look at the arranger from cubase. Its a simple version of live.
i read it somewhere. Now cannot find the article.
other way around
he/she/they/ went from steinberg to ableton
You mean the arranger track and what you can do with it?
Thats definitely one of Cubases messier features. In that case: good that he left.
So sell your Cubase license and go buy Ableton Live. I own both, no way in hell would Live ever replace Cubase here.
Can’t even fast forward or rewind through your arrangement. They must really love clicking mice there…
Ableton Live (with its Session View) was released some years before Cubase introduced the Arranger (or Play Order) Track.
I think either you or the author of the article you read got something mixed up.
Ableton has a developer connection to Native Instruments and to Bitwig.
Steinberg has a developer connection to Presonus Studio One, veery loosely to Propellerheads and veeeeeeery loosely to ex-Emagic now Apple.
Here’s the nature of the problem. It’s money. It goes like this:
- Steinberg has to sell new updates periodically.
- Each update needs marketable features that can convince people to update and increase the userbase
- This is required because shareholders (Yamaha Corp) want to believe their investment is improving their bottom line
- Steinberg has to figure out what a marketable “new” feature is while also trying to fix past issues
- Steinberg is unable to put their full effort into fixing the DAW because their engineering and design team has to integrate a new feature their product research suggests will increase sales by X amount
- As a result issues that can be improved are not improved because they are not marketable enough and they can’t afford to have their design+engineering team focus on those issues.
I write this because I previously worked at a company that went through the same problem. It’s a common problem for many businesses.
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I partly agree with you.
I’ve been a Steinberg users since 1984.
Steinberg has always been very innovative and they have literally paved the way for music production - along with others - since then. I’m writing all this here because I don’t necessarily see Cubase as a DAW - Digital Audio Workstation. I see it as a Advanced Music Production System - and that’s what Steinberg calls it. And that is, for me, much more than a DAW.
Kind regards,
Hjortur Blondal
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Back in the 70s I was able to get a lot of song writing done with a cassette tape player.
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Yes, if you have songs to write you can do it with pen and paper and playing through the ideas again and again. I did a lot with cassettes too before ever getting my hands on multitrack machines. We have all the options available to us today (and have had for some time) yet human expectations seem inexhaustable/unquenchable.
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I agree with you, that marketable features such as VSTs (while lots of users want improved workflow and function instead of new VSTs.) are important. I’m convinced 95% of Cubase users seem clueless about what they actually already have because they are trained to look outside the DAW.
Until the workflow and function improves, you attempt to create work-arounds with PLE, LE, Workspaces, Metagrid, Auto-Hot Key etc.
User complains about no track mono-stereo switch which as of C12 does not exist. I created a macro so with 1 button the focused track goes from stereo to mono. Another button for mono to stereo. Yet the user still complains because he doesn’t have time to create a macros and besides…that should have been included in Cubase 20 years ago and he’s a power user, he’s got clients, and he’s a 30-year IT guy and knows how simple it would be…etc.
Back to VSTs, look at dynamic side chain in Cubase Frequency. .There is no 3rd party replacement for Frequency Specifically, multiple side chain sources. We all know about multiple side chain inputs, but multiple side chain sources.
Skip to 11:05 and take notes if necessary…because at first, judging by comments it seems some don’t get it.
The idea that 3rd party VSTs are “better” than the included Cubase VSTs used to be mostly true. With a fair amount of exceptions, I don’t think you can say that today. And with each new release a portion of Cubase VSTs become improved.
Cubase can’t be marketed by a special version called “We fixed everything.” Part of the marketing must be VSTs. Every developer knows what sells. Follow the money.
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Well luckily no one end user is making the call for the development team about what features, and functionality will or will not be prioritized.
What one person thinks is important someone else will perhaps never use. That’s just about true of every DAW. The term itself has come to mean almost any piece of software that records and renders audio in almost any manner.
All the MIDI functionality you discuss, such as the Key Editor and using Vienna Ensemble Pro, someone else probably couldn’t care less about.
Most of their plug ins are in fact are a pretty basic tool set that is included in almost any DAW or audio editor. Which ones would you suggest that they get rid of? I certainly don’t use them all, not even by a long shot, but they all seem to be tools that many people make use of. One could easily say that all the MIDI functionality is just “inspirational” tools as well.
From your description of issues with your Streamdeck, to me that seems much more like an issue that is as much about how a Streamdeck operates as Cubase. If I want to switch windows, I just press alt and tab and select the one I want. Never have much of an issue.
With all due respect, almost all of your comments that I’ve read so far seem to point to the fact that you would benefit from learning the Cubase keyboard shortcut commands. Maybe creating some of your own custom commands, since Cubase is about as flexible in how you set it up as any DAW I’ve ever used. And perhaps learn about creating yourself some macros.
Yeah macros are fun,
I have about 200 setup and over 400 PLE and LE Presets with about 300 Generic Remote entries. And 100 + Expression Maps. All of which were excruciatingly painful to create with literally hundreds of thousands (maybe a million) mouse clicks.
In this business it is very common to create entries that increase incrementally. Like 10 entries in a Generic Remote of say CC#0 to CC#9. All of which will be triggering similar commands like LE or PLE Presets. But, 32 years after Cubase was created, we can only create one entry at a time by:
- clicking the device column,
- clicking on Command,
- clicking on the Channel /Category column,
- searching for Process Logical Preset,
- clicking on it
- clicking on the Value/Action column
- searching for the LE preset.
- clicking on the preset
That is 1 of 10.
Isn’t a Duplicate button marketable enough for Steinberg to implement?.
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Check out Cubase’s’ rad disappearing act. I get this about 20 times a session. Hence this thread’s existence.
So we could agree that the poor window management has zero to do with Stream Deck?
I see what you’re talking about now. I’m not exactly certain of what I’m seeing in your videos. But I can see how it would be annoying. I don’t really have these issues or I have not run into them. Most of the time I see issues with windows not popping up over the top of applications I have maximized on the screen, but that is across many applications and seems to be more of a Windows issues than a Steinberg one.
I’ll still have to disagree that there is somehow so much time being sucked away from bug fixes in creating plug-ins or updating them that it’s systematically harming the over all development of Steinberg products. I’m not saying they are perfect, not by any stretch. But I’ve seen far worse and in fact that’s one of the main reasons I’ve become a loyal Steinberg user over the past few years.
I’d much rather see some sort of effort to have matching work flows and common short cuts across their various applications. If you really want an exercise in frustration, just try jumping back and forth between Cubase/Nuendo and Wavelab. The mouse wheel works completely differently. How you move around the timeline and select audio and place your cursor is very different. Even basics like zoom in and out with your mouse work differently, if memory serves some functions are exactly the opposite, so I end up doing exactly the opposite of what I’m trying to do in Wavelab.
So I agree there are certainly a lot of workflow things that could be worked on. I just doubt that plug in development is why they don’t get done. And I can also understand that what may be important to you or I, someone else couldn’t care less about. That was kind of my main point.
This screenshot may offer a clue as to why Cubase’s window management is so inconsistent. No other app AFAIK does this when shutting down Windows. Cubase behaves like 8 apps.
i got both and many more arrangers like akai force, mpc live, linnstrument etc. arrangers agogo
thanks for sharing