I am in the process of getting into the Steinberg ecosystem and am weighing up buying Nuendo or Cubase Pro. My primary use is music, though I do have a use for some of the video related features of Nuendo. Many of the film/video features of Nuendo and all the game features are of no use to me, so the added value of Nuendo is not as clear as for some. Steinberg’s educational pricing gives an incentive to ‘go large’, as the discount is only available on full version purchases and crossgrades from non-Steinberg products; version upgrades and crossgrades from Steinberg products are not discounted.
The additional discount on Nuendo left me close to buying Nuendo 10 when the 50% off sale for Cubase was announced. The Cubase sale seems to make my decision a ‘no brainer’: buy Cubase Pro now, giving me a retail licence for Cubase and likely cheaper version upgrades in the future than if I had opted for Nuendo. If I want the additional Nuendo features later on, I can either:
- sell the retail licence of Cubase and buy a new education licence for Nuendo, or
- crossgrade at full price from Cubase Pro to Nuendo
Option 1 is potentially cheaper, depending on what I got for selling the Cubase licence. I realise this would give me an education licence for Nuendo which would be Not For Resale and not authorised for paid work until those restrictions were removed by a future paid version upgrade.
Option 2 would give me a retail licence for Nuendo. If I waited until the next version of Nuendo is released before upgrading, this option seems likely to be no more than slightly more expensive than the difference between the current 50% sale price of Cubase Pro and the current education price for Nuendo, plus the expected price of a Cubase Pro upgrade to the next version (10.5?).
If I do land up with Nuendo now or in the future, I would still like to have the opportunity of creating music only projects in a format where I can collaborate with Cubase users using native file formats. As Nuendo cannot save .cpr files, this means I would need a copy of Cubase.
The recent release of Nuendo 10 has made it clear Steinberg has unified the codebase for Cubase and Nuendo, also there is now an acknowledged link between the product cycles of Cubase and Nuendo. It may well be that Nuendo version upgrades continue to lag Cubase version upgrades for marketing reasons and so that the teething problems of the new version can be worked out in Cubase. In other words, Steinberg are now fairly clear Nuendo is a superset of Cubase Pro, other than the omission of integrated VST Transit, which is irrelevant to me and I suspect doesn’t bother than many people. (I have no idea whether VST Transit Join works in Nuendo 10; I am simply not interested in the VST Transit service).
Please, Steinberg, allow Nuendo licenses to run the same version of Cubase Pro now that Nuendo is an acknowledged superset of Cubase Pro. The eLicenser would have to be plugged in, so Cubase Pro would only be authorised on a system that was entitled at that moment to run Nuendo, the more powerful product. This would free the paying users of your premium product to have music workflows where they can interwork with other Cubase installations / users whilst the full Nuendo feature set is available for any projects requiring Nuendo’s additional features.
The current situation may well be costing Steinberg money. This is not the first thread where a Cubase Pro user has backed away from a potential paid crossgrade to Nuendo because they will not be able to run Cubase Pro once they have upgraded their licence. I am sure I am not the only person backing away from buying Nuendo and opting for Cubase Pro because of Nuendo’s inability to save .cpr files. I doubt many users will buy Nuendo and Cubase Pro.
Buying a Cubase Elements licence as well as a licence for a higher version of Cubase or Nuendo for dongleless working when mobile or as a backup licence in the event of eLicenser failure is a relatively small expense, especially if you pick up the Cubase Elements licence in the current sale. At least with a soft eLicenser containing a Cubase Elements licence you have something to record with or some way of opening your Cubase project if you cannot open Cubase Pro. Buying Cubase Pro if you already own Nuendo is a considerable additional expense that will be hard for most people to justify when most of the money is going on relicensing features you have a licence for in a larger product.