I’ve been kind of active over in the Dorico forum, having been a user for over a year. Well, I just joined the Cubase world, and I posted about it on my website. Thought you might like to read what I posted.
4 Likes
Welcome to the Cubase forum. One can only imagine how hard it must be to the change the DAW after 30 years. I wish you all the best with your transition.
Just remember: most DAWs let you do the same things, but sometimes it requires a very different way.
Quote taken from your article.
I don’t want to spoil your party but there is a huge difference of community engagement from Steinberg staff between Dorico and WaveLab on one side and Cubase/Nuendo on the other side.
The Cubendo team is doing a dreadful job on the forum. It’s other customers that actually carry these forums.
Cheers.
2 Likes
Hey I did the same switch about 25-26 years ago just as we got ‘Cakewalk Pro Audio’ haha. It will get you to the same place, but like Johnny said, you might have to learn how to do it all over again, but we can help.
I wouldn’t be too hard on the Cubase team. This is technically a ‘user forum’ and the Dorico folks and PG really don’t HAVE to participate. Having worked (and still work) with dev companies before, the priorities of the Cubase/Nuendo team are likely a bit higher on the food chain since it’s the ‘money maker’ for the company. They’re probably not available except when they show up around the time of releases/updates to check in on it. You can imagine, Cubase/Nuendo probably have a hell of a lot more testing and work that needs to go into it than something like Wavelab or Halion does.
1 Like
Welcome aboard. I was a Sonar user from Version 7. I bailed out after the Gibson fiasco but prior to Bandlab. I have no regrets whatsoever.
1 Like
Welcome DLJ. I followed the same path as others 5 or 6 years ago after 15 years with Calewalk. I just generally find Cubase workflow so much easier than with Sonar.
1 Like
Welcome. I was a long time SONAR user – actually, I started with Cakewalk at Pro Audio 9, then through all the SONAR iterations. I even beta tested SONAR 2-6, but got super frustrated with V6 (the worst version of SONAR ever in my book – thankfully, they redeemed themselves in V7 and beyond). I was also fairly heavily involved in various Cakewalk-oriented communities for a long time.
However, when the Gibson thing happened, having gone through having to switch DAWs in the past after Passport Designs went out of business and made MasterTracks Pro no longer an option, I decided it was time to look at alternatives. I tried a few DAWs, to see what might meet my needs and ended up going with Cubase 9.5, though it didn’t end up being my primary DAW for new projects until 10.5. Cakewalk by BandLab had come along in the interim, and the Cubase learning curve was steep, so it took me quite a while to get up to speed. I can highly recommend the Groove3.com courses on Cubase (not just the ones on recent versions) for helping overcome learning curve issues. Just googling for YouTube videos and such didn’t help me much due to terminology differences.
In parallel with my starting up in Cubase, and observing differences in performance versus Cakewalk by BandLab, I had a number of in-depth emails with Noel Borthwick, trying to troubleshoot significant performance issues, trying lots of CbB tuning suggestions, but ultimately with no luck. That level of support was pretty amazing, but, as time went on, I just started finding I could be more efficient in Cubase for my workflows, and I got to using Cubase for all new projects, only going back to Cakewalk for remixes. Nowadays, though I still have the final version of CbB on my system, and I actually use it for some compatibility checking here and there (e.g. for MIDI files rendered in Cubase), even if I want to remix an old SONAR project, I generally just use CbB to export any bits and pieces I might need, then bring those bits and pieces into Cubase to do the actual remix. At this point, I’d have a big learning curve to go back to Cakewalk if I were to try to do an actual project there.
As others have indicated the level of Steinberg support in the Dorico forum (and, I’m newly finding, in the WaveLab forum) is way higher than in the Cubase forum. But there are a lot of very knowledgeable Cubase users here, and Steinberg people do get involved here and there, especially as new releases come out and have the inevitable issues that didn’t get sussed out through whatever internal and beta testing happened prior to the initial release.
Good luck with your transition.
1 Like
Welcome!
Started off with Cakewalk Pro Audio 5 in 1996, and stuck through their development until 2018. Cubase is worth the climb. Cubase 13 is far more capable than Cakewalk in several areas. I still keep Ableton around for the fun of it, but everything I create eventually ends up in Cubase.
1 Like