Before anyone reads this post just as some Ableton fanboy clickbait…I have been on Cubase since 2001 and I’ve used Ableton since 2003. There are things that Cubase is great at that Live sucks at (comping!), and there are things that Live blows Cubase out of the water on. Something that I have always found frustrating is doing Warp Markers in Cubase vs Live. Adjusting loops to fit a grid is something I have to do all the time. I decided to sit down tonight and really try and get faster on Cubase (Nuendo actually in my case), but there is still no comparison to the speed of doing it in Live. I made this little video to show the difference in the workflow to achieve the same thing. I’m hoping maybe some Steinberg folks will see this and see just how far behind Cubase is at this basic task. https://youtu.be/NfYqxnakAc0?si=M9HwThqzJCsweVQW
If anyone sees anything that I’m doing wrong in the process that would speed this up, please feel free to tell me! BTW, I did try the “audiowarp quantize” to the grid but the quantization even on this basic example created a lot of wrong snaps to the grid that took longer than the manual method I did.
The critical phase isn’t the quantization; that works well. The critical issue is the detection of the warp markers in the sample editor. Setting the parameters correctly (threshold, intensity, minimum length, beats) is quite tedious. Manual editing is usually necessary as well. Overall, it’s a cumbersome process, and I’d appreciate some AI support there (like the one in Live, maybe?).
I agree that setting the warp markers is the crux. There should be some sort of intelligent suppression based on the grid-IE-if the grid is set to bar then it’s more difficult to capture hit points that are far away from the bar. That would speed things up a lot. I don’t think we need to throw AI at it, as this has been a feature in live for as long as I can remember.
You might be able to speed up your workflow in Cubase by running Project > tempo detection and then Audio > Advanced > Set definition from tempo.
From memory, helps to align first beat to grid, and depending on the source the tempo detection may need correcting but it’s pretty quick once you get the hang of it.
Context was in the video. It was an audio event dropped in and bpm had to be established (easily accomplished in the first few seconds of the video) and then warped to fit the grid.
Setting tempo was fast-took care of that in the first few seconds of the video by tapping tempo. I find the tempo detection feature frustrating for this because the first thing it does is try and warp the tempo of the project instead of the event (the opposite of what I’m doing in the video)
Once you’ve run tempo detection and it’s done the tempo map, you do Set definition from tempo. This basically warps the event (or file if you choose) according to the tempo map, and you can then turn off tempo track or delete the tempo points if you like. It will play back aligned to a constant (or whatever) tempo grid (assuming the event is set to Musical mode).
I’ve used this method for full-length tracks for doing mash-ups etc. and it’s much quicker than manually warping. Would take 5 seconds for the loop in your video.