Is this the year I finally go 100% Nuendo? Countdown to Nuendo 15 begins

Nuendo
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I’ve got one license for Cubase 15, and one license for Nuendo 14. I use both and need both (long story, I need two licenses of Cubendo, won’t bore you with details), and right now I’m in the weird yearly limbo in between releases waiting for Nuendo 15 to be released.

Every year the dilemma has been: why don’t I just go 100% Nuendo? And each year I think I’m about to do it, I promise myself I’m gonna do it, but then I end up upgrading Cubase anyway because I get sucked into the new features, then I upgrade Nuendo later and reach peace and harmony again… So I pretty much fail each year to go all in 100% with Nuendo and it’s an annoying situation for 3-4 months.

This year has been more frustrating than usual. My impatience in upgrading Cubase has now made it impossible for me to easily use BOTH feature sets because for some projects I need BOTH sets of new features: Nuendo 14’s Adaptive Background Attenuation and Dialog Transcription features (although I hope they improve the dialog transcription in N15!), and I also need Cubase 15’s great workflow improvements and things like the new modulators, etc… which will obviously all show up in Nuendo 15.

Normally it’s not too bad, but this time it’s causing some issues because what I need right now is Nuendo 15 to cover all the bases in the same projects… not the weird workflow I currently have. I need just ONE app, not two. But I still need two licenses (again, long story), so the question remains this year – do I finally go all in this year with Nuendo?

Obviously this is a first-world kind of problem, and I don’t want to make light of serious things going on in the world, or even real problems people have in this forum. Obviously my issue is *nothing* in the grand scheme of things. And I’m very grateful for all these excellent tools.

I also totally understand the delay between releases, so I’m not complaining about the delay actually. I’m all for the extra time for stability, and polishing the extra Nuendo features, etc… It’s MY problem since I can’t yet seem to exercise the self discipline to wait for Nuendo each year, and I started projects in Cubase 15 earlier than usual too. So I brought this on myself.

But will this be the year? I think so. I hope so. I really can’t handle this limbo period anymore, so I think I have to just cross over 100% and say goodbye to Cubase. I will just have to deal with missing out on the new features in Cubase for 3-4+ months. I admit that sounds kind of lame of me to say, how pathetic is it that I can’t seem to wait for 3-4 months? :roll_eyes:

In order to force myself to stick with this decision, I’ll have to upgrade my Nuendo 14 to 15, then ALSO crossgrade Cubase 15 to Nuendo 15, to eliminate the temptation when Cubase 16 comes out. (Again, I still need two licenses, otherwise, I’d just sell my Cubase 15 license and be done.)

This is the year, right? :crossed_fingers: :maracas: :man_dancing: :smiling_face_with_sunglasses:

Help me out here… if you dealt with this same situation, or if you have some bit of wisdom from some ancient thinker or philosopher that might help me out, please let me know. :thinking:

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I think there are many who, prior to the demise of the USB-eLicenser, possessed multiple licenses for various products on multiple USB-eLicensers, in order to facilitate using several devices in different locations and scenarios without having to risk bringing the dongle on the road. For example, I have every version and edition of Cubase since v4, so my account is a mess now, with many redundant and duplicate “soft” licenses, and no way to consolidate or maintain their value. Oh well, they served me well.

One of the things that stops me from going full Nuendo is the difficulty in exchanging (entire) projects with other Cubase-using collaborators because Nuendo cannot create a .cpr file. Don’t ask – swapping the entire Cubase project is the only way that works flawlessly in my (our) experience. I’m still waiting on DAWProject support in Cubendo to improve (e.g. handling MIDI-only projects).

In your case, and until successful treatments for GAS and FOMO are developed, I think selling the Cubase 15 license after upgrading to Nuendo 15 is the way to go. That’s what I would do if not for the issue outlined above.

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Agreed, good point, I have found this problematic in certain scenarios. I’ll have to do some more testing, dig deeper, to push the envelope. I tend to start projects in Cubase, and then migrate to Nuendo, and it’s been 99.5%+ fine. Except right now due to the feature gap between C15 and N14, I’m having headaches and have frustrating workarounds that slow me down. But I do need to think about this issue more, and I do work with other Cubase users… yikes… This might be the reason I stick with my current approach of having both Cubase and Nuendo. Hmmmm…

And as for DAWproject, agreed, we’re still in early days. I just hope the devs on all sides don’t grow weary of it and let it slip into oblivion. It’s such a great idea, with a good start.

I can’t do that since I need two licenses (long story). But yes, this is what I would do if I only needed one license. (EDIT: do you mean that my Cubase 15 license is still independent and sellable after I crossgrade it to Nuendo? I thought there was a restriction on the Cubase license after crossgrading to Nuendo, but maybe I’m misremembering.)

As for GAS and FOMO, I don’t know if either are the root of my ailment, but that’s exactly what I’d say if I did have that kind of problem. :innocent:

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BTW, thanks, @MrSoundman !!! :sweat_smile: - my decision is on hold until I do some extensive testing. I hadn’t properly considered the situation with working back and forth with other Cubase users, including clients. Glad you responded! My own projects have flowed very well from Cubase to Nuendo (when on the same version), but I now need to re-evaluate all the scenarios I deal with. Maybe it’s been a stroke of luck that I didn’t commit myself 100% to Nuendo just yet. Seems I might need to stick with both of them after all, to play it safe for edge cases. I just have to check all the pipelines and workflows instead of fumbling myself into a potentially very frustrating situation. :grimacing:

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FWIW, I do the exact same thing every year. I read your post with my voice. @Reco29 and have discussed this very process multiple times, and I think I too said to myself “Self, just go native Nudeno and be done with it.” And then C15 rolls around and the upgrade is like $79 or something, so I just do it anyway. Also, same frustration around 15 that you have, too.

This may get some pushback, but I’ve kind of been treating Cubase as a subscription model. I mean, if we want the next version + fixes, we have to pay for it every year. And if we skip a year, well, we have to pay for the year we skipped to be “current.” So I think I’m just going to keep doing that. 79$ is pretty cheap for the year. I don’t really have an answer, but I just wanted to let you know I’m right there with you and feel the same way. :slight_smile:

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:rofl: That’s awesome. I appreciate it, and I feel less “alone” now, haha!

Yeah, this release cycle has been more annoying than usual, since C15 was – for me – an excellent release, and I want those features in Nuendo ASAP! Let’s go!

But after reading @MrSoundman’s post, I realized I better do some serious testing on all my pipelines before I go 100% Nuendo. I might have to stick with both. Last thing I need is to screw up something with a collaborator who exclusively uses Cubase and not realize it before it’s too late.

It’s the LITTLE things that matter. For my own projects, the risk level is a lot lower, but for someone else’s projects, it has to be 100% safe going back and forth. Even if I accidentally use a Nuendo-only feature on a Cubase-Nuendo back-and-forth collaboration, if it causes even the slightest confusion or headache, then it’s not worth it. I just haven’t scrutinized my own projects closely enough to see if there’s ever been a hiccup, and I’ve kept them mostly unidirectional Cubase → Nuendo… not tons of back and forth. :nerd_face:

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For me, this is the year I say goodbye to Nuendo and switch to using Reaper for all new projects.

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@arimus This is something I’m reluctantly considering myself too. Were there any resources you found to help with the switch? Last time I opened Reaper I just kept trying to do things how I’d do them in Nuendo

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The Reaper forums may be a good source of such information.

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@arimus @EdGray Hi guys, Reaper has been my secondary DAW for many many years, and it’s an outstanding DAW. Not that I want to diverge too much from the topic of this thread :laughing: , I’ll just comment on Reaper from the perspective of a long-time user of both Cubendo and Reaper (and actually many other DAWs too) because it’s a legitimate parenthetical issue that I’ve contemplated many times as it relates to this main topic and other things I care about (i.e. Linux).

Basically, Reaper has been my secondary DAW for many years for good reason.

Correction, each time I’ve tried (and failed) to migrate 100% to Linux, then Reaper became my primary DAW, as it’s the best general-purpose DAW on Linux, bar none. I love Bitwig too BTW, and in those cases, Bitwig then became my secondary DAW. Linux has not panned out for me yet (I’ve talked about this in other threads), I love it, and you can absolutely do pro audio work on Linux, etc., etc., etc.. I just needed other tools which are still not yet available on Linux, so I had to come back. But let’s not go too far afield with Linux in this thread! :sweat_smile:

Anyway, I still keep Reaper around for many reasons, as it is indeed the DAW I would switch to if Steinberg bit the dust or succumbed to the subscription model nightmare, or if Windows became totally intolerable to me (which it almost has at different times in the past). Then it would be game over for me, and I would switch to Reaper. I currently look at Reaper as my “DAW of last resort” should something “apocalyptic” happen, and I’ll regrettably have to move to Reaper as primary DAW. Then, I fear, the end of the world might be upon us, so “Reaper” would be an appropriately-named DAW anyway.

The reason why Reaper never made it to “primary” DAW status for me (other than for Linux!), is simple: It is missing way too many features that I personally use and frankly need in Cubase/Nuendo. WAY too many.

Now keep in mind that I emphasize the words that “I personally use and frankly need” because all of us are different, and we all have different preferences, needs and workflows for our projects. So don’t get me wrong here, Reaper may actually be perfect for you and fit you like a glove, once you get through the annoying learning curve. Or, it may fall short in many ways like it does for me, and it gets relegated to “backup tier” status (except on Linux! :wink: ).

So without diverting this thread too much more, I’ll just list some things that come to mind that are “special” about Reaper to me and why I still keep it around as backup DAW. Other people will have a different list:

  1. It works great on Linux, which I love. :partying_face:
  2. Perfect click-and-drag ripple editing - I’ve been begging Steinberg for years to add this to Cubendo. WaveLab has it in the montage mode, just waiting for Steinberg to finally implement this in Cubendo too! :folded_hands:
  3. Brilliant subprojects feature (nesting projects, fantastic for sound design and even film cue management). :brain:
  4. Outstanding depth of Reaper community - I’ve never had a question I couldn’t get answered. Just ignore the trolls. :+1:
  5. Unrivaled, insanely powerful scripting capabilities, nothing comes close if you want to go deep deep deep. There is a steep learning curve, though, and it’s clunky, and you may not get anything else done with your actual work since you’re wasting time on going deep, but yes, it’s oh-so-powerful. This also means that Reaper is insanely customizable. Which is a blessing AND and curse. :grimacing:
  6. Superb CPU efficiency and lightweight footprint. :rocket:
  7. Some clever workflow concepts having to do with tracks, automation, routing, plugin management, and the way it handles clips and FX. Very flexible stuff. Maybe too flexible. :thinking:
  8. Last but not least, my son now uses it since he wants to migrate to Linux. Smart kid. :nerd_face:

So that’s a very compelling list of positives, right? Yes it is, and I love all those things about Reaper. However, FOR ME, it is STILL missing so many crucial things that Cubendo has, I can’t even begin to list them. All those things above do NOT compensate for what is lost by switching, for me. BUT for you, it might be a different story.

And I also haven’t listed the negatives of using Reaper, and to me, there are many. I won’t give a detailed list so I don’t fully derail this thread, but I’ll just mention the big thing that stands out to me personally: After all these years using Reaper, after going through the learning curves and even exploring the advanced scripting side, I STILL find Reaper to be oddly unpleasant to use in many cases (special exceptions are the positives listed above!), and how frustratingly handicapped I feel when composing music in comparison to Cubendo. There are specific examples, but not needed to list here. YMMV of course.

Since I compose and produce music, do post, as well as do a lot of dialog-heavy projects, Cubendo really shines in areas that I need it. Reaper is – for me – hugely unsatisfactory for composing and creative production, and falls short in many areas in post.

However, Reaper does shine for core editing and mixing tasks, in particular, as long as it doesn’t get into or overlap with creative production aspects IMO. Cubendo does great in those areas too, of course, just different benefits, workflows, that may boil down to personal preferences.

And Reaper does shine for dialog-heavy projects, BUT with Nuendo’s adaptive background attenuation and dialog transcription features, I find it’s about a wash either way for me overall today, and thus tend to do the project in Nuendo due to the other great workflows in Nuendo. Nuendo is really just missing click-and-drag ripple editing in those kinds of workflows, for me.

Reaper also shines for sound design, and the subprojects feature is a superpowered genius tool once you wrap your brain around how it can help in those situations. BUT again, Cubendo has really been shining for sound design lately too in other ways, such as the addition of the modulators, and so forth. So I tend to start sound design projects in Cubendo now too.

So in each case, I reach for Cubendo first. But believe me, I know Reaper, and it’s good, and I could run my whole business on it if I swallowed the bitter parts. :squinting_face_with_tongue:

Now if I mainly just edited, mixed and mastered, with a very LOW emphasis on composition and production, then I would probably switch to Reaper, and frankly, I’d already be on 100% Linux by now too. But since I need those workflows for composition and creative production, I reach for Cubendo. Your situation might be very different of course.

My intention isn’t to persuade you to go one direction or another. I use both. Reaper is my #2. I’ve tried phasing it out, but it comes back every time. I tried deleting it, but I end up reinstalling it. It’s always there as #2 and I just have accepted it. It’s quirky, it’s often unpleasant (to me), but it is good, and no one should be dismissing it without serious consideration. But does it really replace the full feature set and all the pro workflows of Nuendo? No. Of course not. But will it fit YOUR projects and YOUR preferences and YOUR needs? Maybe.

Cheers!

Now I return back to my Nuendo 15 dilemma!

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I would argue the Max for Live development environment in Live would “come close,” albeit, in a different dimension. I regard Live as you do Reaper (which I own, but don’t use because each venture resulted in the same “can already do” outcome). And not just he built-in capabilities, but when coupled with the full Max development ecosystem, one could argue that you could write your own DAW in a way. Not diverting from your excellent points, just pointing out that in my opinion, there is indeed a comparable product, and one that exists in a product that potentially serves and entirely different set of requirements with very little overlap. I can’t compare Reaper to Live, but I can compare Reaper to Nuendo in core capabilities, though certainly different components. I love Bitwig as well, and the patch/grid system is remarkable, but it’s not Max.

Which brings me around to your greater point. I’m relatively new to SB, only starting with C12, then purchasing C13 and N13, and everything since. You’ve still got me thinking about dropping Cubase entirely, and just going with Nuendo. That said, I’ll never drop Live, and it will continue to be my front-end “creative, sound design, composition” DAW. Nuendo will be engineering back-end which I still find to be unrivaled (for my own personal reasons). Now bring in GA6, which I just purchased. I can use GA6 anywhere, and through I think the Live Drum Rack has major advantages over GA6 (and GA in general) I think the curated kits in GA are better (materially better). When building out my control room and overall mixing environment in Nuendo, I adopted a dependency on the Steinberg Bass Manager - it did just what I needed. When I went back to a Cubase Pro project - lo and behold - no Bass Manager. Sad emoji. It was not cool. So I ended up moving bass management to BMS instead at a cost just to have consistency BECAUSE I created an environment when I “needed” both Cubase and Nuendo - just like you described above. Bass management in Live is a different animal, and there’s no Control Room equivalent, which is another reason Live is my front-end to Nuendo.

All of this is just to say “it really depends.” I think fact that you were thinking this all through made me think it all through again, and planned, thoughtful approaches to our environments is nothing but good. That’s a long ‘thank you’ for bringing all this up. Reviewing it all again has be leaning back to “Nuendo Only” going forward, and had you not brought it up, the “details that matter” like Bass Management forcing me to not only change the way I worked, but to re-train my ears and environment to accommodate a different solution. It all matters, and the consequences are not trivial.

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I felt seen reading this and agree with many of your points. I float between Pro Tools, Nuendo and Reaper, and as much as I want a single unified approach for my various workflows, I find that each has its own use, quirks and issues.

After many years of using Reaper, I feel composing music with it (midi in particular) to be a pain in the ass. It’s great for sound design and as a live digital tape machine. We use it to track VO’s in our booth and for remote live show recording. That’s about it. The other glaring issue for me is that I spent so much time customizing it that I didn’t get anything else done. Customization is Reaper’s best asset and its biggest curse in the wrong hands (or mindset).

Try as I might, Nuendo hasn’t gelled with me for Post (yet), but is fantastic for music composition. There is so much there for composers.

The tale of the tape for me right now is, Pro Tools for post and Nuendo for everything else. Reaper is the tool that I bring out for specialized tasks.

As always, YMMV

tg

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Haha! :rofl: Agreed. It is.

Bingo. With you there too.

All good points! :+1:

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All good points, and agreed! And re: Max for Live, agreed too, I probably should have qualified my statement about Reaper’s scripting in the context of a “traditional linear” DAW, but then again, what passes for “traditional” and “linear” today is up for grabs!

But yeah, Max for Live is a powerhouse, and while we’re at it talking about overlapping kinds of tools, we should in all fairness remember Reaktor on another end of the spectrum, and as you mentioned Bitwig’s “The Grid,” which is great too, albeit not of the depth of Max for Live (yet). Personally, I think if Bitwig exposed more of the engine behind the grid, we’d have something really epic to play with. Maybe for Bitwig 7 or 8? And we can probably include other kinds of tools on the market that don’t get a lot of press, but are immensely powerful… Blue Cat’s Plug’n Script comes to mind too… it’s a full MIDI and audio scripting tool that uses AngelScript to create your own plugins. Anyway, lots of cool stuff out there in the general domain we’re talking about, but now I digress…

However, one could make the argument that Reaper’s scripting capabilities are perhaps uniquely powerful in the coding sense though, since they cut across so many areas from extremely complex macros in Reaper all the way down to DSP code, WITH so many programming options/languages too… from Python and Lua scripting, to of course the custom highly-performant EEL2 language (similar to C and Javascript) to build JSFX plugins that can do anything, etc., and essentially the optimized performance of such JSFX plugins so they play very nicely with the efficient multithreaded engine of Reaper, and so on and on. And that’s all built-in to Reaper at an insanely low price so everyone with $60 can use it, compared to far more expensive tools. It’s frankly a bit overwhelming when you contemplate the options and depth. One can lose oneself in the range of options and never come back out to do music again.

BUT your point is well taken re: Max for Live and its enormous power. And I have nothing but respect for that.

Thank YOU for saying that, because I honestly felt borderline like an idiot for posting this thread in the first place. It seems that others are contemplating similar things, though, and I appreciate all the thoughts. Lots to chew on, and I now realize I need to run a bunch more tests before I make a decision in my case! Cheers! :smiling_face_with_sunglasses:

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I think if I needed two separate license and I had to jump back and forth between them I would just update to all Nuendo and keep both of those licenses up to date. I can’t imagine trying to jump back and forth between two products where one gets updated and then the little things you get used to in the latest Cubase are now missing when you open Nuendo. I moved over to Nuendo during the height of the pandemic because I was getting more audio post work since I work mostly in live theatre and obviously during that time a lot of us pivoted to other things or worked on “virtual theatre”, etc.. I’m glad I made the jump and although a lot of the post production work of working in theatre has gone away I am still glad I moved to Nuendo. Those extra post tools still come in handy even for work that will eventually be for a live audience. Do I get FOMO once in a while when I see the new Cubase update? Sure. But I also look at the bright side, by the time Nuendo gets updated a lot of the bugs have been fixed. I let the Cubase user group be my beta testers so I don’t have to. The other good thing is that by the time Nuendo gets it’s update, there are lot of videos and how to type things out there for the new features that are shared with Cubase. And we know we will be getting all of those and more in the next Nuendo. So I feel like when the update does come I can hit the ground running so to speak with some of the new features because they have been talked about a lot by that time. I understand how you want those cool new things right now. But just be a bit patient would be my recommendation. And just go all Nuendo and that way both of your licenses are the same, you’ll never have one that has some feature the other does not. I think being patient would be a small price to pay for a lot less hassle. I have enough problems with the fact that the keyboard shortcuts and the mouse scroll wheel behavior is completely different between Nuendo and Wavelab. That’s enough confusion and changing gears for my brain, let alone also throwing Cubase vs Nuendo in there as well. Just my opinion.

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I have an unactivated Nuendo 14 license, since I am still on Windows 10, with Extended Updates, and using Nuendo 13 as my DAW.

The Visibility Inspector, in the Key Editor, is all I need to get my projects up to spec, composition wise, so I will continue on that least until Cubase 15 is completely stable.

The V14 cycle, brought a new score editor, which is a big deal so I will wait until I have my MIDI data prepared before I start working on score elements, in the new version.

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