Cubase 7 & Windows 8?

Hi,

Just wondering if there are any advantages as far as performance/efficiency that Windows 8 offers, when running Cubase 7, compared to Windows 7 ?

When do you think it would be advisable to move to Windows 8 ? or is Windows 8 another Vista re-visited type of OS ?

Thanks,
Muziksculp

Aloha M,
I am not a windows user but I did read thru this thread
and if you have not already read it, (and the responses)
it might answer a question or two.

Good luck.
{‘-’}

Cubase 7 with win 8 - excellent! Been using it for close to 2 weeks now and done some very heavy projects with bands. IT is quite a time saver on loading, exports, and plugs like stylus - very fast. I stuck with XP till the last moment and didn’t want to get caught with a broken DAW and then have to migrate/upgrade and put clients on hold at the same time. Can’t afford that luxury so I planned hard to a year to check sociability between all components and made the jump.
It was the win 8 firewire issues that caused a sweat - need to load old firewire drivers (legacy) and run win 8 in test mode for now. I have created a document on how to do this - took me 2 days to work through and test but 2 days of planned downtime is a lot better than the alternative…

note about firewire; i’m using windows 8 on 2 laptops with firewire interfaces. I didn’t need to install legacy firewire drivers. just used the ones in win8. I did have a problem with the firewire chipset in my HP laptop; not compatible with DICE drivers in focusrite saffire pro 24. fixed it with an AboCom 1394A expressCard54 firewire card with texas instruments chipset. ed

I’m using Window 8 for a while now with Cubase7 - Complete8 - Maschine II - no problems what so ever.

I am using W8/C7 and have used W8/C6.5 (even used C6/6.5 with W8 pre-release versions).

Currently using C7, MR816csx, CC121 and Midex8 with Intel Extreme boards/processors and W8.

The MR successfully runs with add-on FW (TI) cards (have used two different ones) as well as with internal (Intel Extreme/TI) ports, which is a preference IMO (less stuff, less problems).

All machines are dedicated to music applications, with some used in conjunction with software development and therefore require development tools.

Windows 8 and Steinberg software rocks!

Using both win7 and win8. And here win7 performs a little bit better than win8. But in general I think win8 is the OS to get. One thing I know is better on win8, is the PDC latency. There’re fewer drivers running in the background, that creates DPC latency. At least, that is what I’m seeing on my systems. win7 is more heavy with drivers and DPC, and win8 is more light, with lower DPC.

I haven’t had any problems with driver compatibility. The win7 midex8 midi driver is also working fine on win8.

SLL

I’m keenly interested in this thread, i’m ready to jump from XP, gotta take advantage of more ram.

I’m encouraged about win 8 in this thread, it makes me want to go that route, but every IT guy I’ve talked to around town, (3 or 4) say to stay far away from win 8. Granted, I haven’t really nailed anyone of them down to give specifics on why.

Is it just the uproar over the missing start button? If the UI is the only problem, I’m excited to go with something that is leaner on resources, I can learn a new UI.

Go safe with win 7 or jump to 8?

Anyone else have positive or negative experiences with win 8?

Hey, it’s probably the Win8 “metro” GUI interface your friends are having some bad feelings about. I must also admit, that it has irritated me a lot in the beginning, when I went from Win7 to 8. The Metro interface is the “touch” interface (for phones, tablets), but can also be used with a normal desktop mouse. Metro is the new “start button”. But it’s made like a layer over the normal desktop background. And every time you load a program, for example Cubase, you automatically switch to the good old desktop. A little confusing at first, but you get used to it. Tons of people has probably been frustrated about metro, and the way it works, so now MS is soon releasing a new Win8.1 update, that should make the old start button appear again, as we normally know. All fine by me :slight_smile:

Cubase is working without a single problem here on windows 8. If you’re upgrading from XP to Windows 8, there are more things to look out for. You need to make sure, that you have win7 or 8 64bit drivers for all your hardware in your computer. This is important. Also, if you wanna go full 64bit, or stay with 32bit, or maybe a combination. 64bit will give access to more than 4GB mem. 32bit is max 4GB.

SLL

Just because the Start screen is a monumental obstacles for some, doesn’t mean Windows 8 as a whole is that way. For now, just thing of the Start screen as a replacement of the Start button, but instead of it being a (pretty big) popup menu, it is now an entire screen (opened with the Windows key/button). (Like SSL already pointed out.)

Windows 8 really consist of two operating environments, I.e. the new “metro” style apps, and the old “desktop” style applications, which runs simultaneously on a Windows 8 machine. (There are also dedicated Windows RT computers, that does not allow any third party “desktop” applications.)

So getting Windows 8 is essentially like getting Windows 7 (with some differences of course) and gaining the ability to run RT apps.

I think one has to look at the inevitable goal of converting everything to RT and eventually make it the new “desktop” (in that one could resize/rotate full screen apps in the future, just like you can resize desktop windows today). The reason I say this is mainly because of the Surface technologies (now PixelSense, but formerly Surface) Microsoft has put much R&D resources into. If you also look at what this is, in terms of technology, one can see striking similarities: Apps for PixelSense.

If you have a brand new, high-end computer, and all your audio-related hardware has drivers that fully support Windows 8, you might see a 1-2% increase in DAW performance at most. (And by “DAW performance” I mean your computer’s ability to deliver audio under an extreme music processing load without audible pops and drops in your main outs.)

Computers 3 years old or more don’t see any audio-related performance improvements at all (since the modest performance gains between Win 7 and Win 8 seem to only be noticeable in DAWs on the very latest chipsets, processors, and RAM), although it probably won’t be worse than Win 7, assuming your drivers are solid.

Most of the glowing/impressed reports I’ve heard from people who do music on Windows 8 either got Win 8 with a brand new computer (so haven’t been able to compare it to Win 7 on the same hardware), or jumped straight from old XP or Vista installs to a fresh install of Windows 8- and I can totally understand being stoked about Win 8 if you’ve never used Win 7, and your computer has enough RAM and CPU power to showcase its strengths.

There are a lot of misconceptions about how lean Windows 8 supposedly is, and apparently we have to blame Microsoft for a lot of that. The fact is it uses about the same amount of CPU, RAM and system resources as Windows 7 does to do its job. They just reshuffled a number of system tasks into “service host” processes, so you will see fewer things listed in Task Manager- but the OS is still doing the exact same amount of work! I and others have also noticed that it’s a bit “busier” than Win 7 when idle; the HD spins more often and the CPU usage doesn’t sit quietly at zero percent as often as a resting Win 7 system will. (But again, this doesn’t seem to affect DAW performance; it just doen’t sync with the hype.)

The only noticeable performance-related improvement I’ve seen with Windows 8 is that the OS and apps boot a little faster. But unless you spend most of your day booting Windows and launching apps, this is not a compelling reason to upgrade a stable Win 7 music production PC to Windows 8.

If you are getting a brand new PC- Win 8 is great! If you’ve got a multi-core CPU, at least 3GB of installed RAM, a 64-bit capable PC, and you’re still stuck on XP or Vista- you will also probably be really pleased by Win 8.

For people like me who ONLY work in Desktop mode and don’t wish to be bothered with the Win 8 start screen, the free tool ClassicShell will get you a Win 7 (or even XP or Vista) style Start menu and give you the option to bypass the Win 8 start at boot time. I’m also hearing that the upcoming point release of Win 8 will include a Start button again, so we’ll see about that.

Hi,

Thanks for all the helpful feedback.

I’m currently on Windows 7 Prof., which is running nice and smooth.

I don’t plan to upgrade to Windows 8 at this time, but will mostly upgrade to Windows (8.1/ Blue) whenever it is officially released. I think it is due later this year. So far, they have not announced a specific release date for (8.1 / Blue).

Cheers,
Muziksculp

Just a couple of things on Windows 8.1 (codename Blue) in relation to the musical screne:

The start button is back but the start menu is not, it simply opens the start screen.

MIDI is still not supported in the WinRT environment. The Windows 7 portion (desktop applications) of Windows 8 still works like before, of course.

As for MIDI in WinRT and if you want to see MIDI added, posts regarding this exists here, here or here. There is obviously a similar MIDI denial/confusion at Microsoft, as there was in the Apple iOS camp. Something new is obviously needed in the world of music and MIDI, but there seem to be no apparent and satisfying answer. So get involved if you know, need or otherwise feel strongly about MIDI, so that we can use new AND old MIDI equipment in the future.

It would be awesome if someone at Steinberg could whip together a Windows Runtime Component (and possibly a driver/firmware update) that talks with Midex8 and for Steinberg to again be the pioneer of MIDI. (THEN start porting something like Cubasis to WinRT.)

I’ve been running Windows 8 on my laptop since the initial developer betas. It works great. I just recently converted my main computer to Windows 8. I also hate the metro front end, so I use Start8 to get back the behavior I want. Including integrated search results instead of the crappy way Win8 does it.

Win8 is stable and performs on a par with Win7 for me.

Win 8 is really good , i wrote it off too early , but now , i m sold … its got a lot under the hood , n the metro , is just 2 steps away , all my old keyboard shotcuts work any way … so well i m beginning to like the metro also … sm

Anyone here running any of the M-Audio PCI Cards (Delta 66, 44, 1010, etc.) in Win8 (64bit) with the Win7 drivers?

M-Audio doesn’t have any W8 drivers yet and support would not tell me if they were going to release any. Obviously they have discontinued their PCI cards.

I realize that PCI is slowly dying but I have always been happy with my card and would consider the move to Win8 if I could hear a few success stories.

Anyone?

glad to see someone started a thread about this issue …because hmm i was just wondering the same thing
…iam running Cubase 5 32bit & Cubase 7 64bit on Windows 8 Pro 64bit & ASIO drivers… Cubase 5 runs really fast, smooth…

so i just installed Cubase 7 64bit & attempted "emphasize ‘attempted’ " …to open/import a Cubase 5 cpr
lol it took a few attempts, about 20 minutes for MixConsole to load the file, at first i couldn’t tell if the app was crashing or what ! …so then i just let it load “approximately 20min” :open_mouth:

CPU is really struggling to run Cubase 7 64bit… my performance meter is peaking up double of what it is in Cubase 5 :astonished: … iam going to install a brand new Intel XEON this week sometime, currently iam running an i5 Quad 3.00Hz

Win 8.0 / 8.1 works for me. The way I like to use it – is to only use “Metro” style apps for non-music/audio related things. I ensure that none of the apps run in the background, and I can swap between the desktop and Metro without the fear of some background windows activity screwing up my audio. I just upgraded to 8.1 and after upgrading the Quad-Capture divers and my Video card drivers, every thing is A-OK.

All of my audio devices below work perfectly :
Focusrite Saffire Pro DSP
Roland Quad-Capture
POD HD300 - I use the USB interface on this for doing guitar & bass tracks to avoid having to think about latency

Computer :
ASUS Z87 Pro Motherboard
Intel Haswell 4770K OC to 4.5
Several 2 TB Hard Drives – Window boots so fast I don’t see the need for an SSD.
AMD R7 260x Graphics Card

I have just installed win 8.1 and my cubase 7 is working well, but I get a Message when I run the eLicencer; that says:
“The Soft-eLicenser stored on this computer seems to be altered in an unrecoverable way”
Please contact Your software vendor to solve this issue

Then when I start Cubase 7 I get this Box:
eLicencer Control-Message:
Soft.eLiceneser doesn’t have enought permission to run properly.
Please run LCC to fix this problem.

And another problem is that after installed the Upgrade to win 8.1, all my old sound drivers and software come back,“realtek High definition audio” which I have deactivated in win 8…they all back; mic/mixer/…
What shall I do…?;-(
senserly
jarleiceman :frowning:

Best solution i read is download the latest version of e licencer , load latest drivers 4 hardware for win 8 X 64 / or 32 bit … yet the problem could be in the W 8.1 patch , which could be SB isnt ready yet , only some users or SB can comment …sm