This weekend I installed Steinberg’s Cubase Studio 6.5 on my studio PC, a rather old Windows XP machine. As I have a lot of physical MIDI gear I don’t expect to use a lot of the included virtual gear so processor bandwidth will not be an issue (I hope). It is a dedicated studio PC so there isn’t anything else running on it.
I have been using Cubase since the beginning, i.e. on Atari ST during the nineties. The two albums I released back then where made using Cubase. Actually, I still have that machine around somewhere. I should try it out again sometime 😉
I have been playing around with a trial version of Cakewalk Sonar, which basicly also does the job, but somehow I like Cubase more. Probably because I’m already used to it. So last week I was able to buy Cubase Studio 4 with eLicense key (a special USB stick containing the license to run Cubase) from a collegae who had got it off eBay for a nice price. I then bought the regular upgrade to 6.5.
It took some time to upgrade the eLicenser as I had to do it on a different PC as my studio PC is not connected to the internet and you need an internet connection to be able to upgrade the license. When that was done I had to install a newer version of the .Net framework on my studio PC as the Cubase 6.5 upgrade would crash otherwise.
My first impressions are very good. The application runs without a problem on my old Pentium4 machine. Performance is good and processor load is low. I have a Kurzweil KSP8 signal processor connected to a Motu 2408mk3 audio interface through ADAT and Cubase somehow recognized this unit and I could use it to route audio through with a few clicks. Nice! My Mackie Control Universal also worked right out of the box. I did not have to configure anything.
I’m now configuring all audio inputs and outputs and figuring out what’s the best work flow for me. Time to make some new music!