DAWProject import from Studio One unusable

Cubase
1

I was hoping to be able to use DAWProject to import a very large 14 song project into C14. But, after spending far too long trying to work out why the audio is drifting, I give up.

Whether it’s an S1 problem or Cubase I don’t know, but I’m not going to spend any more time on it. I’ll use the old-fashioned export audio and midi files, and build it the hard way, at least that works.

It’s a real shame as the potential is great. Many of the tracks stay in time, but not all. And I cannot find the missing link to solve that issue.

I’ve checked everything, tempo, frame rates, sample rates, setting in S1 to “don’t follow”. I rarely use time stretch so my default is don’t follow, but I did find some of my audio tracks had the “follow” setting, no idea why. So even after setting everything to don’t follow and re-exporting I have the same errors.
In one case a region in the middle of a section plays slow, for no reason that I can possible fathom as it has exactly the same values (recorded tempo, sample rate etc) as the rest.
There are also discrepancies in the positioning of midi events, I haven’t gone too far into that as it’s obviously not going to be workable but a quick check shows a note in S1 at 0042.01.04.96 translates to 0042.01.04.115 in Cubase

So, if anyone has any suggestions that’d be great. But for the amount of time spent, and the inconsistent results, I’m not going to risk using DAWProject. I was tempted to keep the regions that play OK and the midi that seemed in time with the click, but I don’t want to risk further errors appearing down the line, I’d rather start with a clean project.

2

These are still early days for DAWproject, and there are still a lot of minor issues and incompatibilities, which can escalate into major showstoppers, depending on the project.

Where things get really problematic in my own testing and chatting with other folks who use DAWproject (at least with certain kinds of projects) between Cubase, Studio One, Reaper, and Bitwig, is when you incorporate tempo and automation changes… be prepared for lots of strange things to happen.

So far in my testing, really simple projects translate fairly well between DAWs, again, as long as you don’t have tempo and automation issues. I had pretty good results between Bitwig and Studio One on simple projects in particular, but you would expect that since they were the original launch partners of DAWproject. But it’s still not perfect by far.

The DAW that seems to support DAWproject the best so far is Bitwig, of course, which makes sense because Bitwig appears to be the primary maintainer and effort behind it. Presonus has not even implemented several of the features from what I can see, and again, they were the original launch partner with Bitwig. It’s like Presonus decided to only go “so far” and just left some things dangling.

So basically, it’s hit and miss between them all right now, and I’d say that for complex projects, it’s not surprising at all that you are having issues.

Hopefully all the parties will continue to improve DAWproject compatibility over time, and I appreciate that Steinberg is paying attention and added this feature. But we have a ways to go! Again, it’s early days. May I suggest you continue to provide feedback to the forum and perhaps directly to Steinberg to hopefully help them address larger issues.

For now, practically speaking, I think trial and error testing is the way to go, since everyone’s individual projects may have issues in the precise areas of shortcomings, and we don’t know all the holes yet. And in those cases, there may be some prep work one can do on the exporting side to help reduce those issues. Or otherwise, do exactly what you are doing and revert to the “old school” way of moving projects. Good luck.

I’m doing more testing this coming week to figure out my own adjustments for my workflow w/ Cubase and DAWproject, but we’ll see how far I get with Thanksgiving and lots of family around! Cheers!

1 Like
3

Hi @Dr_Scardo and @uarte,

of course we will improve the support of DAWproject in the next updates. But for this we need your help. Please give us access to your DAWproject file and tell us what’s not working?

Thank you,
Michael.

1 Like
4

Also FYI - Presonus just announced Studio One 7.01 maintenance update which includes “Improved DAWproject compatibility” so it might be worth trying some exports again for those folks with Studio One 7.

Currently, I personally have no plans to upgrade to Studio One 7 though (they lost me with their recent poor decisions and amateurish direction, which has been downhill IMO, focusing on loop-based production, etc., not to mention their inconsistencies of business model), so I won’t be able to test 7.01’s DAWproject improvements.

However, I will continue to test Reaper and Bitwig projects with DAWproject since I actively use them in the studio with Cubase/Nuendo, and I’ll still be exporting older Studio One 6 projects with the “older” DAWproject features.

5

Thank you! Great to hear this. I think for now, the most important things I’ve noticed are with tempo maps and automation – that appears to be known already though.

I will be spending some more time testing soon, and if I get a chance, I will create a generic test file for more common edge cases that impact me. Thank you again for spending time on this!!

6

Hi all!

Just wanted to chime in real quick, though I’m not sure how helpful I can be given that I’m still on Studio One v6 and, like @uarte, I have no plans of upgrading to v7 for very similar reasons.

That said, my experiences with transferring projects from Studio One 6 to Cubase 14 are identical to the OP’s. I recently used DAWproject to transfer 10 projects into Cubase and it was a bit of a pain. Even though most of my plugins and plug-in settings did transfer correctly, other things did nor translate well at all, so I had to resort to the old school way for certain things like Audio and MIDI.

So far, these are the things I noticed that didn’t transfer correctly:

  • Audio files transfer but most are completely out of sync.
  • MIDI files transfer, but without any CC data.
  • Automation and Layers do not transfer, but that’s expected given that neither Studio One v6 nor Cubase support this feature as far as I know.
  • Tempo and Time Signature changes do not transfer. Only projects with one Tempo and Time Signature do.
  • Multi-out plugins do not transfer (however, you can see they should’ve existed as the VST rack shows an empty slot and the first stereo track does show up in the project).
  • Send track settings and FX Buses do transfer, but not the FX plugins themselves. Actually, Send settings are transferred as pre-fader in Cubase when they were originally set as post fader in Studio One.

Anyway, those are the things I remember having issues with off the top of my head. Hopefully someone with the current version of Studio One can test these things and let us know if they have been improved or not. I’ll report back if I remember anything else not transferring correctly.

1 Like
7

Hi @Spork,

unfortunately I was so brain-dead after working on it for a few hours I trashed it, along with any desire to work with something that is obviously, judging from the other comments, far from market-ready. The file was 1.6GB anyway, and I live in rural France with lousy internet.
Errors, pretty much as @jose7822 has listed.
I too am leaving Studio One and not upgrading to 7. It’s served its purpose, and I’ll keep 6 for the Project CD authoring, and batch conversion of files. That’s useful. Funnily enough I’ve never felt they reached a professional level regarding tech support, the forum is woefully short of expertise on user or company side - actually I don’t remember seeing anyone from Presonus commenting with solutions to problems there, and the support tickets generally sound as if someone read the manual but not my e mail.
It’s fun coming back to Cubase (actually I’m going for Nuendo but 13 doesn’t have the DAWProject yet so I was using a trial version of C14 for that). I have Cubase 12, and am one of the people who bought Pro 16 for the Commodore the day it was released in the UK…so I have long history with Cubase, made many records with it, abandoned it when Studio One reached version 3 I think. For me the graphics of Cubase were getting far to cluttered - but I love the way Nuendo looks, it feels solid if that makes sense!

2 Likes
8

I agree ~ I tried a transfer from Studio One to Cubase, and it was a complete mess. For one thing, the audio files were out of sync. This technology still needs working on.

9

They already found the bug with the out of sync files. It had to do with applying an offset to files with certain naming schemes. it’ll be fixed on the next update :grin:

10

Updated to the latest Cubase 14. Imported audio files seem to be in sync now. Imported miditracks are missing controller data.

11

Are you using the latest Studio One version?

I tried it again from Studio One 6.6 (or whatever the latest non 7 version is) to Cubase 14 (latest version) and it seemed to be worse for me. My tracks sounded like everything was coming out in of the Reverb Bus. Also, some tracks were still out of sync. Time signature changes still don’t transfer, etc.

Keep in mind that I’m not using Studio One v7 though, so that’s why I’m curious if you are indeed on the latest version.

12

Have you updated to 14.0.10 and re-imported the project already?

13

Yes. I have the latest version of Cubase (14.0.10).

This time it was worse for me than the release version 14.0. Unfortunately I won’t be able to test again for a while.

14

… it is possible to get access to the DAWproject file? Then we are able to analyse the problem.

See you,
Michael.

15

I’m not sure how helpful it’ll be given I’m still on Studio One v6.6.

Also, the proyect I used for testing is from my band’s upcoming album (though it’s not an original song, so maybe it’s ok). I’ll PM it to you if you still believe it would help.

16

… it will be very helpful.

Thank you,
Michael.

17

Message sent. Sorry for the delay :man_bowing:

1 Like
18

… thank you very much for your PM, @jose7822. We’ll analyse the problem now and return here.

See you,
Michael.

3 Likes
19

For me, importing DAWProject from Studio One doesn’t work at all - it’s like nothing happens, nothing is imported and empty project will remain.