"I’m genuinely curious: At what stage of your project do you create a Group-Folder?
Usually, you reach a point where you have existing tracks and you want to organize them. In a professional mix, those tracks are almost always already routed to a specific bus.
If I use the new ‘Group-Folder’ to clean up a finished sub-mix of 20 tracks, why should I be forced to re-link that folder to my sub-bus manually? The software should recognize that these 20 tracks already have a common destination.
The current implementation feels like it was designed for people who create empty folders first and then decide what to do with them – which is the opposite of a natural mixing workflow. It’s not about the ‘time’ it takes to re-route; it’s about a professional tool understanding the context of the work already done."
What does this even means? What are the professional routing scenarios and how they’re differentiate from the “non-professional” routing scenarios?
I’m a professional sound editor, sound designer and music producer and for me it’s not flawed at all in any of those three use cases. I updated my templates once and now it’s not bothering me to eventually manually update routing for a few tracks per week IF this will be even needed to do that “often”.
I’m fine with having an option to disable this behaviour in settings in an update, but calling it “fundamentally flawed” is over the top.
Since I am doing my own music and usually start with an empty project I’d say I create almost all of the folder groups before what is considered to be the mixing stage.
The feature is still young and my workflow might adjust over the time.
Cubase attracts all kind of people with all kinds of workflows. A healthy discussion about how we like to see the feature work will hopefully help Steinberg to identify whether changes and refinements are needed. Personally I assume I am fine with either behavior, inherit output routing or keep it on the main output bus. I definitely don’t want to be prompted about the routing as that wouldn’t increase the amounts of clicks I as the operator have to perform. And your whole point is about lowering the amount of clicks.
I would question “most”, and I would add that a lot of people work with templates. So I think in many cases we already have group-folders created just like we would have had group tracks created, and rather than route the “existing tracks” to the group track the first time people will just drop them into the group-folder that replaces the group track.
For me, in post, my template contains quite literally all the groups and output buses I need for like 98% of all jobs I start. I “never” create a new group track. I don’t have to. So again for me and people like me the behavior you’re talking about would be undesirable. I would want my tracks to take on the routing of the folder I’m dropping them in.
I don’t think it’s fair to be this condescending about a feature that didn’t exist 2 weeks ago. Maybe moving forward you can take advantage of the new feature and adjust your workflow accordingly. Expecting Steinberg to account for every possible scenario in your existing and previous projects seems a bit greedy to me. It’s likely a part of why they didn’t introduce them before… Just imagine, if they didn’t have them today you wouldn’t be complaining. But here you are
You can still use Folders the same way you have previously. You’ve lost nothing
"To address the ‘Template’ argument: A professional template is an evolution born from years of experience. It’s a complex ecosystem of routing and I/O logic that you don’t just ‘rebuild’ on a whim to accommodate a new feature.
The real issue is that these Group Folders feel like a half-baked promotion act where we, the paying customers, end up being the beta testers once again. It’s frustrating to pay for an update only to find that the features aren’t fully thought through for high-end professional workflows.
Also, I don’t understand why there is so much discussion about the naming (Group Folder vs. Grolder etc.). It doesn’t matter what you call it as long as the functionality behind it is incomplete.
If Steinberg wants this to be a professional tool, they should have implemented a ‘Convert Group to Group-Folder’ function. This would allow us to transform our existing, perfectly routed groups into the new format without breaking our established workflows. We need the choice—either a prompt or a preference—to decide if tracks should inherit the routing or not.
On a much more positive note: I am overjoyed to see that the latency compensation for external instruments has apparently been fixed in the background. This is a massive milestone and a huge step forward for my daily work. A sincere thank you to Steinberg, and especially to Nils, for having an open ear and fixing something that truly matters for high-end performance.
Constructive criticism for the UI, but a big thumbs up for the technical engine room!"
And you also don’t not rebuild a template to accommodate new features simply because you stubbornly determine that your template is already “professional” enough, whatever that means. This feature is significant enough for many people that I bet it’s not “a whim” to rebuild.
Also:
If you do that you end up in the situation I mentioned, and if you take a day to rebuild your template using the current functionality that’s what you get.
Again, I don’t think anybody is arguing that your request is unreasonable, it seems to me everyone is just saying that it should be optional because your reasoning is built on one type of use-case and neither you nor it represent all use-cases, including other professional ones.
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