From all the DAWs I work with (SamplitudeProX8, StudioOne7, Reaper7, RealBand) Cubase15 has by far the most user unfriendly and confusing GUI. It is always a pain when trying to do something in Cubase. Why is it so difficult for Steinberg to create a clear and straight forward structure in the menus and to give comprehensive hints and warnings for the functions behind all that symbols and buttons chaos. Even simple basic actions become complicated and confusing and often enough end in a messy chaos. As a result I try to avoid Cubase whenever possible and use one of the other DAWs.
Why is it sometimes not possible to use your more liked DAWs?
What is in Cubase that the others dont have that forces you to use it?
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I just use Cubase when absolutely necessary, e.g. when I want to ty out
some exclusive Cubase functionality or Instrument, which is not
available in any of the other DAWs or when I want to compare some
functionality options or workflow. As said, using Cubase is somehow
cumbersome and painful for me. Nothing is intuitive or self-explaining.
It is always a struggle and the available Steinberg help and
documentation is only rudimentary, leaving many questions open.
But what are the exclusive funtionalities?
I’m not the OP, but - for starters - proper mixing workflow / Console, vocal pitch editing / VariAudio, ARA support, notation editing, articulations, etc. are some of the Cubase features missing from e.g. Ableton Live or Bitwig.
Not sure how that matters in context of GUI critique, though? Objectively Cubase’s GUI can be inconsistent and chaotic. The number of menus, options, buttons, etc. can be very confusing to new(ish) users. You can customize things, but it’s rarely flexible enough, e.g. I can never find the proper set of what I want to have on the top bar, because things are bundled together, so if I need to see one element of three, I have to see all three, or none. The inspectors on the left are neat, but they’ve a lot of overlap and some exclusive functions, so you really need both, or you’ll be missing stuff out if you decide to go with just one.
Cubase isn’t really designed for single-screen / laptop use, like Live or Bitwig are.
True–but it’s well documented and there are hundreds of videos explaining anything you want to learn. It’s helpful to have a test project where you can experiment with features, without having to worry about destroying an important project.
One thing I struggled a lot with, was the automatic tempo detection on
an old multitrack live recording and the attempt to get the tracks
synchronized. It ended up in a hanging application, crashes and
unuseable results.
The “exclusive instruments” mainly refers to the vstsound libraries,
which I bought but found no way yet to use them with my other DAWs. Even
a preview within Cubase looks somehow cumbersome. The preview when
scrolling through the libraries, currently delivers no audible output,
without dragging the loops it into the project first.
The daily simple stuff with recording, editing and mixing I can easily
do with my other DAWs in a more convenient way and less confusion. There
I have all tracks, audio and midi on one screen and the synchronized
mixing desk on the other monitor. It is obvious which track or object I
currently work on, the available menu functions for the respective item
are well structured and highlighted.
I did not know that this could not be done in the the other DAWs that you have.
Im not really clear what end result your after getting cubase syncronised to an un altered live recording OR getting a live recording altered to fit in to a regular cubase tempo track or perhaps a little of both?