Windows 10 - please do not upgrade! Discussion

Ed, is it possible to elaborate on the “performance and timing issues”?

I updated to Windows 10 yesterday and everything seems to be OK, but I’d like to know if there is something specific I should be testing for.

For what it’s worth, I was getting a lot of vst meter spikes in win 8.1, especially when doing things like opening and closing plug in GUIs or opening and closing the mixer with F3. It was like the sound would stutter or glitch when the graphics were taxed. I don’t get these anymore on win 10, so that makes me very happy. I’m using the on board intel hd5000 graphics, so maybe if you have a dedicated graphics card you wouldn’t have this issue.

One problem I had was my Waves plugins disappeared from the Waves licence manager as my machine had a different ID. I rolled back to win 8.1, moved my Waves licences to the cloud, upgraded to Win 10 again, and then moved the Waves licenses back to the PC.

My setup: Windows 10 build 10240, Cubase 8.0.20, 32gb ram, 5960X, 960 GTX, updated drivers / software.

At first, things seemed to be working fine. I could create a new project, edit it, save it, reopen, etc. without issues. My VSTs and plugins all seemed fine. CPU/VST performance was great (better than W7 possibly). Sound was great. Then I started opening up my existing projects that I had created in W7. Smaller projects would open, but only after a long delay - during which time cubase was reporting ‘not responding’ in the task manager. Opening one of these small projects a second time was very fast though (so did cubase build some sort of cache of the file under the hood?). Large projects, however, simply crash cubase outright, and no crashlogs are created either.

Anyway, it seems that new projects that were created on W10 have a much better chance of being “workable” than projects that were created on W7 and opened on W10. In other words, opening the project itself is when problems happen on my system. If I can open the project, I’ll most likely have smooth sailing from there (I never experience any of those timing issues Steinberg is talking about). I just can’t open most of my projects right now. Super hard to tell why without a crashlog or something else to go on.

Another vote to get rid of QT once and for all! :slight_smile:

Yeah - especially if OS X is as awesome as described online, like here:

So don’t take advantage of the FREE upgrade to Windows 10???
I’ve yet to get Cubase 8 to work with my Tascam US2000 and Windows 7.
C5 was working perfectly until I installed C8.
I have not been able to record anything for months.
Now Steinberg is telling us not to upgrade to Windows 10?
I wasted my money buying C8. I’m totally done with Steinberg.

Rather an over-reaction to them requesting that it might be good not to rush to upgrade until they have checked out why there is some inconsistent issues with Win 10.

That indicates that it may be a short term bump, rather than anything near the year that you have to upgrade for free.

Well, I wouldn’t mind Steinberg letting us know at least approx date. After all they must know if it will be this Monday, or next week, or next month. Shouldn’t they know what they will do for one month in advance? And if they don’t know if it will be this month or not, then I’m a bit worried. How many months will we have to wait then?

Steinberg have had plenty of time to sort any problems out already. If it took them over a year to figure out they couldn’t get ICpro to work on the newest Android then it may be a long wait.
The option to upgrade to 10 may have run out by the time it’s all fixed.
I’ve caught doom and gloom from Steinberg. I’m off to see the doctor.

Wasn’t even tempted. Just finished uninstalling win10 after a month of testing. Here are the highlights for those who are tempted:
The good: maybe 3% faster overall, 5sec faster boot up time, nice window management, DirectX 12 promises 10% better CPU usage (some day), idiot proof apps and app store for the “mobile generation”. All in all a nice OS for your grandparents and your 5 year old kids. Even better if they use it on a tablet.

The bad: Plethora of bugs and inconsistencies, compatibility issues with a LOT of software, Cortana is fun for exactly 15 minutes, OS GUI for the visually challenged, OS icons are back from win 3.1, no desktop gadgets, no WMC, and an all around oversimplification of the OS that makes one feel like their PC has been reduced to a cell phone.

So after a month of testing, I did the math and realized something: there is not a single good reason to upgrade to win10 right now.
Sure, the cutting edge people will mindlessly upgrade for upgrade’s sake and “bragging rights”, a lot of users will upgrade because it’s free and they don’t know any better, and a few people will upgrade because they genuinely need/want to.

Long story short, If I want to use a mobile OS, I’ll use it on my mobile device, not on my 3000$ DAW. Just because win10 is better than the fiasco called win8 , doesn’t make it good. Just less bad.
So I downgraded back to win7x64 and I’m sticking with it for the foreseeable future. And with over 60% of users on win7, compared to the 13% on win8 and the sad 0.2% on win10, Windows 7 is not going anywhere for a long time… so expecting Steinberg to discontinue it just shows how out of touch with reality some people are.

I installed W10 on my home PC without any issues, so I installed Cubase 7 and played a demo file. For what it’s worth, it seems to be working fine. Not sure if Steinberg will be updating Cubase 7 for W10, so I may just go ahead and give it a try.

0.2% but it’s only been out for 3 days. :laughing: Check back in a year.

So what if the OS by default is set up for non-power users and not Windows traditionalists? So it should be. It’s easy enough to get it to function/look pretty much exactly as W7 does (better actually IMO) with some quick tweaking and a couple of third party apps and tweaks.

Also, the vast majority of people using it for music production that i’ve read over the last few days have said there have been very few problems and there is almost nothing that isn’t working that did in 7/8, so maybe you are just very unlucky with all your compatibility issues?

To say it’s a mobile OS is silly/short sighted. Actually the whole point of W10 is that’s it a meta-OS, in that it will run on all form factors and scales and adapts to the form factor it’s being used on.

+1

This is precisely what I predicted a year ago when I campaigned for Cubase for Linux … see reason 3 on my list.

What a lot of rubbish all this talk about the interface on W8 and later is. You are carrying on as if you became paralysed when you started up your computer and never did anything else. The UI was just a variation on a menu.

Under Win 8 with multiple monitors, just moving the mouse left the desktop displayed, and under 8.1 it can be set to default to the desktop from startup.

I never relied on the Start menu functionality, because in case you didn’t notice, its use was already being deprecated under Win 7, in favour of the taskbar, and most users got that.

Otherwise, I haven’t really found any major differences in basic functionality, and once in a major desktop program like Cubase, who cares about the OS.

I upgraded all my computers to Windows 10 yesterday and did a live webcast show last night using Cubase 8.02 to run my backing tracks through an ESI ESU1808 and everything ran fine bar a few minor glitches because the ESU1808’s driver GUI was inaccessible so that I couldn’t increase the latency from the ridiculously low default setting. I’ve kinda kludged the driver GUI issue [run it in compatibility mode] and I’ll test if and how it affects the audio tomorrow.

Verdict so far: good enough for jazz :wink:

I Upgraded to Windows 10 - I do get serious timing/Sync issues. Like track offset. Play whenever.

What do you mean by track offset. Care to explain a bit more?

Not working 100% here

Fresh install of WIn 10 pro 64.

Installed Cubase 8 pro and Halion 5 on my G drive (ssd), don’t know if thats whats causing issues? (both were on my C drive before fresh install)

Having same problem with Halion 5 too.

Programs will start after reboot and work fine, but either wont close properly, or appear to close properly but wont restart until I reboot first.

So far all my other software (mainly NI stuff) seems to be working 100% fine

Cubase not closing properly is a quite common problem on all OS versions.

What I have done is create a new folder in Windows 10 opened a Cubase Project and then backed it up to new folder. Do not know why or how but it appears to have resolved playback issues etc. Worth a try anyway. By the way this is using Cubase 5.5.3 as my Pro 8 trial has just expired. :frowning: