I just upgraded my early 2013 Macbook Pro (2.4 GHz i7 8GB RAM) to High Sierra from Yosemite and downloaded the full Cubase 10 Pro trial version.
The download went fine (about 20GB) and Cubase Pro 10 is waaay faster and more stable than running Cubase 7.0.7 on Yosemite so I’m really happy!
Now I’m about to purchase the full Cubase 10 version. On Steinbergs web site I chose the: ‘Update from Cubase 7 / 7.5 / Pro 8 / 8.5’ to get the best price (really low now with the 50% anniversary price reduction). However, it seems they want me to install a file called ‘Cubase 10 Update’ and not the full installer.
I have not yet purchased the ‘Cubase 10 Update’ because I’m a bit worried: I already have the full installation of Cubase Pro 10 running (very fine!) so I just want the activation code. Can I get this, or do I have to trash my installation and upgrade from Cubase 7 to get everything to work?
Side note from a mac user, having lots of experience with upgrading Cubase versions (and its flaws):
If you upgrade Cubase to a major higher version number (in your case V7 to V10), before the install of V10,
trash EVERY file and folder related to “cubase” and “steinberg”, even invisible files and folders related to those 2.
Ofcourse, backup your custom Keycommands file (if you have any) and made presets and such.
After you are sure you have trashed all these files/folders, install Cubase 10, from Steinberg Download Manager.
In my experience, following this way, you have the least risk of buggy / faulty / weird behaviours in Cubase 10.
Also, good chance Cubase 10 starts up quicker and closes quicker (closing without hang or crash!).
Ofcourse, you already installed V10, so i read.
In case you experience buggy / faulty / weird behaviours in Cubase 10, completely un-install it by following above, then re-install.
I can’t really prove that above workflow is the best, i can only telly from own experience this is a very good habit of installing a major newer version of Cubase on mac.
Trashing (older) Cubase preferences should be enough. Then you don’t inherit an older Cubase preferences (which might be corrupted in the bad case) and you get the Factory settings.
Thank you Martin and vanhaze3000 for your quick and informative answers!
If I run into any wierd behaviour I’ll trash the preferences, and do a fresh install if that doesn’t fix it. So far I’m away from my studio so I just loaded up some VSTs (one Halion SE and two PPG 3.V) to test Cubase 10, using my Babyface running at 512 (old version) and headphones.
It felt very snappy, so I created 14 FX-tracks loaded with REVerence and the CPU hit was negligible - on 7 this would have made the project max out!
The best thing is that this is on a old and average (at best) Macbook Pro from 2013. Also, I’m loving the high resolution on the Retina display; I’m very excited about getting back in the studio and do some serious recording/feature testing!
Just a update for future reference, if someone else have this question.
I bought the ‘Update from Cubase 7 / 7.5 / Pro 8 / 8.5’ and I just had to activate the licence with the new code. No need for a new install.
However, Cubase crashed a couple of times so I trashed all the old C7 preferences first, but later I removed C7 altogether to be safe.
As I have a very old and slow MacBook I now have the buffer size on max and ASIO-guard set high, it still feels pretty snappy but the CPU load is much lower than with a 512 buffer and ASIO-guard on medium - so far no more crashes.
I’m wondering, that the trashing of an older Cubase preferences made any changes here. Cubase should inherit preferences of 2 major versions back only. So for Cubase 10 it’s Cubase 8, 8.5, 9 or 9.5. It shouldn’t inherit preferences of Cubase 7 or 7.5.
What I would strongly recommend after the Cubase update is to update all of your plug-ins.
Yes, I just updated the PPG 3.V as I think the old version caused the first crashes (together with C7 preferences, but as you say - maybe they had nothing to do with it). Now I only have one reproducible crash, which I started a thread about in ‘Issues’. I’ve had one crash when editing in Variaudio 3, but I can not reproduce it. I’ve also had a couple of other random crashes (the now classic: Cubase just dissapeares!) when doing some basic stuff, but I hope these crashes will be less with future updates.
I’ve stopped using most of my old third party plug-ins and I have hidden all the old VST2s and VSTs in the Plug-in Manager (I’ll delete them later). From now on I’m just going to use the stock plug-ins (and a couple of non Cubase gems) for my next big project; the channel strip EQ, saturation and compression together with the stock plug-ins sound great and are more than enough (no plug-in will fix a bad song). The small benefits in audio quality by using UAD, Slate, Waves-plugs (if there even are any) won’t make up for the potential threat to stability they bring to the game. At least not for me.