I strongly suggest that you stop all development on any feature no matter how important it seems.
FIX THE BUGS!!!
I will gladly pay for bug fixes. I’m tired of paying for new features that are mostly broken and does not work half the time. Fix what you’ve got and then go forward.
I’m lucky enough to have a full time job as a composer for video games and we’re using Cubase. Let me tell you that 40h a week of bugs and trouble shooting is enough to drive you crazy.
All the sound designers I work with have switched to REAPER and us composers might jump ship soon enough if Steinberg keeps piling up crap on top of the many many existing bugs.
It’s not really how code software companies work or structure… not every coder codes every part of the program, nor are they familiar with every part of the program or types of code/protocols used. Someone who does effect algorithms may not do GUI coding, and someone who does audio code may not do MIDI. They already have a development road map, and coders/staff assigned to completing that road map, and those people aren’t necessarily going to be familiar with parts of the program that need to be fixed, or updated. It would take more time and resources to pull those people off road map development and to familiarize them with parts of the program that have bugs to be fixed, than it would be to just keep things as they are and move forward.
I see what you mean. You make a good point. That being said, they have to shift what they prioritize. If they put more effort in developing new features while only a small percentage of the resources are working on fixing bugs then it’s bound to just pile up and I think we’re at a point where it need serious attention.
It’s a juggling act… they need to stay in business and can only afford to pay so many people. The need to sell new copies to new users, and sell upgrades to current users and nothing does that better than new features or a dance music producer raving about a new Cubase plugin.
Steinberg is not a family company, it’s owned by Yamaha, they have all the resources they need to hire an a few extras to fix bugs all year long. So what if they make a little less cash in 2021. They’ll make up for it by selling a better more stable DAW in the upcoming years.
Mhmmm I dont know, Yamaha might have them held under a tight quota, I wouldn’t speculate however though. Any time you bring a new coder into the foray, it’s not like they immediately know the program and understand the code, let a lone, how to fix it… Bringing in a new coder is going to be a time and resource investment into itself. Solving bugs can be complex, you can break 100 things trying to fix one.
I totally agree. While I want to see bugs fixed (especially expression maps is rendering c10.5 & c11 useless for me) I understand how difficult it is to fix bugs in a program like Cubase.
For one it’s a very big program with a lot of ancient code that may not fit to new paradigms. Restructuring this and not break anything can be a nightmare. Even just replacing the ui rendering with a newer component can be difficult.
Then there’s the problem of testing stuff. A lot of bugs that happen are due to race conditions or realtime issues, and isolation them in a simple environment (i.e. making it reproducible with the least amount of test code) is just very very difficult.
Most of C11s new features are plugins so they’re kind of not part of the cubase ecosystem itself and can be easily developed without breaking anything.
Implementing bezier curves on midi parts is totally different game again. Actually I’m wondering how this is working/how it’s stored in midi1.0
Not to mention, maintaining backwards/forwards compatibility, you want to be able to do that for at least 3 versions back both ways adds a lot of complexity to the process. It would be a lot easier if they could essentially just write a “new program” every release that disregards the previous versions.
You guys all have good points but I still think they need to adresse bugs even if it means breaking other stuff. They can fix that other stuff too. All
before releasing of course. Sorry, had a very bad day yesterday where every time I had a little momentum going on, I faced a few of Cubase’s recurring bugs. Nothing new to 11.
I’m on a few tight deadlines these days. Whenever that happen, I always think about going back to REAPER.
Innovation is great, but testing is clearly very poor. The basic things that are broken tells me this is not being properly regression tested.
Releasing Alpha versions as releases is what makes people move to a new DAW. Breaking stuff that is needed for projects, just to get addon features is unacceptable.
Funny thing is, I would gladly pay annual maint fee to make it rock solid and bullet proof without any new toys. Put more effort into the core functions, and then create addon’s to that in a modular fashion. That way, one can uninstall a buggy new feature and still keep working on added ideas.
I would probably cringe if I saw the code base. I suspect it is poorly documented and a pile of spaghettis after all the version upgrades.
Sadly, it seems all DAW makers are using the same live beta-testing release strategy. I think I will roll back to older versions, and going forward stay one version behind. Then maybe I can get some work done without debugging the basic DAW. Nothing in v11 is worth all the buggy non-sense
I agree to the suggestion here. The Cubase 11 customer survey was the second in a row in which I complained about the release quality and asked for better testing and more stable releases. I love to work with samples and for a while now want to use fewer external plugins and more of Cubase’s internal plugins and features. That’s why I was eager to upgrade to v11, the updated Sampler track is an attractive feature for me (and I wish it was even more sophisticated). But I just can’t use Cubase 11 at this point. It kinda works, but I need a rock solid, reliable platform. And new Cubase releases aren’t. What I want Steinberg to do is to go through all existing features and make sure they are working as intended under all circumstances, are refined in the way they work and people who earn their income with this DAW have a serious tool they can trust blindly.
I used Propellerhead Reason for around 10 years, from version 3 to 7 and it never crashed once. I never lost any progress, never got interrupted in my workflow, it was bulletproof. And I miss those days and want Cubase to be as reliable. I don’t need new features at this point, I need what is already there to be as good as it gets.
What I would suggest is to hire an external company for a code revision to seek out bugs, at the same time try fuzzing { wikipedia (dot) org/wiki/Fuzzing } and extend beta testing BEFORE major releases.
Fully agree with the OP. I shouldn’t do the comparison, I guess, but it was too hard to resist :
Reaper : 2 developers (with bugs being solved in a more or less regular way, sure, some being solved in a timely manner, while others being ignored since years).
Cubase : 79 developers (see the About Cubase window for more details…).
From which, nobody will be able to convince me that there are not at least 2 or 3 among the 79 that could be specifically appointed to, either solve the more obvious and easy ones (things like the audio fader not pinnable in the Instrument tracks inspector…), or track the bugs already known and more difficult to solve (either here or via the support tickets and Martin.Jirsak reports) and dispatch them to the concerned peoples. I’m not a specialist of development team management, sure, but seeing 79 names listed with still a lot of bugs unsolved after several years (Generic Remote defintions, anyone ?) lets a rather strange impression…
All I can add to this thread is that this has been going on for a while. Only if you are a new Cubase user you will dare to use its latest version for production. I’m personally still using version 10 even if I bought 10.5 (I didn’t know at that time). Version 10 still has bugs but they are thankfully not critical and they have become already so familiar to me that I’ve learned to avoid them.
Hm. What would be a better nickname? Cubugs or Bugbase? ;D
Jokes aside, I currently have a real issue with trusting this platform. I completely stopped working with Cubase until Steinberg starts to make stability and reliability a core principle in every release. It would be great to see yet another “big” bugfix update, but that won’t be enough for me, knowing the next .5 or major release will once again be of questionable quality. Every software has bugs, and some become only visible with broad testing, but that is exactly why I want Steinberg to do public beta phases and polish things BEFORE they put out a major release for the people who make a living with their software. And most importantly, fix all those bugs and quirks people have been dealing with for several years now. There is enough to be found in the forum.
Didn’t buy Cubase 11 due to 10.5 bugs being ignored namely Expression Maps.
I give Cubase 11 a 2 out of 10 for improvements that cater to my personal MIDI programming needs.
I’ll be one of those guys that in 2029 is still on Cubase 10.5. Unless these guys can up their game, I ain’t giving them another cent.
