It seems with every update, Steinberg tries to appeal to current trends by adding what they hope will attract new buyers to the Cubase community.
This is understandable, as all business growth comes from the company evolving into new territory. Unfortunately, many of these trends tend to be very short lived or, worse, at the cost of much more important ‘features’ like stability and performance. This is complicated by the ever expanding customization of computer setups/builds and additions to the basic Cubase code engine trying to push more and more processes up a never ending hill.
If Cubase is really meant to be used in a ‘PRO’ market, would it not make more sense to have industry specific versions of Cubase ( similar feature set but different use case ) ? And Im not referring to Cubase Artist vs Cubase Pro which has a reduced feature set. I mean a ‘Cubase Pro’ vs ‘Cubase Consumer’ product line much like home electronics do or other musical / recording equipment does. Almost all video/photo/audio/ product lines have a Pro line and a Consumer line that differentiates between home/hobby use and professional use cases. The home/hobby line pushes or targets current/emerging trends and the professional line focuses on stability and workflow under demanding, production/deadline conditions.
Most all production houses that we work with value one thing above all else in a production environment…stability. The most attractive new features are useless if the product is not dependable on a daily basis, or worse, intermittently dependable. All of us love new plugins, functions and sexy new features but, in a work environment where clients are paying you to have a stable and smooth running setup every day they come into your business, instability isn’t just a creative killer, its a business killer as well.
Well, there’s Nuendo, isn’t that exactly what you described? Haven’t used it personally so I cannot say anything about stability, but as the major releases always appear after Cubase, I guess that most bug fixes are already included.
Also, in my line of work (IT-professional), we never install .0 releases right away on production systems, only on test systems. And we usually wait for the first bug fix releases anyway.
The conundrum for SB is, as you wrote, that no one will pay for a software that doesn’t include something new. And “something new” will always increases the likelihood of something going wrong.
What I proposed in another thread is some kind of public beta phase of new releases. I think Ableton and Bitwig have that for their DAWS, probably Reaper as well. That way, anyone who is interested in the shiny new bling bling can test it, knowing full well that it is not production ready. And Steinberg gets more feedback about all the thousands of different computer systems out there and the problems that come with them. And that might hopefully lead to more stable .0 releases
I don’t have 12 yet, but every update I did went smooth, I was lucky. But if there was a problem, I always kept the older version(s) I still have 6-11 on my system. And that has saved me on e few occasions, I also have a start up ready win7 64 as I left it (with all software) for those occasions the latest version does not work. (and even XP and XP 64 on a HD lying around with backups).
Yes better beta would be nice or open beta, but my productivity is my responsibility IMHO.
I have never seen an Adobe product without complaints (and never fixed bug to boot).
Latest korg v1.xx synths are unusable. Etc etc.
