Running Cubase on the Surface Pro 3

Now we all know that the Surface Pro 3 is totally capable of running desktop software – so it shouldn’t be remarkable that Cubase or Pro Tools as in my last video or other DAWs run fine on it – it should be expected right? العاب مباشرة على النت Totally, yes, but that’s not the whole point of what I’m trying to do here. The process of installing and running a complex piece of music software like Cubase has the opportunity to highlight the pros and cons of using a format and platform like the Surface Pro 3 for music production. We know it’s going to run, but are there any stumbles on the way, is multi-touch a help or a hindrance and what sort of performance can we expect from this slab of glass and electronics?

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Installation
First hiccup – no DVD drive. The installation of version 7.5 of Cubase is spread across two DVD, one with the software and one with the additional Halion library. I have an external USB DVD drive for emergencies such as this and the Surface emitted that reassuring plugged in series of beeps when I stuck it into the USB port….. then it dropped it, then it found it again, then no, yes, no, bugger. Tried it via a hub so I could plug in both the USB ends in the hope of drawing additional power – same problem. This does not bode well for all the other software I have on disk.

Right, so let’s bring out the dock. The Surface dock is kind of like a 165 quids worth of USB hub that I think is probably an essential accessory for a Surface based studio – I’ll do a full review in another video but suffice to say that as soon as I plugged the external DVD drive into the dock it all worked perfectly.

Thankfully, there is another way. Steinberg allow you to download the full installer disks from their website but be warned the Cubase install disk is nearly 7GB – the actual installer is like 300MB but then you have gigs and gigs of VST sound library for the various included virtual instruments – which is all cool and that, but they could offer a slimmed down or split up option. The problems didn’t end there though – I downloaded the ISO’s onto my regular desktop and then went to transfer them to the Surface when of course my FAT32 formatted USB thumb drive can’t handle a 7GB file. So after digging out an external NTFS formatted USB drive I finally got the Cubase DVD ISO’s onto the Surface – joy. What do we do now?
Right-click on the ISO file and select “Mount” and the Surface will treat it like a virtual DVD drive. However, mine said that it was unable to mount either of these ISO’s but did anyway….. not sure what that’s about. Anyway – double click the Start_Center.exe file on the Cubase disk and we’re off! You should only install the 64bit version unless you have a specific reason to run the 32bit one as even old 32bit plugins work well on 64bit Cubase and you’ll get better performance.

So, what a faff – wasted loads of my time and minutes of this video in just getting the software installed. If we’re moving forward into an optical drive free world then software manufacturers have to be smarter – they have to provide a sensible installation system that requires just a little more thought than slapping ISO images of their install media online for download. Right, let’s move on to the good stuff.

Starting Up
Like Pro Tools, Cubase needs a dongle plugged into a, or in this case the, USB port, in order to run. Copy protection is a pain in the arse but I guess it’s necessary for the makers to protect their software. I like dongles generally because they do make it really easy to move from machine to machine – just plug in your dongle and you can run the software on any system anywhere. However, it does take up a USB port and if that gets knocked or broken – like my special taped up red one here – then you’re screwed until you pay for a replacement. This is a cause for concern on the Surface as it is sticking right out of the side in a very exposed way and if you’re making music on the move using the onboard sound you don’t really want a hub hanging off it either. Maybe a short extension that you can tape onto the back or something – dunno – it’s not exactly a dongle friendly machine.

Using the onboard sound is less of a problem with Cubase as it can handle regular Windows drivers without any trouble. We do hit the same speakers and headphone issue where Cubase sees them as independent outputs – so plugging your phones in doesn’t automatically change anything – you have to go into the device settings and change it there. Cubase only supports a single output when using the “Generic ASIO Driver” so it may be better to use the excellent ASIO4All wrapper which gives Cubase access to all the inputs and outputs in the system. This should allow for low latency and some half decent performance through the onboard sound. Playback achieved.

Desktop Scaling
Cubase handles the desktop scaling better than Pro Tools. The controls in Cubase are quite large and clear and so even when reduced to the smallest size there are very usable – particularly with the pen, although fingers don’t do too bad. For me the recommended size seems to do the job.

Multi-touch
Cubase responds well to single touch, all parameters and functions are available, you can even pinch/zoom in the arrange window to zoom horizontally in time. There’s some weirdness to be found in the GUIs of some plug-ins where virtual keyboards can not be played directly with fingers or the pen – but, if you drag across the keys then they do trigger. This is not the case in the piano roll editor, just in plug-in GUIs, but on the other hand drum pads work fine. It’s all a bit odd really.

I am finding that it’s the pen that really enables you to work with the GUI and that takes a little bit of getting used to. There’s lots of room for frustration when some simple actions with a mouse and keyboard make for a lot of fuss with just the pen. When you don’t have the keyboard attached we hit the problem of the lack of keyboard shortcuts – I’ve used the spacebar for play/stop my whole life and here I am on the edit page and there’s no visible transport controls at all. One thing that’s useful here is the floating “Devices Panel” which enables to launch all the main windows. But as I said with Pro Tools what we need is a row of programmable buttons to give you easy access to copy/paste, duplicate, show mixer, show editor – the common keyboard shortcuts when the keyboard is not attached. I also had some trouble launching editors with the pen – I guess my double stab isn’t up to scratch or something.

Pen toolbar
So is there a solution – can I create a companion touchy toolbar for the pen? Yes I can. All the commands in Cubase can also be mapped to a MIDI controller. So through clever use of SmithsonMartins Emulator software I can create a row of MIDI buttons that can be rather painstakingly mapped to controls in Cubase – and voila, a cool toolbar to enhance your workflow.

Let me demonstrate this by improvising a quick bit of music in order to hopefully demonstrate both the coolness and the sometimes clumsiness of using the pen in Cubase – bear in mind I haven’t been using the pen very long.

The toolbar is setup through the Generic Remote in Cubase which can be very powerful but I wonder whether it wouldn’t be better to do this with some kind of virtual keyboard, so we’re using actual keyboard shortcuts rather than wasting Emulator on such menial tasks when I might want it for other controller duties. I also don’t know whether other DAW software has such comprehensive MIDI-to-command support, whereas a keyboard shortcut toolbar would work with anything. This sort of toolbar, I feel, is vital for making the Surface Pro 3 into a usable creative platform.

Performance Testing
We run a slightly modified version of the Dawbench benchmarking test from Dawbench.com It gives a good indication of a systems performance by running multiple instances of a plug-in across a large number of tracks until you hit the point of crackle. In this test we got around 55 plugins running without a crackle. On a properly setup desktop system with a proper K series quad core Core i7 processor I would expect to get 200-250. So there is a large gap between desktop performance and what the Surface Pro 3 can actually do. سيرجيو أجويرو However, this system has not been tweaked, it’s straight out of the box and we’re going to do another video where we spend a lot more time tuning and tweaking and testing the SP3 to show what it really is capable of. وان كارد
What we’re not seeing is any of the CPU throttling that’s been reported on the internet – where when the CPU is loaded the speed cuts in half. We’ve got the Intel tuning utility running and it’s monitoring the CPU usage up at 97%, running at 70 degrees and although the CPU speed does vary between 2.6 and 2.4GHz it’s certainly not enough to seriously harm the performance. The performance is very much like I expected it to be, I’ve tested an Ultrabook with an i3 processor before and the SP3 certainly beats that. I had hoped it would surprise me but never mind hey.

Final Thoughts
Don’t be too shocked or disappointed by the performance results I got here – I will be doing a much deeper investigation into that in another video where we’ll see exactly what this machine can do on its own when properly tweaked and tuned. Comparisons to a desktop machine are not always helpful – what’s important is whether it can run what you want to run.
Thanks for watching – lots more videos to come including a bit more detail on the pen toolbar thing I just invented and a look at Reason 8 which I happen to be downloading as we speak. So please subscribe, tell your friends, come and have a chat.

 

13 thoughts on “Running Cubase on the Surface Pro 3

  1. Will you make any videos with FL Studio? Also if possible can we see a full track with lets say 40 channels with mixers and at least some 15 different VSTi’s like Garritan and East West VSTi’s and ofcourse some NI and Waves plugins. I’m wondering if Surface can handle a track like that. With and without onboard audio card how does the performance change? And may I learn the weight of that external audio card? Is that any good? And how much is that? Also what version of Surface are you using? i5 8gb?

    Sorry for a lot of questions but inspration comes out of nowhere and carrying a device like this looks very useful. I don’t mind taking that audio card with me if it has it’s own battery and not heavy.

    Thanks for the great videos and the blog.

    1. Hi Andrew,
      I do hope to look at FL Studio at some point yes. The Cubase video shows the Surface running 80 tracks of audio with 55 intensive plug-ins – but these are “how long is a piece of string questions” – it depends on what buffer sizes you are using, the quality of the audio interface drivers, the tweaking of the system and the plug-ins you are using. You have to be very careful when you claims about what a system can do because other people’s experience can vary enormously as they may have different gear and different plug-ins and emphasis. I try to show what I can and I will get onto some more performance testing soon – it all takes a long time to do 🙂

      The performance does change using an audio interface – it has better drivers and performs at lower latency with less drag on the CPU. The box is was using is the Avid Fastrack Duo – i’m sure there are details out there if you search a bit. It’s ok as an interface, it’s not going to win any competitions on quality or performance but it does the job – if you are not using Pro Tools then there are better options out there from NI, Steinberg and others. It doesn’t have a battery, it’s powered from the USB port.

      It is the i5 8GB Surface yes.

      I hope that helps
      Cheers
      Robin

  2. Hi there! I’m really enjoying the series so far! Thanks so much for posting all of this online for everyone. I was curious if you’ve had a chance to record multiple audio tracks simultaneously thus far. How many tracks have you been able to arm and record simultaneously without issue?

  3. It would be great if you could do a test with usine’s hollychock.
    It natively supports multi touch screens plus i think the interface is fully scalable, so i wonder how it would work with surface.
    There is a demo in their site , i think only limited i think in the number of channels-racks can use.

    Anyway thanks for the great tests so far.
    cheers

  4. Nice, I have a surface pro 3 so these are useful articles.

    I’m having problems with latency so I can’t record in real time with my controller if I want to use soft synths because the delay makes it impossible. Are there some generic things to do to get better midi latency?

    I’ve tried with Reaper and Ableton.

  5. Hi Robin, thank you so much for all these helpful articles and tips. It is really useful for people like me who are new to all these, especially the technical details.

    The ASIO4ALL recommendation solved my problem of not being able to get the headphones to work with Cubase. Will definitely try more of your suggestions to get more effective at using the Surface Pro 3 for audio and music.

    Cheers and keep up the great work! Much respect and appreciation.

  6. Hi Robin. This was very useful. I know it’s one of your older vids, but I have only just got a Surface Pro 6 and haven’t yet upgraded my Cubase from 7.5.

    You have answered my main query, that I can run my Cubase 7.5, but before I go through the process of installing, I just wondered if you could advise whether Cubase 10 is much better for working on Surface Pro?

    If so, I will probably consider the upgrade.

    Cheers

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