Yep, I actually got a personal mail from one of the Steiny employees and he kindly confirmed a specific Arrangment Track false behavior “being a bug but not a big one”.
Well, the bug is:
If you set up an arrangement chain so that you for example have parts A, B and C so that the part don’t “overlap” but instead, have some timespace between them (thus, clipping two parts from the downmix, making a downmixed audio file shorter than the time difference between left & right locators) and THEN you downmix…
Well, Cubase 5 will behave so that it will start LOOPING the project from the left locator! And it will “play” it from the beginning the exact amount of time that the sum of the lengths of the parts (A, B and C here) is less than the time between the locators.
So as I made an arrangement chain so that the “clipped” time was about 18 seconds, then the downmixed file was abnormally lengthened by that 18 seconds, during which time the song played from the beginning. But otherwise the Arrangemnt worked fine (it jumped over the “empty” parts in the chain but the downmixed song just didn’t end at the right locator).
So that’s a “small bug”? Yeah, right. I can imagine professional music producers laugh about such a scenario on their top-of-the-class studios…
I was also told to first FLATTEN the arrangement chain, THEN downmix and THEN just UNDO THE FLATTENING!?!?!?!?
I mean, please correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that kind of behavior supposed to exist in the most successful DAW in the whole wide world?
So my question is: Is that bug corrected in Cubase 6?