Cubase 9 features

Nuendo
1

C9 has been released today and since we share the same code base, it’s likely that we’ll see the same features in one of the next Nuendo iterations.
It seems to concentrate a lot on the new zone concept that is basically making things easier if you work on a laptop or with only one screen (does anyone here do that?)

Apart from that we get:

VSTi side chaining (that was kind of missing)
A Pro Q2 clone with 8 bands (yawn)
Mixer undo (!)
A sampler track (maybe NEK only?)
Some new plugin guis (yawn)
A cloud collaboration/VST connect update that’s still missing video or TC sync (thus yawn)
No 32 bit plugs anymore (well)
Some sample loops (probably NEK only, yawn anyway)

To be quite honest I feel this is more of a consumer update, less pro oriented than C8.5. That’s okay since Cubase needs to appeal to a lot of different customers, not only the guys on this forum.

I’m still dying to finally get my hands on independent loop/punch points from 8.5 but the stuff from 9 bores the hell out of me, really. I was hoping for ARA (vocalign integration) or a vocalign type tool, more sends or EuCon enhancements…

It’s quite a shame, since many people from the music side of things requested these enhancements as well…but as Mick Jagger pointed out almost half a century ago: You can’t always get what you want.

2

The new Zone idea might solve the focus issues present with the separate Project and MixConsole system, but if SB intend to stop jBridge from working I can’t see myself updating Nuendo beyond N7.1.20. I only use one 32-bit plugin (NI B4 II) and I don’t want to be without it - there is nothing to beat it as a Hammond emulation.

3

I used to love the NI Hammond. Yet there are now a couple of alternatives, like the AIR and Arturia Hammonds. Have you tried them? The AIR Hammond is damn cheap on pluginboutique.

4

Yep…thanx Oliver for posting this.
I might be the loner voice here, but instruments, Midi stuff , etc…are not in my workflow. I am a hardcore audio only guy.
So…you are hinting that these Cubase 9 features might be the way Nuendo is heading in 7.5 :question:

N 7.1.20 being as it is I quite happily can live with. BUT;
Why can not they just simplify and streamline the overall UI first ?
I hate to bring up ProTools, it can set up different new tracks with individual types, names, etc at once.
Or the detailed parameters it makes available for session import ?

Very small yet crucial details, that users would welcome .

5

While that might be true I worry about what it does to key commands. Currently, if I remember correctly, the available key commands aren’t globally available at all times, it instead depends on which window or"panel" has focus. So I really hope that we’re not now seeing the same issue.

To be clear, if the “a” key trims the head of an event to current timecode location, and you last used the new lower panel and it is in focus, will pressing the “a” key 1) still trim the selected event (is it even still selected?) or will it 2) do something in the lower panel or 3) do nothing?

Honestly, this worries me. And it’s a bit frustrating to see zero advances on that very issue.

6

I have not tried the AIR, but I have got the Arturia version - it is a good first attempt but has missing features and is just not as flexible or good-sound as the B4. Ni’s own 64-bit replacement, Vintage Organs, is a total waste of money.

Slightly OT.

7

well i for one embrace the new lower zone feature as you can still do everything else with more screens
like before and it also doesnt clutter the screen anymore with overlaying windows.
i also welcome:
the sampler track! (rocks! period!)
Undo History in the mixer windows! (finally!)
Multiple Marker Tracks! (sweet!)
USB device plug and pay! (yay!)
and of course all the other (midi) features added in cubase 8.5

As i am doing more music productions these days I am really thinkig of switching to cubase only,
but there is no offer for nuendo users. :frowning:

8

This

Oliver.Lucas wrote:
I was hoping for ARA (vocalign integration)

And this

fenderchris wrote:
if SB intend to stop jBridge from working I can’t see myself updating Nuendo beyond N7.1.20



fenderchris wrote:
I have not tried the AIR, but I have got the Arturia version - it is a good first attempt but has missing features and is just not as flexible or good-sound as the B4. Ni’s own 64-bit replacement, Vintage Organs, is a total waste of money.

If this helps (as a B3 and Leslie 122 owner), I’ve tried every Hammond emulations and at some points, always find them sounding plastic. I recently tried and bought VB3 from GSi which, to my ears, sounds amazing.

They have a 64bit Windows version but sadly for me, Mac is still 32.

This is just for help, please dont reply to this message, I don’t want to hack the topic.

9

I may well be way off with this, but if SB intend to release a major new version of Nuendo early in the new year and make it perhaps N8 so that they can charge more for it, they would need to release a Cubase update now in order to keep the Cubase numbering one above Nuendo - maybe that’s the reason for C9 suddenly appearing with, by some accounts, underdeveloped new features, new bugs and old bugs still unfixed.

Probably just the musings of an addled old cynic. :wink:

10

We’ll see Cubase 8.5 / 9 features popping up in Nuendo 7.5, I don’t have any doubt about that, because it’s always been like that. It’s interesting to see Andrew from Steinberg addressing the topic in the first opening lines of the C9 introduction video. He states that they need to keep a variety of different users happy and it seems they know that 8.5 was for power users who want workflow enhancements and 9 is more for the lifestyle musician with a fancy laptop.

I was disappointed about the release because I strongly believe that they should focus on stuff that only THEY can solve. I can buy Fabfilter ProQ2 and it’s probably better than the included EQ anyway, but I can’t buy Vocalign integration or a field recorder workflow. I need to wait for Steinberg to address this for me. As I have stated before in other posts I believe that they had yet another window of opportunity to take over a lot of frustrated audio post users from AVID but they have again shown that they are not really interested. Cubase is their cash cow, they need to keep every segment of that market happy. I get that. Still I personally think that Nuendo is moving much too slow at the moment and the new game audio focus is not exactly what I was hoping for.

We’ll see what momentum the integration of Fairlight and Blackmagicdesign will bring to the pro audio/media market. My hopes are very high.

At the moment it’s rather frustrating to see that both major audio post DAWs are stagnating.

11

I found the Cubase 9 announcement interesting in several ways and share the sentiment of many here. But hey. What’s new? We have a love/hate relationship to probably any software we use. It’s never perfect.

I was surprised they released Cubase 9 already so shortly after 8.5, and again charge for it. About $100 for some UI changes (lower zone), updated plugin UIs, some EQ enhancements. I think Mixer Undo is a biggie, as many DAWs struggle with this for some reason. And Cubase with its detailed history log… looks really like a great solution where you can backtrack your steps! But overall it feels like an expensive upgrade. Also their marketing headline “Our most complete DAW ever. Period.” - haha, I had to laugh.

First thing they mention is that the transport bar is not a floating window anymore (that gets in the way all the time). Nice. Buttons to show and hide the inspector and racks… haven’t they introduced the mouse hover feature in 8.5 to hide and show these areas? Seems they don’t know what they want. And the lower zone? Almost any other DAW has this. Ableton Live has the channel strip there, Studio One also has this, Logic has this, Reaper has this. No DAW has tons of floating windows and bad window management anymore. Reaper even has a very similar docking concept where you can dock stuff in the lower zone. And zones elsewhere if you wish. And this is one of Steinberg’s flagship features? It’s a little embarrassing. They jumped to a major new version number, I would expect a lot more from a major version. This feels much more like 8.6.

We Nuendo users were told there was a free video engine update coming this year to replace QuickTime, and then Nuendo 7.5 next year. So don’t get your hopes up for a jump from Nuendo 7 to 8 suddenly. I think Timo posted some things that could be expected from 7.5 so I don’t know why Cubase suddenly leaps ahead.

As Oliver.Lucas said, it’s a bit frustrating to see the major DAWs stagnate and rotate in their own sauce, feeling comfy.

While I use and love Nuendo for film work, for game sound design stuff I move more and more to Reaper. Reaper has a little bit an uncomfortable indie / hobbyist smell to it. It doesn’t look all too appealing, its stock plugins are ugly, but they sound good and Reaper is a hell of a flexible DAW. For sound design, sound manipulation, signal routing and overall flexibility and extensibility, it’s one of the best DAWs out there. And it has working VCAs :wink: You can do mixer snapshots and powerful macros beyond what Nuendo offers. I’m not surprised the sound blogs I read report of big game companies where their sound employees switch to Reaper for sound work all the time.

Reaper is no match to Nuendo in the movie world though, primarily because of all the import / export of AAF, re-conforming and anything that needs interoperability to industry video packages. But no dongle, no hassle and a great price for which you get all updates within the major version AND next major version for free (when you buy 5.x you get all 5.x and 6.x versions free of charge).

I’d like to see more creativity and long term vision in Steinberg’s products.

12

On the topic of marketing of course I agree with you Chris, it’s silly. But it often is when these guys release software. The silliest release-marketing to date award goes to Avid for version 10/11, where their top list was like 80% features Nuendo had for years before.

But that only leads to the rest of your post which I also agree with; Avid managed to take those features and make a lot of them more flexible and more sensible, all while maintaining a market lead and still come up with more features. No doubt they have problems now, but a lot of that has to do with their new business model.

So again, what concerns me is that they’ve added yet another pane which I fear will make some types of workflows actually slower. A big nuisance with N7 has for me been that it’s been taking two steps forward and then a step and a half back. So while I appreciate some new features that speed up my work all of a sudden I find myself struggling because macros I programmed can no longer be used if the wrong window is in focus. It’s just garbage. Very poor design or programming. Every time I open up a floating window with the movie-window open on a second screen I get the wrong window focus when closing the last opened one (for example MediaBay). No logic behind it, no comments on it, no solutions to it.

The numbering doesn’t really concern me, it’s more an issue of what’s included and how much it is to update/upgrade. As long as we eventually can get working VCAs without paying more I’ll be ok with the money I paid - though obviously not with the delay in fixing it. I agree though that $100 for those new features and relative to full price of the app seems a bit steep, all things considered. Generally speaking the Nuendo upgrades have been very fairly priced in my opinion - IF we exclude the promises Timo and others made that were broken. If we instead assume that when Timo implies something is working it’s actually working as advertized then of course it’s not worth it. But I think we now know we can’t trust what they say in marketing…

I do however think there’s creativity and a vision for SB’s products, the only thing that worries me is that between a larger view of the lineup and features and on the ‘lower’ end the actual coding there seems to be a disconnect and lack of unified vision. We’ve seen different icons in different parts of the app, different visibility agents available on different pages, a strange approach to window management where I’m not sure I understand if the vision is single-screen first or multi-screen first, or an app optimized for either… So in a sense I agree with you there…

I think it all boils down to what Oliver said above, and what we’ve been saying for sooooo long: What we absolutely need from the DAW is whatever we can’t get elsewhere, hence my low tolerance for faulty VCAs. I don’t care about your analog synth, there are millions others I can buy - VCAs? Not so much. Same with workflow. I don’t currently do game design, but I can absolutely ‘feel you’ Chris when you talk about adapting to such work. If you need it in the DAW then I’m all for it.

Perhaps some sort of vision statement would be appreciated. On the other hand my trust is in short suppy these days.

13

Words of true and realistic users points all over this very thread !!
Recommended presentation material for an urgent Steinberg boardroom meeting.

I can not add anything more, it has been written and some points been presented over and over for some time already.
I do feel though that is the current trend all around in the software industry. The better companies will earn trust and possible longevity in the business by redirecting some financial and creative resources away from heavy handed hardcore ( sometimes even false ) advertising and marketing toward development, reliable QC and ways to build an open end user communication avenue.

unlike Avid did with their convoluted introduction of ACA :laughing: …as one DUC poster named it “deck chairs on the Titanic”

14

I was really disappointed that bezier curves for automation didn’t make it into Cubase 9. I agree with all of the statements above, I don’t need an EQ that copies most of Pro-Q2, what I need and want are updates to the program itself.

15

It would be a good feature if every Nuendo would have a bundled Cubase license, that could not be seperated from Nuendo. Then you can choose between Cubase9 and Nuendo 7 everytime you want to use a DAW.

16

I can’t remember how many years we’ve been barking up that tree… nothing changes…