Chunks feature a la Digital Performer

It would be beyond amazing if Cubase had their own version of DP’s Chunks feature.

It makes it incredibly easy to switch, arrange, and write between and with multiple cues on one film (or sections in a song), and once you’ve seen it in DP you won’t stop thinking about how gigantic a difference it would make in Cubase. Like, it’s really a night and day thing. With Chunks you can easily switch between multiple cues and copy segments or parts, etc., without having to activate and deactivate entire projects (and the resulting crash that often happens in Cubase with large projects when you do that) and then go through the rigamarole of copying parts across. The Arranger Track in Cubase does not do what I’m talking about. With Chunks you have entire sequences (with whatever tracks, instruments, plugins, etc., that you have in them) as completely arrange-able, editable, and fluid pieces that you can put wherever you want in your project. Then you can switch between them to work on them individually. I saw it in action at a fellow composer’s studio and was drooling…it’s that good of a feature. Total heaven for a film composer.

Any chance, o people at Steinberg?

+1, yes, this is one of the best possible features for composers. The amount of time and frustration it would save would be immense.

+1 Been talking about it for years!

Whatever way they do it, having independent cues on the timeline would be great. DP does load all the instruments in all the chunks, but the beauty is that you can work on cues, on, basically speaking, completely independent timelines. An ancient program called “Cubase VST 5” had a feature like that.

yeah, i really liked chunks in Digital performer, vision also used to work that way.

+1

+1 yes, yes, yes and yes. Been asking for this for 10 years. It would benefit everyone, not just film people.

Are you talking about the Group Track in Cubase Atari up to Cubase VST32 then killed off for no good reason?
At least there are no good reasons to not resurrect it.
A fantastic tool that would fly in circles around the Chord Track if they appeared in the same project window.
We can always hope! :sunglasses:

From what I remember, group tracks in Cubase VST were basically a clunkier version of the Arranger Track in modern Cubase. The fact that they were usable as an alternative to chunks was more of a side effect of the way Cubase VST handled projects.

I don’t remember what exactly I remember. What I think I remember remembering is the ability to have multiple songs in an arrangement, that share the same pool and maybe instruments.

Anyway, things are a bit different now, however they manage it, having the possibility to be able to have an area of the timeline doesn’t get moved when you move something earlier would be great.

Yeah, and the multiple projects worked great in Cubase Atari, even with different tempi!

The great thing about Cubase Group Tracks was that you could create a maximum mix of everything you needed in let’s say section A B and C or verse, chorus and bridge if you will.
Then you just selected some basic parts for the start of the song and then add as you go.
You select a few parts from the A part, create a Group with a name from that selection, and place it on a Group Track in the same project or in another project.
All you have is this named little Group that you could place wherever you wanted and the mess was kept to a minimum.
Now do the same with section B and then back to section A where you decide you want to add a piano so you create a new Group.
At this point you have three groups. One built on B and two built on A.
The parts in the Groups where live so let’s say you wanted to edit the piano in Group A you opened the piano part and all Groups that contained that piano part was updated.

I feel kind of stuck with the stack created now in Arranger Tracks so I don’t use them very often.

Well, that would be a great set of features to have in modern Cubase.

Yeah, we’ve debated this one for a long time. There are variations that would benefit various usages. I know I simply want overlapping cues with independant tempo/sig that I can fade between. All events associated with a cue remain in relative position to that cue. For me it’s basically scene transition/fade. But, I know that there are tons of other usages that have other cool feature requirements to implement them. Anyhow, yes please … +1

I do not quite understand how these chunks work. (sorry guys)
but I am absolute in favor of cubase being expanded for film and score!

Cubase and Nuendo are one of the best daws for film - and this postion needs to be expanded.

Essentially it’s multiple sequences in a single file with their own timelines, and they share resources such as tracks, the VST Rack and the audio pool. With some imagination, this sort of feature could be implemented into Cubase, but I imagine it wouldn’t be easy from a coding standpoint.

+1

YES! If one has done software development, it’s basically Forks in a version control system.

Exactly. Infinitely more versatile, intuitive and elegant than the Arranger Track scheme we’re stuck with these days. We lost this with the introduction of the SX series, along with a ton of other features, some of which eventually found their way back into the program over the years. Too bad this one never made it back.

Oh, man, what did I write???
Only those who have seen the old skool group tracks in action knows what I actually meant.
For the rest it must have been total word salad!
Sorry about that! :astonished: :blush: :laughing:

Hi guys,

I’m sure I’m not the first to request this and I remember Cubase pre-SX having something like this, but It would be AWESOME having the option to have subprojects based on a project, as a cue or subversions. That would be amazing for scoring and music arranging-producing, even mixing. Digital Performer has it, Reaper has it. I lost a lot of time jumping among cues, arranging and rearranging things.

Cues/subproject could be a great way to SHARE work. I can have an arranger working on a cue and I can keep working on another one, and so on.

This is it :slight_smile:

You can already do this to some extent using Export/Selected Tracks and Import/Track Archive.

(FYI Nuendo has perhaps closer to what you are suggesting in the form of clip packages, but this is not included in Cubase).