Now that we have the announcement for Cubase 11, here’s an assessment based on my wish list.
It doesn’t appear that any changes were made to the UI and its inconsistency.
Also would like smooth scrolling and trackpad pinch zooming.
It doesn’t appear that smooth scrolling and pinch zooming were implemented.
And a dongle-free option.
Not implemented.
Borrowing some ideas from FL’s piano roll would be nice, such as scale detection and highlighting, recalling the prior note length when placing new notes, and a means of erasing notes as you pass the mouse cursor over them. FL uses a hold of right-click, but this could be done by holding a key while left-clicking and dragging over notes to be erased.
I’m pleasantly surprised to see changes here in Cubase 11! The scale feature looks great. It doesn’t appear to do highlighting, but it does do folding, and it also will snap notes to the scale before or after recording. Also happy to see the double-click to erase notes. Would prefer the above mentioned behavior, but this new method is much better than what is currently there for mouse-driven note editing. Would have liked to see a feature to have the last entered note length used for the draw tool. Overall though, quite happy with the changes in version 11 for these.
And I’d like the manual to be overhauled. There are many places where it says “you can…” without explaining how it is done.
It doesn’t appear that this was addressed.
Refresh any instruments that have small UIs that can’t be resized, such as Retrologue.
It appears this might have been addressed at least on macOS. Still reviewing, but seems there may be a feature to allow plugin resizing with the new macOS graphics engine?
Update Groove Agent with tap2find (EZDrummer) or a feature to follow a given track and generate drums (Logic).
Nothing new for Groove Agent SE / Groove Agent.
Add the ability to go straight into a project without identifying a project folder at the start.
This became worse. It now defaults to prompting for a project folder.
Remember defaults for audio connections so I don’t have to pick my input/output setting every time I open a new project.
Another user suggested creating a template. I will do so. Still think Cubase should by default assume the prior audio settings instead of starting with nothing selected.
And eliminate crashes. I had a simple session running one track with Groove Agent this week and it crashed.
Unclear. And this needs to be addressed in 10.5 still.
Update the score entry. Studio One’s score entry based on Notion is very intuitive to use.
Overall, impressed to see the changes made in the score editor. The ability to do MIDI edits to velocity and note length in the score editor is nice.
To give credit where credit is due, I like the SpectraLayers feature integration, such as the spectrogram view of audio and spectral editing. The source separation for vocals is neat, although I’m not sure I’d use it. I’d rather have instrument separation included, such as what RX has. I do like the analysis metering features that were added.
Will I upgrade? I’ll ponder it. If Cubase 11 had pinch zooming, smooth scrolling, and a dongle-free option then I would definitely upgrade. And if it had none of those, but instead had a UI improvement overhaul I would also definitely upgrade. As it stands now. There are some very nice “icing on the cake” things that were added, but some of the key things I wanted were not touched.