Discussion: Possibility of more open APIs or scripting support in Nuendo 15

[Moli]

Hi Steinberg team and Nuendo community,

First of all, I’d like to say that Nuendo is already an extremely powerful and mature DAW, especially in professional audio post-production, game audio, and large-scale projects. Many of us rely on it daily for serious production work.

That said, I’d like to start a discussion regarding user-level extensibility and APIs, looking ahead to the potential announcement of Nuendo 15 next year.

In daily use, even in a very complete DAW like Nuendo, there are always workflow details and niche requirements that vary greatly between users. These are often too specific to be covered by built-in features alone. From this perspective, allowing users to extend or customize parts of the workflow via official APIs or scripting interfaces could be incredibly valuable.

I’ve noticed that in other DAW communities (for example, REAPER), a more open scripting/API ecosystem has led to a very active user community:

• Users build custom tools for their own workflows
• Repetitive tasks are automated
• Community-created tools often inspire future official features

Of course, Nuendo and REAPER have very different design philosophies, and Nuendo already provides a highly refined, professional feature set. This is not a request to “turn Nuendo into another DAW”, but rather a question about whether some form of controlled, officially supported extensibility might be considered in the future.

For example (purely as discussion points):

• Limited scripting for project/track/event management
• APIs for batch operations or custom workflow tools
• Safe, sandboxed access to certain editor or project-level functions

I believe this could help advanced users, technical sound designers, and tool developers adapt Nuendo even more closely to their specific pipelines—especially in areas like game audio, middleware integration, or large-scale post-production.

I’m curious to hear thoughts from both the Steinberg team and other users:

• Is this something that has been considered before?
• Are there technical or design reasons why this might or might not be feasible?

Looking forward to a constructive discussion.

Best regards.

[Moli]

I’d like to add a more concrete example from my own daily workflow, in the hope of making this discussion a bit more practical.

I use Nuendo’s PLE (Logical Editor) very heavily, and one recurring issue I run into is the need to constantly switch between multiple preconfigured PLE presets and trigger them back and forth while working. These presets are already well-designed and tuned — the challenge is simply running and switching them efficiently during real production work.

From a functional point of view, this is actually a very small and very workflow-level requirement:
being able to trigger, switch, or combine different PLE presets more flexibly.

However, since there is currently no officially supported API or scripting interface that allows access to this level of control, the only way I’ve found to reduce repetitive manual work is through a rather indirect approach:
I ended up developing a VST plugin purely as an interaction layer, just to force some degree of control over running PLE presets.

Technically, this works — but it’s clearly not an elegant solution.
For a requirement that is conceptually simple and very workflow-oriented, having to rely on a full plugin as a control mechanism feels unnecessarily heavy.

At the same time, I completely understand that developer resources are limited, and that small, highly specific workflow requests can quickly accumulate into a very large workload if each one is handled at the core feature level. I think this is something most of us on the forum can relate to.

This is also why I personally feel that some form of controlled, user-level extensibility could be beneficial — not to replace official development, but to complement it.
Many of these fine-grained, user-specific workflow improvements seem like good candidates to be solved by users or the community themselves, rather than requiring official implementation every time.

Looking at the forum as a whole, I don’t think this situation is unique to me.
A lot of users are essentially doing the same thing: repeatedly posting requests for small workflow refinements, waiting to see if they might be considered in a future version — sometimes one or two release cycles later.

That experience is what motivated my earlier question about APIs or scripting support.
It’s less about asking Steinberg to “add more features”, and more about asking whether users could eventually be given more room to help themselves in areas that are deeply personal to individual workflows.

I’d be very interested to hear from other users as well:

• Do you run into similar “small but repetitive” workflow issues, especially with PLE?
• How are you currently working around them?

Looking forward to hearing different perspectives.

[Moli]

[Moli]

I also wanted to share a bit of my own journey and, honestly, some of the irony I’ve experienced while working on this tool.

The goal was simple: reduce repetitive mouse clicks while working in PLE. But to achieve that, I ended up spending much more time developing a tool than I initially anticipated. In the end, it does help me a little, but it also feels a bit funny and ironic.

The reason I chose Nuendo in the first place was precisely to save time. I wanted a highly integrated DAW where most workflow elements are already built-in, rather than spending hours or days building everything from scratch like in Reaper.

And yet here I am — for a very small, highly specific feature — investing extra time and effort to implement my own workaround. It’s a bit of a paradox, and a reminder that sometimes even the most “complete” DAW can leave us needing to engineer our own small tools.

I’m curious if other heavy Nuendo users have felt the same way — chasing small workflow efficiencies in a DAW that was supposed to save time, only to find themselves doing extra development work to get there.

[MattiasNYC]

I totally agree with what you wrote. All of it so far.

@Moli

• Is this something that has been considered before?

By users, sure. If you do a search for “scripting” you’ll find some threads tagged Nuendo;

Custom Scripting Support - Nuendo - Steinberg Forums

Scripting Features in Reaper are getting amazing - Hope SB takes note - Nuendo - Steinberg Forums

Avid Scripting SDK is about to be released. When will nuendo join the SDK - Nuendo - Steinberg Forums

Might be worth reading them just to get a feel for what other people thought.

Steinberg on the other hand rarely make contributions here, so, expect absolutely no response from them

@Moli

one recurring issue I run into is the need to constantly switch between multiple preconfigured PLE presets and trigger them back and forth while working. These presets are already well-designed and tuned — the challenge is simply running and switching them efficiently during real production work.

I agree. I have had somewhat the same experience if I understand you correctly.

One way to improve this would be to allow us to stack multiple PLE scripts into one “super-script” in the same editor interface. Right now in the one instance I ran into this and decided to finish it I have one main PLE that triggers multiple other PLEs post-process. This is incredibly cumbersome because if any of the “sub”-scripts need tweaking they need to be loaded again, tweaked, re-saved, and then I need to re-open the main script again to test it. It really should all be possible to do in the same interface. As you said earlier, it sometimes feels like spending a lot of time to chase small improvements.

I think this would solve some problems.

@Moli

I completely understand that developer resources are limited, and that small, highly specific workflow requests can quickly accumulate into a very large workload if each one is handled at the core feature level. I think this is something most of us on the forum can relate to.

This is also why I personally feel that some form of controlled, user-level extensibility could be beneficial — not to replace official development, but to complement it.
Many of these fine-grained, user-specific workflow improvements seem like good candidates to be solved by users or the community themselves, rather than requiring official implementation every time.

(emphasis added) Absolutely, and a really great point. Rather than having Steinberg plan and implement new functions opening up more of it to scripting by users allows potentially hundreds or even thousands of users to assemble functionality that can then be shared. This should be a no-brainer decision by Steinberg assuming it’s technically feasible and not too costly.

All functions that now appear to be “edge-cases” where you have a thread feature-request posted and 10 likes and nothing else might seem like wasted resources from SB’s perspective but allowing us to take care of that ourselves makes that a non-issue. Great for everyone.

I think it would be a great boost to the Nuendo community, especially the post-production community, if we could do this. I can imagine a forum tag for scripts and then we can share our solutions for different situations.

[MattiasNYC]

Addition:

I think that currently the PLE renaming can’t rename a set of track names to another set. In other words, if I have two tracks called “2.0 PM” and “MIX MINUS” and need to rename them both to for example “_stereomix” and “_mixminusnarration” I need two separate scripts for that. PLE will only allow me to rename with one new name. Obviously then the more required mixes and stems the more PLEs I need to string together.

Also, feel free to add your suggestion to a thread I started here:

Usability / Utility, various - Features Request - Nuendo - Steinberg Forums

I do mention “Text and voice input with AI to execute PLE and macros” and added at the end of that paragraph to “See “soundflow” integration into Pro Tools using “Session Manager” for example”. Adding your voice would be great.

Lastly, let’s face it, the two main DAW competitors are Pro Tools and Reaper, both have scripting.

[JLM]

+1 for a proper scripting API.

Being able to automate tedious tasks or build custom pipelines (that are not common enough for Steinberg to implement something) would be wonderful.

[Moli]

Thanks a lot for the thoughtful reply and for backing up the points I mentioned.

Reading about your own experiences with PLE — especially the “super-script” idea and how quickly small edge cases can add complexity — really resonated with me. It’s reassuring to know I’m not alone in running into these kinds of workflow issues.

Regarding your point about PLE renaming only allowing a single target name, that’s actually a very good example of the kind of limitation that pushed me to build my own workaround. Once you start dealing with multiple mixes or stems, the number of PLEs you need to chain together grows very quickly.

That specific issue was one of the motivations behind a small tool I’ve been working on. The idea wasn’t to replace PLE or macros, but to treat existing PLE presets and macro commands as building blocks, then expose them through a VST-based management layer. This way I can visually manage multiple presets and trigger several PLE or macro operations with a single action, instead of constantly switching or chaining scripts manually.

It’s definitely not the most elegant solution, and I’d much prefer a native or official approach. But in the absence of any supported API, this felt like the only practical way to reduce the overhead caused by these kinds of edge cases.

I’ll also add a consolidated version of these thoughts to the feature request thread you linked. Thanks again for the invitation — and for taking the time to articulate these issues so clearly.

[Held]

I’d also love a scripting API. I have some nice MIDI editing scripts in REAPER that I’m missing dearly in Nuendo.

There’s already some scripting in Nuendo, like the ModScripter modulator.

If an API were introduced, it’d probably be pretty disappointing at first, since it take times to make features available through it. But any progress would be appreciated.

[emotive]

With something like this, which I would support, it would need to be introduced in small portions I believe, so firstly we could have some scripting in the Media Pool so that, for example we could script the process of bouncing audio, in order so that older files could be automatically deleted, replaced and renamed.

I do hope something like this happens soon.

Cheers

[kenobi1]

+1

It seems community requirements are moving faster than Steinberg development. Particularly in automation, remote control, media and track search and spot/load functions.

The API needs to be opened up.

[estevancarlos]

A good, robust API is always good for the community. Ableton Live has Max/MSP controlling the Live API which has allowed the community to fill in the gaps here and there with features Live has not developed yet. I can see Steinberg taking it further. I’d love to do more JS scripting.

[emotive]

if there was a way to script functions in Steinberg products, that to me would put them at the forefront of development.

I have never used the Project Logical Editor and do everything by hand but to be able to write scripts and share them with other people and download various other scripts, that would be an excellent Christmas or New Years gift.

[MattiasNYC]

@Moli

Regarding your point about PLE renaming only allowing a single target name, that’s actually a very good example of the kind of limitation that pushed me to build my own workaround. Once you start dealing with multiple mixes or stems, the number of PLEs you need to chain together grows very quickly.

Not sure if it was mentioned or considered, but I think linking this to CSVs would maybe be useful. That way we can populate lists with a “source” name which would be a project’s default track names and then in the next column the “target” “new” name that each track should get instead. Much easier to have a master document like that which can be edited separately. This is essentially the “Rename Events from List” function but available it the PLE or as a script option and applicable to more than just events.

Also, I would think that once this would be implemented then any number of uses of referenced CSV files could be useful.

[Soushi]

For my use case, I just used the available MIDI API.
It’s not perfect, but it does what I need. Having a better API with more control would definitely be great.

[emotive]

I suppose having a general API in Steinberg DAW’s would mean this:

Backup & Restore Scripts for Cubase on Windows

This is great. I hope they´ll add this to all Steinberg products natively. Really nice basic stuff, that should be included in..

would be redundant, and that cross-platform scripts could be created and used instead.