I think Plogue did this (farm out code/libraries for any company that wants/needs it) for a long time, and perhaps they still do. Finale and Sibelius both sit on a Plogue Engine. I think Plogue also had a good bit to do with the SFZ protocol, and Cakewalk was heavy into that with whatever instruments came bundled in Cakewalk. Finale is going defunct…but Sibelius is still around and in the AVID arsenal as far as I know.
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But for a small fortune you could get a 300-9600 baud modem and join GEnie/Compuserve/AOL. If you lived a rural or small-town life, get ready to pay massive long distance tolls to call the nearest major city. You might have to auto-redial for 2 hours to get an open line (and even if your area always had busy lines and you couldn’t use it much, you still got that big BILL from GEnie/Compuserve/Whatever).
Someone in your house pick up the other phone while you were online? Borked!
A good many independent hobbyist BBSes existed. Many of those were quazi networked, as they’d all call each other to swap information (fidonet hierarchy…like a pyramid scheme). There were a few servers around the world that independent BBSes could call in a few times a day to update things on the ‘internet’ like ‘usenet’ news groups.
The internet did exist, but was pretty new, and mostly a military and ‘university’ thing. Usenet came to be…it often got shuffled in with the old fidonet (and similar) databases. The providers like GEnie and Compuserve would also dig into this stuff and make it available for their subscribers.
Seems like GEine and Compuserve had some Shell GUI things Subscribers could tag their favorite stuff in, call in once a day and grab things to enjoy ‘offline’. Whatever ‘interaction’ you did while offline (responses to news groups, emails, etc.) would get uploaded next time you logged in. You could tunnel out over telnet to do things in real time…like IRC chat, mucks/muds, archie search, hit ftp sites, and so on.
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Well said! Not to mention the obstacle on the track, which was the arrival of Apple Silicon and, of course, the tough battle that will come (in fact, it already is) with AI.
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Great read U. For a moment I was lost in the old world of Cakewalk and SEMPTE time code. Has all this technology made music better? Is some of it actually even music?
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GENie was pretty cool. I only used it for a few months before moving to something called the NVN Network (I think thats what it was??). Started off on Prodigy in 92, then in 94 they started charging hourly rates and PER message and everybody bailed. The gaming group I was in based around the Ultima games moved to various dial up services until the internet got more widely available a year or so later. I remember having access to ‘the internet’ for a bit through the Delphi service but there wasn’t really anything to do unless you really knew what you were looking for. All I can remember was being able to use Gopher to browse all these file servers thinking ‘Are there games here somewhere??’ but that was it… Started getting into local BBSes around then and started my own RBBS/WWIV/Telegard sites and joined up in the whole fidonet thing (parents LOVED it when the phone rang at 2am to collect all my Fidonet mail with DBridge!). That was fun times, except downloading a 1MB game to install for your BBS took you literally 24 hours to do with a 2400 baud modem., and if anybody picked up the phone or you had call waiting…
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I solved it,
Go to the APP Cubase 14. Show files → contents → help in the help folder create a new one drag all help files to new file named whatever so you have back up. Then delete all help files, so far no f1 and no bugs,
If i should come across a bug the backupfolder is there but i named it nameless and deleted all help files, SO FK AMAZING i did it. nothing happens on f1.
Edit: Mac OS Sonoma
Your welcome.
Very well argued. I’ve been using Cubase since before the SX days and have tried other DAWS along the way before returning to Cubase. I also use Logic Pro at times but just don’t trust Apple to not suddenly abandon it for a super-GarageBand (Aperture anyone?) I sort of trust Yamaha/Steinberg to endure for a while. Look at how they employed the Sibelius team sacked by Avid then gave them the time and space to develop Dorico.
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This might have been one of the best things Steinberg has ever done, at least in terms of business strategy, and it was IMO a pivotal decision/gamble in creating the business culture of the Steinberg we know today. Whoever decided to do that at Steinberg gets high praise from me. It set the stage for many of the good things we have from Steinberg today, and it brought in some very good people that will impact Steinberg for years to come.
THANK YOU to the Steinberg executives (and maybe Yamaha executives too, if they were involved) who made the decision and gave the Dorico team the time and space they needed.
Honestly, this business model is what has differentiated Steinberg from the other “legacy” pro audio developers. You can see the pattern pop up over the many years with how they brought in various talent – via different kinds of business relationships no doubt over time – such as WaveLab’s @PG1 and SpectraLayer’s @Robin_Lobel and of course Dorico’s @dspreadbury and team – among others. This seems to be part of their DNA… and it’s a good thing.
While Steinberg hasn’t been 100% consistent in this regard (they also lost some good talent too over the years, unfortunately, including spawning one of their DAW competitors with Studio One, for example), the overall net trajectory over decades has been positive IMO, as if they learned some lessons when they made mistakes.
And when you factor in that Steinberg appears to be working well with Microsoft’s @Psychlist1972 on some pretty important stuff IMO, and so forth, you’ve clearly got a company that is cultivating a healthier culture, that does NOT want to stagnate. I take all this as a net positive when you compare and contrast to other business models and cultures in the pro audio (especially the DAW) market.
I hope Steinberg keeps this all up! Of course, they could screw this all up any time with some bad decisions (no one is perfect!), but if they keep following this business model and keep this business culture, they should be in good shape for years to come.
It’s for these reasons that we haven’t seen Steinberg needing to move to a subscription model, or other kinds of aggressive or bargain-basement commodity marketing tactics. They’ve been fairly consistent overall, especially compared to the merger/aquisition/commodity/equity-management/subscription craziness that has transformed this industry in recent years.
Steinberg, in a way, still behaves somewhat like an “indie” developer by comparison to some of them. But still with the connection to Yamaha of course. It’s an interesting hybrid they have created. Can it last? I sure hope so. And their long-term strategies are starting to show the fruit of their planning, with the new score editor, and refreshed codebase that is (perhaps shockingly) now native on Windows ARM before any other major DAW developer (along with Reaper, but that’s a different beast altogether).
Again, I can’t overstate the importance of bringing in the Dorico score features as a huge step for the future, and the inevitable evolution of those features. Cubase 14 was an example of several long-term plans finally coming together IMO, and here’s to hoping this kind of thinking continues!
Much respect to Steinberg! Stay the course! Just PLEASE continue to listen to your customers, stay active in the forums, keep your doors open to people like Psychlist1972, and to emerging standards like MIDI 2.0 and even things like DAWproject, and to emerging platforms like ARM, and please squash bugs as a priority, and more than anything else, PLEASE devote plenty of resources to the continual refinement of the core workflows of your EXISTING users! And when/if you do make a mistake, please just own up to it, and make the course correction, and get back on track!
Cheers! And Happy New Year! Looking forward to Nuendo 14!
(P.S. And don’t forget to please give us true drag and drop ripple editing one of these days! Had to throw that in there… 
)
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This is included as part of Cubase 14
Yep, indeed, and it’s a feature I use in Cubase 14, and I look forward to it in Nuendo 14. That’s why I mentioned it.
Apologies if my phrasing was confusing. The sentence was kind of long, sorry about that, but the operative words were CONTINUE and LIKE as in… continue to keep your doors open to people like Psychlist1972 and to emerging standards like yadda yadda… so my implied context was that they were already doing it, and to therefore continue doing it…
(In that overly long sentence, I mentioned a bunch of things… i.e. implication was they are already working with Microsoft (Psychlist1972), already working on MIDI 2.0, already launched DAWproject support, already support Windows on ARM. So I thought the context was clear.)
Anyway, I could have phrased that more clearly! But yes, very happy with their support for DAWproject! I hope they continue to keep up things like that going forward! Big kudos to Steinberg for Cubase 14! Best version in years!
This entire post (quoted) is one of the best ever on this forum - congrats and thanks!
The wonderfulness of the post goes far beyond this second quoted paragraph, but I did want to take the opportunity to highlight it as well.
Thanks, @uarte !
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Great post Uarte. As added evidence for the fervent wish that Yamaha/Cubase never fall prey to whatever modern bandit capitalism is called, is the fact that Avid seem to be laying off people on the Sibelius team.
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Also the fact that this is a niche market has something to do with this.
Plugins and libraries that many (many) years ago were never on sale, are now on sale on a regular, or constant basis.
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None of my frustrations with Cubase will ever make me leave.
This forum is great but could be structured better for Steinberg to really know what issues and requests matter. Just looking at the recent wishlist post with multiple copies of the 100+ requests shows it is not an ideal way to track users thoughts.
A database with some kind of dropdown menu and votes would be easier in order to aggregate requests.
On this note I am going to make yet another post making requests, this time about the Cubase Zoom …
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I Have Nuendo 14, Cubase 13, Ableton Live Suite 12, Bitwig 6 & Reason 13, all full versions, i know them all inside out. There all dope but I wouldn’t Mix in any of them except Cubendo.
Creativity wise, there all different, but the final mix is telling in anything other than a traditional DAW like Pro Tools, Logic or Cubendo.
The Newer more trendy DAWs seem to make mixes sound thin and limp.
Not sure why people leave DAW’s, in computer programming they learn multiple languages, Graphic designers use multiple applications, Motion artists used multiple software’s, not sure why music makers seem to think you can just be with 1 DAW.
Most of them all use the same Hot Keys, so they literally all function the same.
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You can switch off Abletons analysis files, this is optional, set to ON by default.
People leave DAWs because there is no point in using two different software applications that do the same type of work simply because you can - while also paying out of pocket to maintain them over time (Updates/Upgrades, etc.). It’s like jumping between Microsoft Word and WordPerfect. Most people don’t do that. They picked one and they stuck with it.
People will just go to whichever feels most comfortable to them at the time, or with a workflow that caters to their specific niche. Ableton Live and Bitwig aren’t trying to be the Studio DAW standard, and Reason is designed to be highly skeuomorphic - and that has its own drawbacks.
It also doesn’t make sense to have your work divided up across 5 DAWs, which also means you need perpetual access to 5 different DAWs to open projects. It makes literally no sense, objectively.
Subjectively, it will make all the sense to whoever is doing this, because people always find a way to rationalize their decisions 
One DAW is enough.
A programming language is not comparable. Different programming languages can be completely confined to specific domains of problem solving or predominate certain industries and/or niches. Capabilities can differ, and there are standards for applications in certain segments (e.g. Banking, Insurance, Military, Aviation) that necessitate the use of specific programming languages (which can be optimized specifically for the scenarios that exist within those industries). This is why we have Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) in computer science.
Implementation languages are often mandated by companies/organizations. They won’t hire or give you the contract simply because you have a stellar resume as a C++ systems developer … when they mandate Ada as the implementation language and you have zero experience developing with it.
In addition to that, there is a lot of legacy code out there and if you cannot maintain the existing systems while also developing newer systems; you will be outcompeted by candidates who can do this. So, the market already factors this in normally, which is why back in the 1990s it was common to tell people going into ComSci curricula at Universities not to just sit on C/C++ and ignore everything else. Frankly, the market had evolved beyond one-trick-pony developers since the early 80s (when far more development and even system languages were in common use than later).
Companies aren’t going to hire double the development staff just to get this done, either.
In some cases I know of personally, Insurance Companies with COBOL systems simply sent their COBOL developers to get trained on .NET/VB/C# instead of hiring newer developers.
It seems to have worked out for them. One of them is the largest insurance companies in the country and they haven’t had any major system failures since then (~20+ years ago).
I have tried a lot of DAWs, but I generally delete the account and the product when I decide I am not going to use (migrate to) it.
I don’t see a point in hopping between them just to constantly review them, while paying maintenance costs to keep them up to date.
For many, one DAW feels sufficient—just as one guitar, one studio, or one producer can be enough. Yet countless artists choose to work with multiple guitars, studios, and collaborators to broaden their creative possibilities. The same logic applies to DAWs.
Each DAW encourages a different creative approach (Keep in mind that they include unique instruments and devices, not merely shared techniques). In Ableton, the workflow often leans toward quickly bouncing tracks to audio, experimenting with devices, and enjoying the immediacy of its stock tools. Cubase, on the other hand, supports a more traditional, methodical workflow—tried and tested techniques that many users know intimately.
The choice of DAW can be as significant as a guitarist choosing between a Gibson Les Paul and a Fender Stratocaster—each shapes the performance and creative mindset differently. Sometimes, it’s even compelling to blend results: crafting one section of a track in Cubase, another in Ableton, and merging them to break free from routine creative habits. For instance, one chorus might be built using Cubase’s Key Editor and Logical Editor to design dynamic drum patterns, while the next might rely on a third-party drum machine for a contrasting groove.
Artists like Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails) exemplify this approach, often combining Ableton and Pro Tools in their productions. Their distinctive sound likely owes much to the freedom gained from switching contexts—something that would be lost had they confined themselves to a single DAW.
Admittedly, managing multiple DAWs can be technically inconvenient, but the creative benefits often outweigh the challenges. The deeper question becomes: are you aiming to be a professional working with speed and efficiency for clients, or an artist exploring every facet of your ambition and imagination?
Sometimes the most powerful creative act is to say no. Refusing to rely on your favourite EQ, and instead forcing yourself to use stock tools—or even plugins you dislike—can spark unexpected results. On another track, you might do the opposite, deliberately returning to your preferred effects. The goal is to avoid creative conservatism.
Overreliance on formulas and comfort zones can lead to homogenization—the kind that has resulted in artists like Taylor Swift dominating the charts with multiple albums, all polished to the same Los Angeles production standards. By contrast, the unique sonic identities of artists like David Bowie, Fleetwood Mac, Elton John, or Nine Inch Nails emerged precisely because they rejected uniformity and embraced risk.
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I value my time too much for that.
As I’ve stated, this is not worth debating because everyone will rationalize their decision. It’s their decision. They can do what they want with their time and mental bandwidth.
God speed.
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