Dongle question, stick with old or transfer to new?

Ok, so I’m a long time Cubase user here and I have the older style Syncrosoft blue hardware dongle that came with Cubase SX.

Since then I’ve upgraded up to Cubase 5, but always using the same old dongle to hold the license. I’m now thinking of possibly making the jump to Cubase 7 so my question is this.

Should I upgrade to v7 using the existing ancient dongle, or transfer the license to a brand new dongle?
I guess my main concern is dongle lifespan, eventually all electronic components will fail at some point right?.

My logic behind either choice is this:

  1. Change dongle. Fresh new hardware, eliminates the chance of the old one suddenly failing one day due to component age.

or

  1. Keep existing syncrosoft dongle. It’s lasted this long so has proven its reliability, thus the risk is actually taking on a new one.

If you were using a decade old dongle, which option would you choose?

my emagic dongle still works… lol

I would prolly keep the dongle if it works. the new ones do look nice though:P

Hard to tell. If you’re happy with your dongle and it’s not showing signs of breaking I think I would keep using it. The current dongles are quite fragile, many report the plastic casing cracks easily (mine’s cracked too).

I expect Steinberg will come with a new model in the not too distant future, with the advancements in technology a dongle can be much smaller than it’s now, and I’m sure they’ll take a good look at durability then as well.

I just noticed an article on the steinberg website claiming that newer dongles have faster processor and so the calls made to cubase and back are quicker, which might result in slight performance improvement (I guess in terms of cubase loading time and loading any eLicenser plugins). As my dongles very old, hmmm…maybe i should switch.

It won’t hurt to switch but if the old one is still functional, you can stick with it for the time being. Yes, the new ones are faster but in real life practice you won’t really notice this. It’s up to you :wink:

Aloha E.

Without getting into a lot o tech talk, when you say faster,
do you mean only in regard to ‘boot-up’ time?

Or are the newer dongles faster in other ways (that we won’t really notice).

Just curious.

TIA
{‘-’}

First, we are talking ms or μs here and not significant by any means. I doubt that this improves the project or Cubase load times. But eLicenser calls happening while using the program will be a little faster. Again, you won’t notice it.

Are the new dongles any longer?

The current USB-eLicensers are shorter and a bit thicker that the previous ones. There’s a picture comparing the three revisions in this article under #5