I am very conscious that I have a back log of writing to do. I haven’t updated the CableFactory DI review and I haven’t written about the rather wonderful Marian Seraph AD2. Plus I haven’t finished musing on editing and I have something to say about Studio One and multi-document interfaces! However all that has to be banished to the backing track because today I took the plunge and upgraded my Win 7 Pro 64 bit installation to Windows 10. I’d been holding off partly because I have a load of audio stuff that I need to work and I was worried about the upgrade breaking it. I currently have Wavelab 8.5, Cubase 8 Pro, Reaper 4. something, Studio One V3 and Sequoia 12 on my machine and I really didn’t want to install any of them again if I could help it. Especially Sequoia – 80 something gigabytes of samples.
My main worry was the software protected by dongles – Wavelab and Cubase use e-Licenser and Sequoia WIBU key – I have a feeling those might break at the upgrade. I began by ordering a 500Gb SSD as I thought I would treat myself to a faster C: drive in the process, and I upgraded my AOMEI Partition Assistant to the full version for the princely sum of 20 odd dollars. I have been using the free version of Partition Assistant and it really is very good. I parted with the cash because the new version claims to be able to copy your C: drive complete, and as that is exactly what I wanted to do, I put my sixteen quid where my mouth is. The other reason I wanted to copy my C: drive was that frankly I was worried the whole process would go horribly wrong and trash my system.
Microsoft have been nagging for a while to update so with my C: drive copied and the SSD in the driving seat I pushed the button. A couple of reboots later and rather sweaty moment at around 75% when I thought the process had ground to a halt, and voila a Win 10 log in screen. But now the moment of truth. What I wanted to do was very quickly spin up my audio software, import a song and play it back, hopefully without taking a journey to crashville on the blue screen express. Or even just a trip to nasty lockup world. With a little trepidation I fired up Sequoia, I’m on version 12, so a little behind the times, and I was worried about that hardware dongle. I shouldn’t have been. Sequoia sprang into life first go and not a peep about the dongle. One down.
Wavelab was next and on boot I ran into a requester complaining that the e-Licenser wasn’t happy and I needed to run LCC. Having forgotten all about License Control Centre I wasn’t quite sure what was being asked of me. And with a spelling mistake in the requester I had a horrible feeling I might be looking at bit of code that not many people had had to interact with. Interestingly Wavelab seemed to be working all right, but I didn’t like the idea of an unhappy dongle. Sure to be trouble down the line. So having googled my way to the LCC download and run the maintenance routine, the dongle cheered up significantly and Wavelab was happy as Larry. Two down. Well three because Cubase relies on the same licensing technology and started smartly under command. Fourth was Reaper. I see version 5 is out, but rather than upgrade first I tried version 4.731 and it worked without a blip. Nice job Justin.
And finally, last but by no means least, Studio One Version 3. There’s a review coming shortly for Audio Media and there will be something about single and multi document interfaces, but for the moment S1V3 ran without batting and eye lid. 5 for 5, not bad at all.
You might wonder at my fear and trepidation, you might even scoff and say – ‘of course these will all work, this is 2015, it all works!’, it’s just I’ve been hurt too many times now. So I was surprised and delighted and surprised. Mostly surprised.