Is it just me, or is anyone else strangely excited for Cubase/Nuendo 15?

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Cubase/Nuendo 14 have been really good for me. Obviously they’re not perfect (and still missing click and drag ripple editing, hint-hint!), but overall, v14 has been a joy to use, and the best version in years. Thank you again to Steinberg.

The top three new features in Cubase 14 that have been the most useful, fun, or inspirational to me have been the event volume curves, modulators, and new score editor. On Nuendo, I would add dialog transcription.

There are a bunch of other great new features (especially workflow-related), of course, but those are the biggest winners for me, personally, making v14 a total no-brainer upgrade, and worth every penny of the update fees. Steinberg made Cubase and Nuendo “exciting” again as a creative tool to me, and now we’re coming up on Cubase 15 update season within the next few weeks (in theory, if prior release schedules are good predictors of future release schedules!).

This past cycle they also improved their community interaction IMO, invited more beta testers into their inner circle (I did not have the time to volunteer, sorry, but thank you to everyone who DID join the beta team!!!), and even open-sourced a few things that are very encouraging to me about their future direction (specifically new licensing for VST3 and new driver collaboration with Microsoft and Qualcomm!). Bravo to Steinberg for all of this!

As a result of all this good stuff, I’m strangely excited this time around for v15. What goodness will they add this time? Will Steinberg build on a good thing and keep going in this positive direction?

Last time, I was personally delighted at what they chose to release. Yes, we all have things we are still hoping for. And soon we get to find out what the Hamburg Elves have been forging.

This time I’m excited to find out what practical and/or useful improvements they’ll offer. Will they double down and refine things they introduced in V14? Will they surprise us with a new big feature?

Waiting for Cubase 15 this year feels a little like when I was a kid waiting for a birthday or Christmas present… that anticipation and excitement of something cool, or special, or fun, or unexpected. It’s a good feeling for v15 this time.

So best wishes to the Steinberg team as they prep v15! And keep up the good work bringing outstanding tools to your customers! Crossing fingers for my own personal wishlist, but as we saw with v14, Steinberg is capable of surprising and delighting many of us! Hope it is similar this time around!

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We just have to wait for a Wednesday…

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Yes, great update. Works well. Modulators, great. Also play probability and velocity variance are nice. Gain staging. Channel drag and drop. Lovely.

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I remember I randomly watched a bit from a Greg Ondo session, that was long before C13 was released. Someone asked about the C13 release, and he answered that they were working on that, but also on C14, and C15!

This episode is from February 2023. So there’s something (no clue what that might be) they have been actually working on since maybe 3 years back, that’s still waiting to be released, for C15…

I understand if they are working on some things for a next-next version, but 3(!) versions ahead??

Here it is (3:02:47):

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Interesting…

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If they fix DOP then maybe I will be moderately excited. And develop dialog transcription to be on par with Pro Tools.

So far this year I am underwhelmed by the execution of new features.

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Cubase 14 still need to polish.

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One could argue updating to a new version number without addressing the big list of issues being dragged across three versions now on top of having to introduce new features to entice people to upgrade to be a shot in the dark at a target that might not exist inside a room that may or may not be there. Kinda like Eventide releasing a $1000 hardware upgrade to their $8000 H9000 when they haven’t even exhausted the processing power of the current hardware.

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lol I used C14 for an entire year and didn’t notice it had probability lanes :smiley: - it’s even better than I thought. Thanks for that.

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Thats fairly common in any software project. Hell I’ve got a ‘little’ Amiga emulator that is on a 3.6 release, but there are 4.x betas, and 5.x alphas. They don’t just decide one day to stop working on the current version and then begin the next one, the next few releases are always in the pipeline.

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Im looking forward to see if the “public” beta have had any quality impact on the first release.

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rumors about cubase 15 says…… nothing’, No rumors yet oddly !

we want some leaks :thinking:

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My bet on this, the first Wednesday of November

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…December. The 3rd. Or maybe the 10th.

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10$ my date is closer ! :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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While recent versions have been in November, for a few years previous it used to be December. I’m feeling nostalgic…
placez vos paris!

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As always, it’s a balancing act. Steinberg’s business model is a known fact of life for long-term customers, for good and bad. No honest long-term Steinberg customer would deny there are ups and downs. The good side being a long list of positives IMO (many good things I can say), and the bad being primarily they still need to balance more time for their bugfixes. For me, personally, I think they need to allocate about 10% more time/resources to bugfixes, and that would be a pretty good balance. I’ve mentioned the 10% figure many times over the years. So I agree with you guys in the sense they have more work to do on the bug list.

However, every long-term Steinberg customer knows the reality of the business model, and psychologically, many of us are conditioned to kind of want everything, but many of us also know we aren’t going to get it. They have to balance very tight profit margins, update prices/cycles, new features, bugfixes, R&D, legacy code, refactoring, etc., in a very compressed market that has had a lot of uncertainty for years. The list of struggling developers is long. Steinberg continues to survive and sometimes thrive. From my humble analytical perspective, they are navigating this pretty well compared to many of their competitors. BUT there is definitely room for improvement! And if their current business model breaks down, then we’re going to be in a far worse situation IMO including if they start playing around with subscription models or worse yet, Yamaha grows tired of Steinberg and sells it off… which would be a nightmare IMO.

Amazingly they’ve kept pretty much the same business model for a while now, without raising prices much at all (actually I think the prices have gone down relative to inflation), while they’ve also demonstrated an agile/modern development stack with their rapid support for Windows on ARM, etc., and a slow, but positive progression of better customer interaction. I’m looking at the trajectory. To me, it’s positive. And I also haven’t been hit too badly with serious bugs this round. And I happen to LOVE some of the new features. But I can understand others may have a different opinion, and we all have different workflows that might expose/amplify different kinds of issues.

Again, is it perfect? No. But I’m fairly optimistic, all things considered. I have most of the DAWs on the market, and I can tell you from my perspective, the grass is not greener on the other side of the hill.

But anyway, in theory, I’m with you that more bugfixes should be part of the cycle, even though I also feel they have been making progress in the right direction.

I’m curious to see if their expanded beta team will have an impact on quality control, etc., so the next few months will be telling. Crossing fingers and I remain hopeful for now! Let’s see what happens next!

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yeah, that’s pretty impressive! I take that as a good sign that there haven’t been big leaks!

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My guess is that it WAS going to be the first Wednesday of November as suggested by @mozizo , but then they ran into a couple big bugs in the 14.0.40 release patch, so I’m now guessing the release of C15 has been pushed back a few weeks. My guess is now November 12 or 19… any more and it conflicts too much with Thanksgiving weekend IMO. But @Googly_Smythe might be right, it could be early December…

And BTW, I’m guessing that anyone NOT making any guesses on the release date but who is also one of the regular forum veterans is 50-50 chance now a beta tester! Just thinking out loud! :laughing: :grimacing: :innocent: :brain: I have no inside information!

I can definitely say that I am NOT a beta tester, although if I had more time this year I would have absolutely signed up. Kudos again to all those who are beta testers, much respect! You are making Cubase 15 better for all of us!

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It stopped being a balancing act many years ago.

The CEO forces the product team to churn out profitable products otherwise the product team gets fired.

The product team analyzes the market and determines that there are more teenage beat-makers who can’t play an instrument and need push-button AI music-creation than there are composers who need better expression maps (and further, even when those same composers are so angry that they write screeds online about the perpetually shitty expression maps, they still confess that they’ll never stop using the product)… and the product team sees this, and guess what they do?

And why do they do it? Because they’d rather cash their paychecks while reading your complaints on a message board than get fired by YOU in a capitalist chain reaction intended to accelerate your own retirement so you can stop working for those f’ing capitalists one day.

I miss the times where things like stability were pitch points that actually sold units instead of driving the crowd of magpies mad because stability is a not a shiny new feature that can be used by the “push button/receive bacon” crowd.

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