Cubase 13?

And yet if you looking from electronic music pov you will find that Cubase lacks waaaay behind Ableton/Bitwig for example in terms of parameter modulations, “midi plugins”, parallel processing etc etc, as well as some workflow manoeuvres.

I can’t really comment on electronic music, as it’s not my area of expertise. But, if Abelton/Bitwig covers those requirements, why not use these DAWs instead?

I am curious though why Cubase lacks these functions…

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Thats what I dont get. Everybody whines they want Ableton’s Session View. So go use Ableton who already perfected Session View…

I make ‘electronic music’, mainly Jungle/DnB, but downtempo, ambient. Skinny Puppy ripoff stuff, etc. I’ve never once been in the middle of a project and thought ‘Man this is never going to work unless I use Live’. The last time I even opened my Live Suite was probably right around when C12 came out heh. Was fun to play with alongside Logic, doesn’t come close to replacing that or Cubase. Hell you cant even fast forward or rewind through your arrangement in Live. Mouse clicks galore woohoo!

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It’s not point using “those” daws instead nor changing concept of Cubase instead. Don’t get me wrong I am more pissed that lot of Cubase features are half baked and constantly breaking things that worked well previously. It’s more about Cubase’s weakest points, although the midi/score among other things are really strong points of Cubase especially for film music on the other hand modulation is practically non existent comparing to Bitwig/Ableton. Arp/Step and all midi inserts are outdated to be fair. It’s not about making new gui and call it a day but rather it needs rewriting and making things ergonomics and more sophisticated. For example I had to make some synth line for client referencing some popular track where arp is used but “rate” parameter is automated. In Cubase to get that you have to manually program the MIDI or rather use 3rd party plugins (such as melda for example) the second method has it own quirks when its used on track that have latency plugins so you have to be careful. Ofc you can say why don’t you use Ableton for that, but that is not point when we speaking about Cubase 13/14/15…

I hope you don’t mind me asking, but why can’t you do parallel processing in Cubase?

All good :blush:

For ex: You want delay signal but also want a bit of reverb just on the wet delay signal, cool you add send/aux buss done.
Now you have vocal line here you need reverb but you want reverb to be “duck” side-chained with dry vocal signal, awesome add another send track.
Now you want to emphase last words of the same vocal with big tail reverb to fill gaps, having rvrb on vocal track won’t work since it will include the words before. What you do, add another send track and automate send level (which feeds into that big tail rvrb send track) only on words you want cool.
Imagine you put crossovers into equation where you want to split band signal and apply process only on particular band range…

You see where it is going? On shitload of auxes tracks…

Now client asks for stems, cool you export all with those aux buses, and client get back to you and said “some of the sounds are grouped into one aux, can you separate it so I can have them separated” :thinking: ok there is new feature in cubase 12(or11) which allows you to export in que with several options with one that can include send tracks export time slow and complicated and when I tried that when it was introduced I got few levels screwed for some elemets, meaning when stems summed there is noticable difference between premaster( unlimited signal) but I promise myself I will revisited export que feature again.

Above examples are actually needs from my everyday practice since cubase 6(2012?) How did I solve it?

Bluecat’s patchworks :raised_hands: where I have all things (send to reverb/delay, Linearphase multiband split [where I can sidechain only low band with any 3rd party compressor] and few “Dan Worrall” type of tricks(that aren’t possible in cubase at all) which makes my life much easier and it’s all on fingertips without any need of send buses/import from project/xml/ or any kind of going through vast field of menus (which cubase is very famous for unfortunately)

How to do that in Ableton/Bitwig? Simply use “parallel effects rack chain”

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You need to understand that Cubase is used in much more context than just a few genres of music.
It’s also used for:

  • sound design and music for movies
  • sound design and music for games
  • post-production (Nuendo can do more but Cubase can still be useful in smaller than AAA projects)
  • music genres from classical to grindcore
  • and more

Steinberg has to provide for all of those who work in many different audio departments.

DAWs like FL Studio or Ableton Live are much more ‘fun’ to use and yes, you get plenty of content there that is more suited for ‘beatmakers’. Steinberg is trying to catch up but it’s a mixed bag.

I wouldn’t use HALion Sonic in any of my electronic music production projects. Included sounds there are meh.
But I’m using it every day when I’m working on the sound design for mobile games. It’s perfect for this.

tbh if I would be you, doing only genres like those you mentioned, most likely I would switch to FL or Live for convenience. They have tools and GUI much more suited for those genres.
But on the other hand, they’re missing useful features of Cubase that are great for other audio tasks :wink:

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I would switch to Presonus Studio One Pro v6 today if I didn’t have some so many projects in Cubase Pro 12 format. I have over 100 Cubase songs that are almost completely finished except for a few guitar parts and the lead vocals and backing harmonies.

The idea of converting all of this material to Studio One Pro gives me a major migraine just thinking about it.

Cubase Pro 12 isn’t unusable by any stretch of the imagination. And it’s SO much better than Live, Bitwig Studio, and FL Studio and all that schocky EDM crap. Cubase’s only real competition is Studio One Pro and Logic. However, I’m thinking I might build a massive PC tower as my main music production machine because my M1 Max MacBook Pro with 64GB of RAM and a 2TB NVMe drive just isn’t powerful enough to play back my my songs which can have well over 100 VST and audio tracks along with a number of string and brass parts using massive streaming orchestral libraries.

And I just don’t want to spend $8,000 on an M2 Mac Studio Ultra that isn’t nearly as fast as a standard 13 Gen Core 9 Intel 13900K system that I can build for less than half that amount.

It sucks because I used Logic for nearly 25 years. It’s a great DAW. But I don’t want to be tethered to Apple. Who knows what their plans are regarding their next gen high end audio workstations. I don’t think an M3 Ultra chip will be as fast as the current top of the line Intel and AMD processors. And the M3 Ultra is supposedly one or maybe two years away. Screw that. macOS Ventura isn’t that great anyway. Windows 11 Pro is just as good for music production.

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I hear you,

I had also gone through a very stressful time with some horrific bugs from Cubase.

I was seriously thinking switching to Studio One, but it was so very alien to me that I backed down.

I managed to get a very powerful PC and things are smoother now, not without problems, but much better.

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I feel we’re homing in on the actual topic: Cubase seems to be expected to do everything that any competitor’s product does. The ProTool folks ask for ProTools features, the Ableton and bitwig people ask for Ableton and Bitwig features, Then there’s Studio One, Logic, Reason, Digital Performer, Cakewalk - and Cubase is supposed to all that stuff, too.

I wonder if it is because Cubase seems to be some sort of Swiss Army Knife that happens to sit in the middle of the DAW feature circus or if the same things happen on the other DAW’s forums.

I feel that it is totally ok to express wishes for Cubase’s future here. That’s actually great.
However, any kind of entitlement should be left out. As if anybody has a right to have their feature-requests fulfilled.

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Cubase Pro 12 is unfortunately a bloated mess of outdated and half-baked features that should have been cleaned up 10 years ago. There are MIDI features in Cubase going back almost 30 years that haven’t been touched since that time. Cubase has gotten a little better with these last two versions at trying to harmonize the multiple design patterns to one cohesive look and feel.

But there are still dialog boxes and settings windows that haven’t been updated in 20 years. Steinberg couldn’t even manage to move away from that archaic single window interface without implementing a total kluge solution on Windows. Now the application menus are stuck in the main window title bar. It looks horrible and is confusing to use.

With all the money that Yamaha has, they could afford to completely rewrite Cubase from the ground up. Anything less than that I ask why bother? Studio One Pro is a leaner, more capable DAW that has not only caught up to Cubase in terms of features but has surpassed Steinberg in most areas. Steinberg has no one to blame but themselves for failing to invest in revamping their flagship DAW.

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Yawn. Thank you for venting.

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I’m sorry I wasn’t more entertaining. Maybe if Cubase users cared 1/10th as much as I do about bringing the program up to modern standards, perhaps something positive might happen. But sadly, there are too many people who simply accept whatever incremental “improvements” Steinberg decides to doll out for yearly upgrade fees.

Just look at how far Bitwig Studio has come in just a few short years. Steinberg developers don’t seem to possess the same skills and desire to innovate.

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Nonsense

Are you one of the Steinberg apologists who flagged my post as “inappropriate.” The truth hurts sometimes. Get over it. And grow up.

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Incredible how a company like Musictech rate it as a 10/10 DAW, really.

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Logic costs $200. And I don’t believe Apple has charged customers an upgrade fee in over 10 years. (I might be wrong about this. But who cares? It’s only $200 for the most full-featured DAW on the market.)

Not only is Logic probably the most powerful and feature rich DAW in existence, it also includes more high-quality synth, drum machine, and effect plugins FOR FREE of any DAW. Logic’s “Sampler” (aka "EXS24) is one of the most powerful and easy to use software samplers there is. And then there are the “Drum Designer” plugins which are simply amazing.

Logic includes one of the best convolution reverbs available and an incredibly cool “Delay Designer” for programming complex delay “patterns.” It’s EQs are terrific, it’s compressor are fantastic, and on and on.

Steinberg charges a hefty fee for their software sampler, HALion, and includes only a couple of decent synth plugins (Retrologue and Padshop) with Cubase.

There is just no comparison between Logic and Cubase in terms of value for money.

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:rofl:

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Well, OK then, work with Logic…I don’t understand the issue here…

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The point is, to use Logic, you have already bought a Mac which is quite a convenient way for Apple to subsidize the Logic price policy. I guess ours would be different too if we sold expensive hardware with our software :wink:
It’s a bit like apples and oranges…

BTW, this was about Cubase 13, right? It is getting kind of off-topic in here.

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