Around mid April of this year, Steinberg announced, that they will close down their eLicenser service in early 2025.
This creates a potential stress and decision point for users of older versions of Cubase (versions 11 and older). Affected users may want to read the official Steinberg announcement just to be sure they have the best available source of information.
After that service ends, it sounds like:
- Anyone on Cubase 11 or older won’t get discounted upgrades for new releases of Cubase, but will have to pay for a new full license.
- If an eLicenser dongle breaks or gets lost – it won’t be recoverable.
- Licenses can’t be moved to eLicenser dongles or moved between dongles.
So it’s probably fair to guess, that quite a few users of the affected older releases of Cubase are now wondering, if it might be worth it to upgrade before the end of the eLicenser service.
And the answer will also depend on how old their current Cubase release is.
Some software makers create overview pages to quickly find out what’s new in a current release compared to a particular older version. I couldn’t find such a thing for Cubase.
However, since Cubase 10, Steinberg has published a “What’s New” section in the official Cubase manuals. But one would have to quite some clicking around to find those sections.
In an attempt to make it a bit easier to find all of those sections, here’s a collection of links that will hopefully make it just a little more convenient to figure out what one might get when upgrading Cubase to the current release:
What’s new in each Cubase Pro and Artist release after Cubase 9 (2016)
Here are the links to Steinberg’s official Cubase documentation about the new features in each Cubase release since version 10:
Read also:
What’s New in Cubase releases 8.5 through 9.5
I had a rough time finding listings of new features by Steinberg themselves for some of the older releases. So here are links to some relevant articles published around the time of those releases:
Cubase 9.5