubase 8 Artist on PC and have hit a bit of a wall. I’m in the middle of a big project writing background scores for an audio production, and have realised that batch export isn’t available in the Artist tier. Given the length of the episodes and the size of the orchestral arrangements, bouncing out WAVs manually is proving to be a huge time sink.
I’m long overdue an upgrade and would happily move to Cubase 15 Pro for this reason alone - let alone all the other benefits - but my main concern is upgrading mid-project and breaking compatibility with my VSTis, plugins, and general workflow.
Ideally I’d just upgrade to Cubase 8 Pro, but I don’t think that’s an option anymore given the eLicenser situation.
A couple of questions:
Is it possible to run Cubase 15 Pro alongside Cubase 8 Artist, so I can test plugin compatibility before fully committing?
If I did upgrade, would I have the option of reverting to Cubase 8 if things went pear-shaped?
Or is the sensible advice just to suck it up, finish the project on Artist 8, and treat myself to the upgrade once I’m done?
You can only purchase licenses for whatever is the current version.
Be careful to keep full backups of your C8 projects now, because I’m not sure about the backwards-compatibility between C15 and C8. If you load a C8 project in C15 and then save it (overwriting the original C8 file) you might not be able to open it in C8 again!
Note also that C15 is 64-bit only, and you cannot officially use 32-bit plugins in C15. If you’re already using the 64-bit version of Cubase Artist 8, then you shouldn’t have too many problems. In Cubase 15, you may have to enable VST2 support as well (it’s now switched off by default).
Finally, the score editor in Cubase 15 is completely different to Cubase Artist 8, so if you depend on scoring, you might have a problem there. You could however also install e.g. Cubase 12 and use it with a Cubase 15 license to get the “old” score editor.