Downgrade from Padshop 2 to Padshop Pro?

I have licenses for Nuendo, Cubase and Padshop Pro. I mostly use Cubase on my laptop, but I also have it installed here on my main machine. After installing Cubase 10.5, now suddenly I can’t open my Nuendo sessions that use Padshop anymore, as I get a “Padshop is not yet permanently activated”, unless the Cubase dongle is also in the machine.

What I feel should’ve happened is that the Padshop Pro license on the eLicenser would be upgraded to the latest one, but since it seems the Padshop 2 license is nowhere to be seen and is instead a part of Cubase 10.5, I’m stuck with this situation until the next major Nuendo release, which I assume also comes with Padshop 2.

I think it’d be best if I just went back to the older Padshop Pro in the meantime, but is there a way to do this without breaking anything? Do the sessions that now use Padshop 2 open properly with the older Padshop Pro?

Thanks for any insight.

The only one of the three licences you listed that will authorise Padshop 2 is your Cubase Pro 10.5 licence. When the USB eLicenser containing the Cubase licence is not connected, you are correctly getting a licence error for Padshop 2.

Sessions using Padshop 2 are unlikely to work correctly with Padshop Pro.


Your Padshop Pro licence will only be upgraded to a standalone Padshop 2 licence if you pay to upgrade it - but there is a potential gotcha here. Unless I am misremembering, Padshop Pro licences exist in two variants - a standalone Padshop Pro licence, and a Padshop Pro upgrade licence that unlocks the Pro functionality in the Padshop bundled with certain versions of Cubase and Nuendo up to version 10.0. So far as I am aware, you can only upgrade a standalone Padshop Pro licence to Padshop 2, not a Padshop Pro upgrade licence. The correct upgrade to Padshop 2 from the Padshop Pro upgrade licence is to upgrade Cubase to Cubase 10.5 or wait for a future version of Nuendo that includes Padshop 2 (at which point the Padshop Pro upgrade licence is redundant as Padshop 2 includes all the Padshop Pro features).

I suspect your Padshop Pro licence is a Padshop Pro upgrade licence, which cannot be upgraded to a standalone Padshop 2 licence.


You don’t really have many options here.

You could uninstall Padshop 2 and reinstall Padshop - but that is likely to break any sessions using Padshop 2, also it might well break Cubase 10.5’s integration with Padshop.

You could connect the USB eLicenser containing your Cubase 10.5 licence to authorise Padshop 2 when using Padshop in Nuendo. If you have both the Cubase and Nuendo licences available when working in Nuendo, this is the easiest option.

You could buy a Padshop 2 licence - but this is an expensive way of acquiring a licence that will likely be redundant when you upgrade to the next version of Nuendo and which might turn out to have limited resale potential.

You could buy Absolute 4, as an Absolute 4 licence authorises Padshop 2. This might be a worthwhile upgrade if you already own another Steinberg product that you can upgrade to Absolute 4 (such as HALion or Groove Agent). It is rather expensive as an outright purchase, especially if you have no need for HALion, HALion Sonic or Groove Agent.


This problem would have been avoided if Steinberg had aligned the product cycles of Cubase and Nuendo, but it seems a deliberate decision on their part to keep the product cycles offset in order to allow new code to mature in Cubase first.

Much thanks for the explanation, that’s even more complicated than I imagined! It seems it’s just best to wait it out at this point.