Connecting Cubase - Cubase Tutorial

- [Instructor] In this tutorial, I'll talk to you about the important procedure of activating the Steinburg E-licenser that validates your copy of Q-base has been purchased and all other Steinburg programs for that matter. The E-licenser is the official name for the blue plastic USB dongle that you need to buy to run pretty much all of Steinburg programs. Once you have downloaded your copy of Q-base via the Steinburg Download Assistant, and subsequently installed it, you will need to activate Q-base so that it runs fairly operational. That said, you can run the program for thirty days as a trial, but to make it work past that date, you need to activate it using the separate E-licenser control center software. The E-licenser control center software is a separate application to Q-base, but it does get installed automatically whilst installing any Steinburg software that requires the use of the E-licenser. As you you can see the E-licenser application is predominantly presented as two columns with a horizontal menu zone across the top. In the left column, we see the E-licenser listed as well as any soft E-licenser activations. We see three categories at the left here. My license is at the top displays all the licenses available to me, soft and hard. Then below we see the breakdown of licenses between those installed to my dongle and those activated by soft E-licenser. Obviously selecting any of these three categories changes what is displayed at the right so on the right, we see the software registered to the E-licenser at present. Notice as you roll over any of the licenses in the right column, a pop up appears to inform you if the license is a full one or a demo one. In fact demo trial licenses are indicated in red text at the foot, scroll down to see them, if you have a lot of licenses. If you you want to convert a trial license to a full license you will need to enter the activation code Steinburg gives you upon purchase. You'd enter the activation code using that button at the top left here. Once clicked, you'll see this pop up dialogue. To enter the activation code, and then validate it. I'll type in the activation code that I've got here for Q-base elements 10. As soon as it's entered, the dialogue box here recognizes the number relates to Q-base elements 10 and indicates that below here. I'll click on continue, and we now see this upgrade dialogue appear, as the code is validated via the internet. Obviously you will have to ensure that you are connected to the internet to be able to do this. Once validated, you'll see that confirmation message. I'll click on the close button, and we now see Q-base elements 10 listed at the foot hear in black, in black text to confirm it's a full license, rather than a trial license bearing in mind I've got the my licenses option selected at the top of the left column, because I validated this, the license has been stored on my dongle, and that's why we see it listed at the right when the USB E-licenser are optionally selected at the left. The many options across the top text will indicate what they do. We also get a maintenance button at the top right, too. Selecting this runs software maintenance on your E-licenser control center software to ensure you have the latest versions. You will click that button here at the bottom right to begin the process. As you can see there are six steps that this process runs, and can take a few moments to complete, but as once done, you shouldn't have any problems running your programs, such as Q-base pro 10. Here I see I have no issues so I'll click on close. So to finish up here, let me recap some of the important information mentioned. As we saw, I had already activated my copy of Q-base pro 10, as well as the other Steinburg software listed in black text at the right hand side. If a license is indicated with red text, it means it is a trial version of the software and will stop running after 30 days. Pretty much all Steinburg software requires the use of the E-licenser. Some of the cutback versions of the software will allow for a soft E-license activation that ties the software to that particular PC, so to rent that one by you again, a soft E-license simply means an activation has been used that doesn't require the insertion of the physical Steinburg blue dongle into a spare USB port. Q-base elements for example allows activation by either hard or soft E-license. Q-base pro, the software that we are going to looking at in this course, does require the use of the dongle. It can't be run with say soft E-licensed activation. Now there are positive and negatives to each option. If you choose to register all your software to the dongle, you can install your Steinburg software on as many PCs as you like. Obviously you can only use one copy of Q-base at any one time because you only have one dongle with the license attached to it, and Q-base pro won't run, unless you've got the E-licenser dongle inserted into a spare USB socket. Bear in mind also that you can register the same software to multiple dongles. That's the purpose of the activation code that we entered earlier. The activation code is granted once and checked to see it has only been used once when validating the software. If you go down the soft E-license route for Q-base elements, you'll only be able to use the one copy of the program on one PC because the soft E-license only allows for one activation. Anyway, let's move forward now and talk about how we use Q-base pro 10 with a function called the Steinburg hub, to speed up the creation of projects.