Hi all. I am a one time music technology student who purchased Cubase Studio 5 student edition whilst I was a student approx 10 years ago so I could do work from home. For some reason I never actually activated the licence whilst I was a student and never used up the temporary licence. Once I finished my 3 year course I went straight into working in a different industry I’ve been in ever since, and have just decided to get back into this stuff and have the discs and security key dongle right here with me, the problem is I no longer use any desktop or laptop and have microsoft Surface Pro tablet (with no cd drive) and also an unactivated dongle for student software whilst I’m no longer a student.
Is there any way for me to install the software and activate the licence legally, or will I have to buy it again (newer version)?
Seems I did actually activate my licence, at least my old laptop didn’t complain about it like I remember it doing for a good long while. But I need an installer for studio 5. That old laptop is run down to the point it can’t handle much before it says no.
Regarding the license, if it was activated then it’s on the USB eLicenser (“the dongle”) and you own it in perpetuity. There would be various ways to get Cubase Studio 5 onto the Surface Pro but by far the simplest would be to borrow or buy a USB optical drive. You should be aware that it is no longer supported by Steinberg and is not supported on Windows 10, however, it would be worth trying.
One other way would be to could create ISO images of the CDs on another computer, copy them all onto a (large) USB drive and mount them in WIndows 10. The mounted ISO image will look just like an optical drive and you should be able to install from that. Mount each image in turn, and when finished, download and install the latest eLicenser software, and finally connect your USB eLicenser.
Either way, you should create an account for yourself at MySteinberg where you can register your USB eLicenser and with it the ownership of the product. If you do manage to get Cubase Studio 5 working on the Surface, then great, but although there’s no “official” upgrade path from that version any more, if you wanted to upgrade to the current version you would then be entitled to ask Steinberg support if they would be nice to you and cut you a deal.