Possible to run two instances of Cubase?

Currently I run Cubase 8 and Cubase 7 side-by side and connected via MTC. Is there a way to trick Cubase into running two instances of Cubase 8 on the same machine?

I am curious to know why you do this? Sorry, no answer for your question though

To have two separate projects, on for sound design and other project for music which syncs to the other one.

I have tried to do this and failed. My workaround is to use Studio One via rewire and it works great.

As it turns out you can do this. If you make a copy of the Cubase8.exe file in the same folder as the origional you can launch both the regular exe and the copy at the same time.

Seriously?

And each instance runs independently? Unique threads? No ASIO conflicts?

—JC

Really. What Version of S1 are you using?
I have V2.6 and neither S1 V2.6 nor Cubase Pro 8 can act as Rewire Slave. So how are you going to rewire both. I don’t think Presonus changed that in V3 but maybe i am wrong.

Well I really didn’t check it out in much detail since it’s not something I’d normally use. Mostly I was curious and we had a heat wave that made doing real work unattractive. But I loaded a different project in each instance and they both played fine at the same time (except for the cacophony :laughing: ). In Task Manager they show up as separate entries. I don’t use MTC so don’t know if they’d sync to it, but I’d guess they would. However they don’t show up as rewire options for each other, which would have been cool if they did. Maybe if you had another rewire app they could talk to each other via it.

Can they have independent settigns though? it seems like there would be conflicts if you change application preferences etc because they are sharing the same App Data folders(?)

Don’t know, but suspect you are correct. You could just try it and see. Maybe with 2 different versions?

2 different versions work great, but I wish I could do it with both apps having the same features (8.5)

Well you can run 2 instances of the same version as long as they have different file names such as Cubase8,5.exe and Cubase8.5copy.exe. Both are really 8.5, but because the names are different they will both run (or at least they did when I tried this out some time ago).

But as you pointed out earlier if you change a preference in one instance it will probably change in the other. But not necessarily. It would likely depend on when Cubase looks at the file to load the settings. If it only looks at the file when Cubase starts and when it opens/closes the Preferences dialog, then one instance could retain the preferences in effect when it started even if the other instance changed it after that. Only way to tell is to give it a try.