Comp tools problem, take system is dumb

Cubase
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Hello all! As I am relatively new to Cubase, there are of course growing pains. It does so many things so well, and yet, I keep running into problems that have been “a problem with Cubase for years and they’ve never bothered to fix it!” Well, I have a friend with a VERY large Youtube channel who would like to help us by making a video of all the dumb things that Steinberg has flat out refused to fix over the years. While us plebs can’t make a lot of noise by ourselves, when my boy makes a video complaining about something, and it gets a few hundred thousand views, IT. GETS. FIXED.

So lets hear it! What have YOU been bitching about for years that hasnt been fixed in Cubase? The worst and/or most egregious errors, or the ones that have a stupidly easy fix will be the ones featured in the video!

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I’ll go first:

The take system is the fugging dumbest sh!t I’ve ever seen in my life. It doesn’t work, Group Editing is a joke that will always fail you, and ruin your session. You can easily slip edit a take in a track and if you have multiple takes, it will slip some random take on the other tracks instead of the one you’re supposed to be “Group Editing”… thus ruining your session by making all your tracks out of time with each other.

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Hi,

I’m afraid, the way you started it, doesn’t help at all. You are just complaining with empty words. If you really want to do something with it, you have to be much more specific.

What exactly doesn’t work? Could you describe in a step-by-step manner, what you did, what you got and what would you expect (and why)?

Could you describe in a step-by-step manner, what you did, what you got and what would you expect (and why)? What exactly and how does it ruin your session?

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@Martin.Jirsak I’d be happy to explain, because its a really easy fix, I promise!
Lets imagine I have 4 mics on a drum kit (Kick, Snare, OH L and OH R), and 3 takes of a song. I’ve got all the drum mics into a Drums Folder, Group Editing is on as well as the phase coherent thingy.

We’re using the Comp Tool to comp takes, AND slip editing the chosen takes as we go (because thats how drummers who track themselves all do it.)

Lets say Take 1 is chosen for the first verse, but when we get to the chorus, Take 2 is clearly the better choice, so using the Comp Tool, I hold Option which brings up the split tool and Left Click, which splits all the takes on all the mics in the Drums Folder, just as it should.

But I notice that while Take 2 is clearly the better take, the very first kick on Take 2 is a little late, so I want to Slip Edit THE ENTIRE GROUP of mics and bring them all earlier in time so they’re more on time. If I move my mouse to Take 2, on the Kick Track and hold Shift+Option+Left Click to slip it in place WITHOUT FIRST clicking on Take 2, what will happen is this: Take 2 of the Kick track will be slipped into place as expected, but Take 1 of Snare, OH L and OH R will be slipped instead of Take 2. This has now made both Take 1 AND Take 2 unusable for the entire rest of the song, because Take 2 of the Kick track has been slipped independently of Take 2 for Snare, OH L and OH R; and Take 1 of Snare, OH L and OH R have been slipped independently of Take 1 of the Kick track.

And the best part is you’d have no way of knowing unless you just so happened to be looking somewhere else while you were slipping Take 2 of the Kick track.

When you only have 4 mics and 3 takes, this is an easy problem to fix. But when you have a modern drum tracking setup like I do, 27 mics, 8-12 takes per section, well over 200 takes on total for the song, its completely unfixable if you don’t notice it right away. I can send you a video of what this looks like if this whole explanation doesn’t make sense.

The solution is super simple: When Group Editing with multiple takes, if I slip edit any take, the same take on all the grouped tracks should be slipped as well. It shouldnt matter if I clicked on the take before slipping them, thats ridiculous.

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Seems odd that did you not ask him to make a video about your issue before, as you have stated, it would have been fixed then! :thinking:

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Been following along your description - yes, seems some weird (unwanted) behaviour.! If you could record a video, by all means send to @Martin.Jirsak - but would you also post it here too please (for clarity’s sake).? :slightly_smiling_face:

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He’s been out of the country for a month, and I just called him the other day and I told him how I had to scrap an entire session, and he said “We should make a video about it!”

He wants to do a whole series on all the stupid things that DAWs do and how their parent companies tend to be too arrogant to actually fix core problems.

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Oh yeah!! I’ll post it as soon as I get home from work.

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Fair enough, was just a flippant comment, probably unnecessary I know, but your statement did make me wonder. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Well, I can’t tell anyone how to work but the lanes and comp tool is to basically choose your best takes, so after finding the best ones you can close the lanes mode and group slip edit the parts you like, or do more.
That’s not to say that cubase isn’t flawed, and would be nice to have the freedom to choose what works best for each one of us, just that things can be done.

I am more worried about fundamental aspects of the program that don’t really work and they don’t seem to get fixed.
Like the Flatten real-time processing that is not working and messing the timing of the audio, which beats the very purpose of it.
Or sandboxing so plugins would stop crashing Cubase.

Thanks to @Louis_R there is a big list of issues that are not addressed, your friend can start with these for the video.—> Cubase Issues

Also, I find the split tool not needed when comp editing because by design the comp tool will split and select the part you want when you just click and drag on it, and that’s way faster for me.

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All well and good - thanks @almaelectronix

I take your point about waiting to do any slip editing until after the comp work is done; however, it is allowed in here (inadvertently or deliberately). Hence the @David_Velez request to not mess everything up. I get the impression the issue is more than simple user error i.e. not following set rules as to how its designed to work (make sure you click on ‘Take 2’ first etc…)

Keen on seeing his video when ready…

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While I do neither appreciate your foul language nor your ‘my friend is influential’ posture I can easily re-create your described issue.
I took a few minutes to think about whether the way it currently works is actually the desired behaviour. However, I think it is rather not and it might be an oversight.
Steinberg seems to think if you want to slip (= move content with an event) a take you will slip the one that you can actually hear, ie. the ‘active’ one. So Cubase does not take into account that you slip an ‘inactive’ take and it seems to get confused.

Since C13 is near I assume we better wait for its release, see if there is a fix already and if not bring this to the attention of Steinberg.
moveContent

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@Martin.Jirsak @Johnny_Moneto HELL NO thats not desired behavior! Its a bug! And a very easily fixable bug at that! Anytime you can destroy GROUP EDITING when… GROUP EDITING is On!!! is undesired. There is no reason on earth why you would want to move one take differently than other grouped tracks when you have the Group Editing On… if you wanted to do that for a very specific reason, you would turn off Group Editing, and then move the takes individually.

CleanShot 2023-09-23 at 14.45.34

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In addition, as you can see in this GIF, this problem doesn’t happen with the Select Tool, it only happens with the Comp tool, which is even MORE undesired.
CleanShot 2023-09-23 at 14.49.20

The whole purpose of the Comp tool is to Comp takes, and if you record drums, like a lot of pro studios do, this is an unacceptable bug that should have been fixed 10 years ago when the problem was first identified.

And as for “my friend is influential”… I offered some easy fixes here
https://forums.steinberg.net/t/fix-cubases-unusable-comp-system-with-a-few-easy-check-boxes/862649

And many people chimed in noting how whackadoodle the Comping system has been FOR A LITERAL DECADE.

I asked how to do it here

Nothing but crickets!

Another very simple option that would help tremendously and would be super easy to implement would be this
https://forums.steinberg.net/t/the-split-tool-is-absolute-garbage-how-about-right-click-to-split-lanes/864227

I have found workarounds for almost every problem I’ve faced. You guys have shown me some really awesome PLE presets that have made Cubase an incredibly great DAW for just about everything… except for the one thing that I do every day of my life. And clearly I am not the only person on Planet Earth that tracks drums with multiple takes in Cubase… so I gotta swing the biggest hammer that I have.

The ball is in your court Steinberg. Take the 4 hours it would take to program in the solution. Add a few check box options, add some options to the Comp Tool. Its not that hard.

You could even make a “Drum Comping Mode” where all the options/modifiers/Tools are optimized for the tedious, very difficult task of comping multi-tracked drums with multiple takes.

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Sandboxing is a great idea! FabFilter Saturn 2 crashes Cubase everytime I open the plugin GUI… the plugin can run no problem, but i cant open the actual plugin and mess with the parameters. I asked FF about it and they told me to try disabling Graphics acceleration or something like that. Thank you for the list of Cubase Issues!

As far as the click and drag method you showed with the Comp tool, that definitely works, but only when I already know the take that I wish to choose. Often times, I have to go through each take and see what works best, and I don’t know for how long that take will be the best option. So I end up in this infinite loop of choosing a range with the comp tool, slipping audio, listening, and then if it doesnt work, undoing all that and then trying again, and then moving the end of the selection, etc etc And of course if I slip even one events without clicking on it first, both of the takes involved are ruined because theyre now out or time with each other. And when you’re trying to move quickly, you can easily miss it until 30 minutes later when you listen back and hear some weirdness. Then you gotta hit UNDO 19 bazillion times to get back to before the part you screwed up. And if you didn’t notice it til the next day, you gotta dig into your auto backups and hope theres one that saved before your screwup.

But yes, if they fixed the Comp/slip edit problem, using the Comp range slection thingy as you showed would be a great option indeed!

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The way this thread began, it sounded like you just wanted to dump on Cubase. Not very constructive. I think it’s better to start a thread with a particular problem in mind and see if someone can help you solve it.

Alt idea: use Studio One for takes — which is mostly a knockoff of Cubase anyway. But it has issues too when dealing with various other musical chores. Same old same old. Nothing’s perfect.

Except cats.

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The thing is that Cubase does just about everything else perfect. Workflow is easy, routing is limitless, it’s fast, intuitive, auto hit point detection, latency for running a bazillion plugins while tracking is practically zero, I love how all the tools are laid out, I love how easy it is to change the view of the mix console, I love the macros, the PLE is fantastic, auto coloring, linking plug-in parameters, automate anything, Control Room is fantastic… I could go on and on… but there’s this thing, this one easily fixable thing that JUST SO HAPPENS to be the thing I deal with every day.

Every DAW has its fatal flaw… Pro Tools has its ridiculous delay compensation for hardware inserts, Reaper has this live monitoring bug they can’t fix, Logic’s editing workflow is trash, Studio One has all kinds of weird editing issues.

It’s just that this one problem I see with Cubase is so easily fixed, but according to my friends who have been using it for years, the comping multitrack drums with multiple takes thing has always been there. Maybe I can find a way around it…