Well, after waiting on hold for over an hour, I can officially report that Steinberg/Yamaha does NOT offer any upgrade discount to seniors.
…and I was in error, it’s not $239, it’s $249. Although my 10.5 setup works as is, if anything should happen to the USB dongle, then I’ll have to pay full price for the next version.
…UNLESS I upgrade now, before the eLicenser support stops in 2025.
In fairness, software development is costly. I understand that. Cubase is a superior product. Sure, ALL software has bugs, but it eventually gets fixed.
That said, it’s worth it I suppose. I’m 68. I guess I’m going to be frugal for a few months and fork out the $249. I’ll eat beans & rice. LOL… If I die tomorrow, well, that’s the cosmic plan.
P.S. Sorry to have started any controversy RE Atari on floppy discs.
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Does Steinberg/Yamaha have any senior (68+) discount for 10.5 to 14 upgrades? Just a casual user. Had heart health issues and rig was packed away for two years.
I think that’s a great idea! Sort of a reward for sticking with Steinberg through thin and (sometimes very) thick, a way of giving back to the musical community. It can’t be a huge proportion of their customer base, so they wouldn’t lose that much from it. I’ll be eligible for it myself in 18 months too! Hope you stay well.
I’m well into my 60s and I make sure I only update mid term when the offers are on. I started doing this when I retired. I’ve got Cubase, Wavelab and spectral layers so a few to update. Other options are to buy mid term on offer and then not use the code until the next version and get a free upgrade. Ok so not ideal but it does work if you’re not fussy about keeping up to date immediately.
In all seriousness, while it could be logically argued that, seeing as there’s an educational discount available (presumably because students are poor, although we know some are not), there should also be an senior’s discount (because some are poor, although we know some are not).
The harsh reality is that educational discounts are offered not for altruistic reasons, but to win new (young) customers, who, over their (long) lifetimes, will buy enough product to more than compensate for loss-leading initial discounts.
Need I say more?
Another way to approach it might be to enroll in e.g. night classes in music in a local college, and avail of the educational discount.
Nothing scientific, I assure you! Merely my own anecdotal experience which is that, of the many musicians in my age group among my friends and aquaintances, only about 3 or 4 are regular users of any DAW at .all. Many complain that they’ve never got the hang of it, that it takes them out of the music or that they’re musicians, not techies. As a songwriter/arranger who is by no means a virtuoso I’ve used Cubase since you had to stick a floppy disk in an Atari to start it up, and I’ve always been an unpaid shill for Steinberg by constantly advocating for it’s many vitues, but I’m forever running into the road block of technophobia. On the other hand, of my son’s generation I know very few who don’t carry laptops around with them and use Cubase, Logic, Ableton or another DAW. The latter point however, I now realise, means that while currently Steinberg might be looking at a small proportion of customers in sight of 70 or over it, in years to come they’d be faced by hordes of Gen Z beatmakers or whatever they are wanting to claim the musical equivalent of a senior travel pass. Which rather disproves my point. However, as I say, this is all anecdotal, and I’ll think before I post in future. Respect to you for asking the question Nico5.
p.s. My Atari was connected to an SMTPE box, reading and writing sync striping on my Fostex 8 track, driving MIDI to my Juno 60 and my DX 7. (Yes, I had and still have the DCB / MIDI converter for my Juno 60).
And you might be surprised how long you can scroll down on the following page:
I’ve always been creative with statistics, it might not surprise you that math wasn’t my best subject at school in the early 70s!
Yes, you’re right!! Darn it…
And you were in a very sophisticated cohort, my Atari was connected to a DX11 and then the audio out from that to a Teac 144. SMTPE? Well, I had one hand on the Atari’s space bar and one on the transport of the Portastudio, if that counts? I had to save my 3rd and fourth hands (or, more accurately, my collaborator’s hands) for the DX11 keys, the guitar and the Boss drum machine. We made it up as we went along.
Also… you CAN scroll a long way down on that page. Yes, Steinberg would be in trouble if they followed the OP’s suggestion.
My avatar is an actual photo of my first “DAW” on 5.25" floppy disk – Gerhard Lengeling’s SuperTrack on the C64. My next project is to learn Dorico and brush up on scoring.
But back to the OP’s question about a discount for seniors, which I think is now answered with “no, there will not be one”, there are other benefits to advancing age, for example, having the patience to wait for the inevitable discounts and make huge savings, such as the recent 70% discounts on flagship Steinberg products (although perversely, many long-time Steinberg users had, over the years, already purchased everything that was on offer and therefore did not benefit).
So yes, there are discounts to be had, but not any labelled “senior”.
Thanks, Googly_Smythe, I didn’t remember what I paid when I first got Cubase a long time ago. It was in the late 90’s. I think it’s a steal nowadays. The capabilities of this software are incredible.
What’s also amazing is that I still have the very first version I bought, Cubase 4.5 Studio, on an old IBM laptop running Windows XP, and it still works (with the original dongle). I pull that laptop out once in a while to record bands with up to 16 simultaneous tracks. My main computer is on Cubase 13.
I used to have a 244 - it came with a footswitch to start/stop it. I also had a Korg S3 (I think) drum machine, which could read and send SMPTE. So the SMPTE on the tape went to the S3 and then to Cubase.
Cool stuff. My friend Paul, who was a drummer, caught on to tech really fast in the early 80s and used smpte to not only control drum machines but also an Akai sampler. He still used a portastudio though, and he and our guitarist recorded an entire ambient dub album that way, including in the final mix a live track of the playback sound in the bedroom it was done in! The fact that he was so quick to get the hang of that stuff meant that he had a career as a session player with big name bands for quite a few years while the rest of us were still playing pub gigs and doing demos on cassettes.
I never had that footswitch you mention, I would have killed to have another hand free though. Did the footswitch really come with the purchase do you remember? or was it an optional extra?
