So, trashed my preferences, then went through the joy of resetting up all my settings for track controls and inspector displays, toolbars etc.
First off, auto align disappeared as soon as I tweaked the top toolbar - it doesn’t even appear in the list of display options when I right click.
Secondly, though I saw some very welcome improvements in GUI responsiveness with video, when I loaded up my current session the Video window is just a white blank.
Checked that the video format is compatible (it is, thumbnails are showing), the frame rate is correct, everything.
disabling, reenabling video, muting and unmuting the video track seems to make no difference.
Load the video in a new session, it works…
Having just spend nearly $2000 on a new PC so I could run Nuendo properly (as the Mac performance is waaaay off), I’m disappointed to say the least.
I’ve invested a lot of time and money in running Nuendo, and currently it’s letting me down…a lot.
I for my part am currently evaluating a switch to Reaper.
My current findings are that for my personal use cases it can (mostly) compete with Nuendo, while vastly outperforming Nuendo in terms of speed. It is far more stable in my tests, it is far snappier, but it lacks a few features I love in Nuendo. Some of them can be customized (Reapers is HEAVILY customizeable, you can access the complete core functions and script powerful own functionality), some have workarounds where I just need to learn a new way of doing things. Reaper doesn’t have that strong of a support for control surfaces, but I don’t use any currently. I’ll see how it goes for me personally. I’ve seen many people switch, so now I’m looking at the grass on the other side and will see how it goes.
Nuendo has many strong features. But I’m tired of being afraid every time there is a major upgrade and spending weeks on this forum, seeing what does and what doesn’t work, finding workarounds, being frustrated, posting bug reports and feature requests into a black hole, looking for workarounds, waiting months for fixes.
Yes, same here.
I’m currently on my first feature film score, which is stressful enough. I’m hopping between Cubase and Nuendo trying to get things to work.
Nuendo is slightly more stable, and seems to handle a heavier load better; in Cubase at least the video works.
I also have the disappearing plug-in issue again and plug-ins instances showing up blank.
On the Mac it seems to work better, with less crashes, but the GUI can’t keep up and it’s too slow to run my sessions.
It’s a shambles, and I’m sorely disappointed with the current state of Nuendo. It seems it doesn’t matter how much money I throw at it, the program is unable to deal effectively with large sessions with lots of VSTi’s, video and cope with heavy cpu load.
I honestly can’t believe some of these issues haven’t come up under beta testing.
I real shame as I generally love the workflow, and the key editor is still second to none.
After this project I’m also going to seriously investigate other options. As my mainstay these days is more music than audio based work, I’ll be looking at Logic, Studio One and performer.
Prefectly said. It clearly does no use to complain here, but I’ll do more of it anyway: Cubendo is in a dreadful state at this time. The only hope at this point might be a total rewrite of code (and maybe a shake up of who’s running things over there)…maybe that’s happening, maybe not.
I’m in the same place as you two. What an incredibly frustrating experience Cubase 9 and Nuendo 8 have been, and this is coming from someone who really does want to use them!
I am a long time Steinberg products user, starting from Cubase 5 (if I remember correctly). I’ve crossgraded to Nuendo when this option became available, because I’ve started doing mainly post production jobs. And I was always pretty happy with updates. It’s first time, when it’s huge dissapointment. New version is in almost every aspect worse then old for me. I stay with 7. I’ve also recommended to TV post facility where i often work to not upgrade. To this time, I managed to do all the work with Nuendo rarely touching Pro Tools, now i think I have to get good at Pro Tools to protect my future
Could you describe the steps to reproduce this issue on your machine?
Was Audio Alignment still added to the right panel of the Toolbar configuration window? E.g. options that should be available in the toolbar.
I’ll have to check as I finally ended up trashing my preferences and starting from scratch, only keeping my keycommands and presets files.
That brought it back.
All I can say is that it appears to be linked to having ‘old’ or previous preferences; I had a similar issue with the audio export window not wanting to switch to MP3 settings despite it being selected as file format. Same thing; trashing all preferences seemed to ‘fix’ that too.
So your first port of call should be looking at what happens when preferences from previous versions are used.
Last year I purchased Nuendo 7.5 after beeing years on Nuendo 4.1. I was frustrated and shocked how steinberg destroyed the UI.
This simultanious view of event on the old position and the new one while waveform outline disapears made me crazy.
The only thing why I didn’t move to Reaper
were media bay and handling of muti-out instruments. I rely heavily on both in my daily workflow while producing music and doing post jobs.
I moved to cubase after all.
Apart from media bay, reaper is very good. It’s THE DAW for spatial audio. VR features will be implemented only in Nuendo 9, which is in two years or something. Many PT move to reaper as well.
Producing music has different needs than audio post for films has different needs than producing game audio. Even within people doing audio post there are probably vast differences in what they need. I for my part tried Reaper for my work and I could totally rely on it for voice recordings for games or audio productions, I could rely on it for producing large amount of sounds for games, it was very stable, very fast and has some really really great innovative features. But I somehow didn’t find a way of using Reaper for film mixes in surround. Nuendo has such great panners and built-in mixdown / upmixing, and also great ADR features. To my knowledge, everything surround is a hack with complicated routing in Reaper. So I’m staying in Nuendo for film mixes and haven’t decided if I switch to Reaper for the rest. If it’s worth learning and configuring 2 DAWs or stay in one for consistency’s sake, even with its drawbacks. Hell, Reaper has no dongle… it sounds stupid but this is such a strong point!
Regarding Media Bay, Reaper has the Media Explorer where you can create databases of your sample loop libraries. You can index all your audio loops there, too, and find it with a search field very quickly. I rely on it when I seach for game sounds in my 1TB sound library. It works great. But if you use Media Bay to find VST presets and channel strips etc. of course this doesn’t work in Reaper.
I think this is not a place to discuss pros and cons of Reaper.
Of course reaper has media explorer and cubersome handling of mutli-out instruments. Been there done that.
It doesn’t suit my needs and is cumersome.
But Nuendo is unbearable at least for me.
I feel for you guys, but don’t find these problems at all and would understand the frustration if this was happening to me. We do careful preference transfers from updates and try fresh versus old transfers, most things like key commands, configurations, ports, ram presets seem to always smoothly translate, you can also save presets for a bunch of things also, but NEVER transfer your plugin folder from update to update that is something that you have to let the new system re-initiate, sometimes even the mediabay (but that has been working okay between 7 and 8). There are certain things that every new piece of software coding is going to rely on to operate smoothly. Especially A piece of software this sophisticated and innovative as Nuendo This system is a beast for us. And I will proudly stand on a mountain and scream of how awesome it is compared to the other only Audio Post competitor in ways that it has saved us time and efficiency, cost etc. And this coming from someone whom has used the other system a lot as well to know the differences between them. It hurts to see how much basing i’ve seen recently. I know N8.0 original versus was definitely on the beta side, but this update really fixed everything for us to start enjoying all of the new features and what they have to offer.
I’ve recently had a feature session with over 700 tracks on my system, Network features running, been pushing Nuendo 8.1 to the max and even when I think its going to crash, because it was loading a huge series of files,nothing… still stable. Did a re-conform on it also yesterday, worked great. I’ve only came across one or two very minor things are not really bugs that I will report on as I build a list of things and continue to put it through the ringer. We are doing multiple game project’s sfx design, feature films (tested align audio, working fine here), etc We rely on this program daily and it serves us incredibility well.
It’s not bashing. I’m sure you don’t think we’re here for the fun of complaining. Nuendo doesn’t work for us in the way it’s working for you and I’m sure if it works really well as in your case, it IS the most powerful software. But for many here, it’s not. Every workflow is different. As there are so many ways of achieving a goal. Somebody uses DOP, someone else really prefers sending clips out to an external editor (“open in external editor”). Some people have a fixed installation in a huge studio and come back to the same setup every day, I for my part am highly mobile, working only with one powerful laptop. Sometimes I hook it up to my studio, sometimes I’m on the road, sometimes in the office.
Nuendo works differently for each of those use cases and small differences and inconsistencies can really tear your creative flow apart. Why is it not possible to open clips in an external editor? A seemingly simple thing, but ignored by SB. When I’m on the road and open Nuendo, it forgets the assignments of outputs to my speakers in the studio. Even though I save it as a preset. I come back into my studio and start Nuendo, no sound. I first have to re-create my setup and assign speakers to outputs. Every time. Why can’t Nuendo just remember and when those speakers become available, assign them to the last known output? For somebody who moves around a lot it’s annoying. The GUI is slow and I can barely scroll around in the project as scrolling jumps around erratically. I constantly am seeking the spot where I last edited because I overshoot with this strange scrolling again and again. The UI response is slow. Sometimes I jump back and forth between mixer and arrange window. On a laptop with a small screen this happens a lot. But opening the mixer window takes a long time if you do it constantly. And then, when I’m on the road it happens that I forgot my dongle because I didn’t intend to use Nuendo but then spontaneously had some spare time or wanted to show something to a client. And when I show and hide automation, Nuendo tends to crash often on my machine. To the point where I’m afraid of opening automation at all because I want to avoid waiting for Nuendo to finish crashing and opening the project again. Is that a desirable state of mind? Of course not.
You see, I probably have a very different style of working and environment and all those incosnsistencies between UI, the sluggishness, the fact that sometimes I’m not allowed to open Nuendo on the road although I paid for it, that Nuendo forgets my speaker setup, all those things are like small needle stings. Any one thing is neglectable, sure. But for the way I and others work they are adding up and start hurting. It’s not that we haven’t pointed them out, sending feature request or bug reports, but nothing happens. This makes me feel as if my inputs and issues are not worth tackling. This is the huge frustration as I, every day, try to make my clients happy and make a living with a tool I actually really like. But I sometimes have the feeling that it’s working against me.
If Nuendo works for your style of working it’s great! But I try to constantly provide feedback (I hope mostly constructively, although sometimes frustrated) and speak up that there are people who use Nuendo in different setups than just with a big Nuage table.
And as Chris rightfully states, we do not come here for the fun of complaining. I come here because it hurts to see that Nuendo (for me) does not work at all the way it has been working since version 3 when I started to like and later love it. I have made my income and built studios around this software.
I come here because I can not and refuse to accept that the issues many have been having (like sluggish GUI) have been fixed in Hamburg but are only released to the musicians using Cubase and not the audio post guys using Nuendo. With a nightmare roll-out such as N8 to look back upon, why on earth would you chose not to release a bugfix in the update and then release it to another part of the userbase a couple of days later?
I honestly do not get this and I honestly hope that whatever lead to this problem will be adressed, because I am a very unhappy customer at the moment.
Thank you. It’s not something that we overlooked at but obviously there’s something that still went wrong when your preferences had been migrated.
This is now reported and I hope to address this issue soon.
If I would not care, I would move on to another DAW in a heartbeat. But I depend on Nuendo, it’s currently the only option I have to do my work in the way I think is the most streamlined and fun and produces the best results for my clients. I could do my work in other tools, but I would be significantly less happy making my living. I’m invested, also emotionally. I tell other people proudly that I use Nuendo and not PT or other tools. I’m here because I really like Nuendo and I care about the experience. I’m frustrated that it often hinders me doing my job with efficiency and joy.
Yes, it would be good to be able to choose an external editor but that might get complicated due to SB’s unlimited undo. Of course, you can open clips in Wavelab, but that may not be what you want. This might be worth a feature request but I think this may also be a marketing issue.
Of course, it shouldn’t do that. This has to be worth submitting as a bug report.
I feel your pain with the various aspects of Nuendo that are not working as well as they should. The GUI really should not be sluggish on a Macbook.
Armand, thank you for responding,
I still ended up having to go back to N7.1 to do my work properly.
I guess I’m an anomaly as I use Nuendo mainly for composing, though I do sound design as well (it’s just that for the last 4 years, my main gig has been composing work for games and film).
There appears to be an issue with video thumbnails that grinds N8 to a halt. Also, the performance lag in the GUI (even on the PC) meant I had to go back.
Scrolling horizontally when zoomed in with thumbnails on gets N8 on its knees quite easily.
C9 faired a bit better, but is still slower.
I run large sessions (around 450 tracks of various types, though mainly midi and audio) with many VSTi instances and VEP Pro, so they do push it a lot.
Scrolling on n7 stays quite smooth; on N8 it is a lot slower.
I find that the key editor, which I use a lot, just opens up a lot quicker as a separate window than it does as a lower zone.
If N7 and N8 had been released without multiple bugs so obvious that you find them during first use…then the posts and demeanor of this forum would look very different, wouldn’t they?
