Clip View & Text Track

Cubase
1

Hi everyone,

first of all, thank you to the Steinberg team and this community for keeping Cubase such a powerful and inspiring DAW. I’ve been using Cubase for years and truly appreciate its depth and flexibility.
Still, I believe a few new features could take the creative workflow even further — especially in the early songwriting phase.

:one: Clip View for Creative Songwriting

I would love to see a clip-based view in Cubase, similar to what’s available in Ableton Live, Bitwig, or Studio One.
The goal is to have a creative environment where you can quickly and freely combine musical ideas (clips) — for example, different versions of a verse, chorus, bridge, or intro.

These clips should be easy to trigger, stop, and rearrange on the fly, allowing us to explore how different musical elements interact before committing to an arrangement.
Once the right combination is found, the selected clips could then be dragged directly into the Arranger view to form the song’s final structure.

This would give Cubase a true idea playground, where experimentation comes first and arrangement follows naturally.
An additional “Scratchpad”-style area (like in Studio One) would also be helpful for storing alternate song sections or early versions.

:right_arrow: Benefit:
This workflow encourages spontaneous creativity, helps to discover the best-sounding combinations early on, and makes the songwriting phase more intuitive and inspiring.

:two: Text Track with Scrolling / Karaoke View

A Text Track, similar to Studio One’s implementation, would be an excellent addition for vocal recording sessions.
This track could display lyrics or scripts in sync with the project timeline — ideally with a scrolling or karaoke-style highlight on a secondary monitor or tablet.

:right_arrow: Benefit:
Singers and voice artists could follow the lyrics comfortably while recording, without printed sheets or external lyric tools.
It would improve performance by keeping focus on emotion, expression, and timing during takes.

:three: Summary

Cubase remains, in my opinion, the most complete and flexible DAW on the market — with excellent customization, workspace management, presets, and visual options.
Adding a Clip View and a Text Track would elevate Cubase further, bridging structured production with the creative freedom of modern DAWs.
It would give songwriters and producers the best of both worlds: precision and inspiration.

Thanks for reading, and I hope others here might find these ideas useful too.

Kind regards,
Dirk Müller

2

These features might help beatmakers but not engineers, band recordists, or scorers.

Steinberg has to be selective, because Cubase is used heavily in film/TV composing, not just sample-based production. The clip view feels niche—it’s geared toward people tossing around loops, but many users are instrumentalists recording real parts.

Steinberg should track where the market is actually going: recent US charts showed no hip-hop entries in the Billboard top 40 for the first time in 35 years, suggesting sample/beat-driven workflows may be slowing, while podcasting/streaming, film/game audio, and musician-led styles like afro-beats are growing.

In my opinion urban music House, Techno, Hip-Hop are fading out fast, the future belongs to those that can do audio for the podcasting era, which will grow rapidly, Podcasters are the new rockstars, and they need quality audio to stay ahead of the game.

Beatmakers are making hardly any $$$ in an over saturated over populated under paid spotify environment, yet Podcasters are becoming multi millionaires running basic shows from 1 room and basic audio/visual set-ups.

3

And best of all: They don’t even need Cubase.

4

For ‘Text Track’ - I saw that Presonus added a new ‘Lyric Track’ in Studio One (S1 v6), which is a good example to compare to:-

I think the use of a whole separate ‘lyric lane’ inside the Key Editor and the ‘Lyric Track’ window, are far more elegant than what SB have come up with in C15, thus far… Its a start though…

5

What composer wouldn’t benefit from being able to experiment with ideas quickly in a streamlined and non-destructive way? True there’s “workarounds” to kind of accomplish the same thing, but it’s not very inspiring or intuitive. I used the scratch pad on a pretty regular basis in Studio One and I don’t make electronic music.

6

Most podcasters are not skilled in audio editing or design, or have the time, they hire Audio specialists to do the work for them.

Podcasters > Hire Graphic designers & Audio specialists.

If your filming and spending time editing inside Premier Pro, a lot of the time its easier to outsource the graphics and audio elements to specialists, so you can stay focused on filming and editing podcast footage.

7

People need to understand why things are designed a certain way.

Clip View has been popularized by Ableton LIVE, this is not realy a DAW, it was designed by a group of Techno addicts in Germany who wanted a minimalist system to play samples on the fly in a non linear fashion LIVE on stage, it then became a DAW.

Cubase is a complicated Linear DAW, it is not designed to be taken on stage in front of a crowd and have plugins and samples just thrown in a non linear clip view fashion.

If you implement this, you literally have to build the DAW from the ground up, with Clip View as the core and the DAW plays 2nd fiddle, like Ableton and its breakaway copy-cat sister Bitwig.

8

You have this in Nuendo, so that actors can read there dialogue.

11

I don’t think we’re quite on the same page.

What I was referring to was more like the Scratch Pad in Studio One. It’s meant to be a place where you can take a particular section of your song and quickly create a new instance of it where you can try out new ideas while easily preserving the original. You could try multiple different things (Variation A, B, C, etc.) without risk or endless undo presses…all without loading alternate project versions, keeping track of multiple positions on the timeline, etc.

12

Thanks. But that’s for ADR sessions specifically, isn’t it.? Does it have audio to text auto translate.? I should check myself really; I might be quite wrong…

13

Nuendo 14 has an AI-based Dialogue Transcription feature that converts spoken audio into text and writes it into ADR cycle markers.

1 Like
14

Ah.! Thank you… So not quite the ‘Lyric Track’ approach of Studio One, but very useable none the less…

15

Then why did you mention them? And why does Cubase have to cater for podcasts when there is a dedicated, affordable product already?
Are you opposing the two requests because you would like to see the development resources spent on something else?

16

I mentioned them because they are a part of the wide scope of the audio market.

Cubase is not an environment limited to just making beats, or scoring to footage, it is an audio mixing environment. The WaveLab for podcasters is aimed at podcasters who want to dabble in that field, but podcasters with a more larger audience who are basically running a podcast business, usually hire people who specialize in audio to do there work for them.

The music making market is a dying audience, recent stats show that for the 1st time in 35 years Hip-Hop is not even in the Billboard top 40, House, Techno, pop music sales and streams are all manipulated and dying out.

It is an over saturated market soon to be dominated by Ai music from users and companies.

Doing audio for alternative mediums like film/tv, audiobooks, podcasting, gaming are areas not to be neglected.

17

So you oppose these particular requests out of fear that Cubase will lose market share?

18

No I just don’t want Cubase to mimic Ableton in this area, I feel it will cause a code rewrite of the system that is too deep and ruin the DAW.

I have Ableton, Cubase crushes it sound quality wise, Abletons exports sound weak and thin compared to what leaves Cubase, I dont want Cubase to mimic there code engine.