Ableton Forum

Hey folks,
does anyone have a clue on extracting midi tracks from very ancient Atari Cubase .arr files?

These song files are from Cubase 3, a program from the year 1993 , when music software was like this

I've already converted the old Atari floppy data to PC / Mac OS readable format (using ST recover).

But now the difficulty is in opening these ARR files. I half expected someone would have created a parser of some kind but the common solution seems to be "install the last cubase which would open an .arr file (SX3) and export from there".
Now the problems are firstly, SX3 requires a Cubase license and dongle, but secondly there are mixed results installing SX 3 on a modern 64 bit OS. So that's a bit of a dead end.

So unless I find someone running WindowsXP and SX 3 I'm baffled which way forward.
Perhaps a musical specialist data transfer company?

Any recommendations, clues, magical incantations ?

Hi Angstrom,

Cubase SX3 can be installed on Windows 10 in 'Safe Mode' using the installer. Also, available from this link:
https://helpcenter.steinberg.de/hc/en-u ... CPR-format
I've just done it quickly on my laptop and it opens blank session. Haven't an old session to hand, however it has opened a recent Nuendo 11 .npr with obviously some wonkiness.

Would you like me to take a look at it?

Cheers

Dean Corrie wrote: ↑

Wed Nov 24, 2021 8:36 am

Would you like me to take a look at it?

Cheers

Hi Dean, if you can see if they open that would be great. I've put them in a zip archive.

Ancient Cubase files https://timeshard.com/wp-content/upload ... verted.zip

That’s a bunch of files in there but 4 main ones worth trying. They are mostly from a set at Glastonbury festival in 1998

• In the folder “/dedard-squonk-blackfoot” titled “GLASTO.ALL”
• In the folder “/intro metatrons heed” there’s a file GLASTO1.ALL
• In the folder”/Heed Drugless” the file GLAST02A.all”
• then there’s “/waarg drugless dedard” folder – a file 1world.all (from a Peter Gabriel world music festival)

If you can spew those out to MIDI files that would be absolutely great, as I still have the Emulator hardware sampler with the programs for these sets, and the disk still reads! It would massively help me reconstruct the songs . But I understand if that's a big ask!

Thanks! Steve

OK cheers, here goes.
Unfortunately, none of the .ALL files open causing an error and hang.



Importing .ARR files result in empty session. One of them caused an error then nothing.


Don't think I can help much more unfortunately.
Maybe some issues with your conversions? Have you tried Steinberg forums?

Cheers

Dean Corrie wrote: ↑

Wed Nov 24, 2021 7:19 pm

Unfortunately, none of the .ALL files open causing an error and hang.
---

Ah, that's a shame. I wonder what happened to the files. Thanks for trying anyway!
Its much appreciated, and saved me from trying to resurrect a 20 year old PC in my attic.

I just had a thought of trying the disks in the old atariST, slave it, and seeing if I can record the MIDI out.
I might have more fun simply rebuilding the songs from scratch though!

I'll ask a few more places, and see if anyone has clues why they might be corrupted.
thanks again!

No problem. Good luck with it! Cheers