Your questions are in uncharted territory for me for the most part to be honest, but I’ll try my best with what I do know, or THINK I have an idea. I can say that to convert your older songs created within Cubase VST 5, you need to get a hold of Cubase SX3 to convert your .dll to the file system that all versions from SX3 up to Cubase 7 uses. It’s a simple process. Then you won’t have to do track by track export/import. You can get SX3 directly from the Steinberg site…you know, the BIG Steinberg LOGO at the upper left of these forum pages. Or obtain SX3 some other way, a used copy maybe someone is selling. I’ve seen older versions selling for next to nothing, when I originally paid close to $600…go figure!
As for syncing your drum machine/synth, which I’ve never done. From my own research & PDF manual reading (from memory here) there are various ways to sync various devices with Cubase.
I ‘believe’ you’ll want to choose the ‘Transport’ tab, and there’s a drop down menu, then go to “Synchronization Setup”, which looks like this (don’t know what version this pic is from?) but I’m sure among different version, this dialog box should at least look similar…later one’s no doubt may be more elaborate (?).
I THINK you’ll want to use MMC (Midi Machine Control)… well this is what I think is the direction you need to go towards, and do further PDF reading on those specifics. I can’t imagine any other way to sync up a piece of hardware with Cubase, unless your hardware has some other form of capability to sync? older adat serial type sync port maybe?
I know what you mean about getting lost, the 1st time I saw Cubase SX3, what my buddy is using to this day, I was totally lost & clueless compared to Cubase VST. Seems like versions after SX3 or more like SX3 than any VST version…but I don’t the experience to say for sure…it just LOOKS like it. Well, Cubase 7 looks fairly different.