Cubase has a great history of pioneering extensibility with the VST and ASIO standards. But it seems that there is a lot less zest for extensibility lately - for example, there is still no API for Midi effects (Either the documentation or a Steinberg comment remarks that the VST3 API is not intended for that, but then, what is?). There is no automation API. No ability to create custom editors. Why does this matter?
On one side, of course, there is the ecosystem effect of extensibility. No DAW vendor alone can cover all the bases - innovation needs a broad playing field that allows a wide group of people to contribute ideas and their vision to the ecosystem.
But there is value even beyond that: Specialized tools, sometimes custom-made for a single use, usually provide a huge productivity boost for the artist using them. In other tools in the graphics space (e.g. Blender, Fusion 360), I am creating scripts sometimes just for one task, and it can make a difference between a project being impractical and being possible. Custom tools can be another set of wings for the imagination.
Steinberg knew this truth once - realizing they could never create all the audio plugins and instruments people might want themselves, and thus created the VST standard. For audio IO, with ASIO, the same story.
I wish Steinberg would reclaim this mantle of openness and extensibility that drove it in earlier days and open up Cubase for scripting and plugins beyond the areas that are accessible today. Other DAW vendors are already doing it - for example Ableton and Reaper.
I don’t want to have to rely on Steinberg for features that others may perceive as esoteric, I want to be able to do them myself. And in the era of AI-supported coding, writing plugins or scripts is far more accessible than it ever was.
Historically, of course just learning APIs has been a huge barrier of entry, even if you already had general coding skills. But that problem increasingly has been eased by AI tools. And coincidentally, this works particularly well for scripting and smaller tools, where the overall system complexity is not so high that complex devops processes are required.
Concretely, my personal preferences for APIs include:
- Midi FX plugins with complex editors. I’d like to be able to apply such plugins on the track and clip level
- Custom Midi editors (and generators) that can provide a custom alternative to the piano roll editor in Cubase. I discussed an example, a specialized editor for guitar and other stringed instruments, in another post. But I would also love much easier ways to use algorithms and scripting to generate midi information in the first place, sometimes in really light-weight ad-hoc manners.
- Multi-track audio analyzers and processors. We are at the point where, in the mixing process, we can do a much better job if we can look at more than a single channel at a time. People are implementing this by creating feeder plugins or instance-to-instance communication for their audio FX, but this is cumbersome to use, because it requires users to insert plugins into every channel, and it quickly becomes a usability nightmare. It would be so much nicer to have multi-channel analyzer and processing APIs with a native user experience in Cubase to make these an integral and efficient part of the mixing process. Things like frequency band cleanup, resonance avoidance, unmasking and leveling could be done much better this way
Thanks for reading.