Coming from reaper I have been used to ultra stability, ultra fast editing and batch export of regions is a godsend!
In December i purchased Cubase pro 8, the first 2 versions were unusable, constant crashing and slow laggy interface, but since 8.0.10 things have been awesome, the interface feels great and I haven’t had a crash since.
I do lots of live recording, hours upon hours of live multitrack sessions, and in reaper its real quick to edit, trim, fade, create a region and at the end you can export all those regions (not like with cubase where you need to sit at the pc… wait for one to finish, then start the next… its so lame for long projects!)
Cubases’s strengths are when im doing a single song, with lots of audio/vsti/midi etc… it is then unbeatable! it beats reaper in every way.
OK I bought reaper for the measly sum of £35 or something silly years ago… and it has been a bombproof solution for ultra stable live recording and super fast editing/bouncing.
Buying Cubase wasnt for me to replace reaper, as I had lots of older nuendo/cubase projects and some clients bring cubase projects, so its useful for me to have, at a much larger cost of £400 or so, I have yet to get cubase to recoup any costs that I paid for it.
Which brings me on to the subject of this thread.
This weekend I had a project for a Three Piece band, who wanted to live record 4 songs, then overdub vocals and some guitars…
(10 channels of drums, 2 channels of bass, 2 channels of guitar, 1 live vocal feed) total of 15 live channels…
The first 2 songs went down fine (took a few takes of each) but halfway through the 3rd song and then at random I kept getting “audio dropout detected, recording stopped”
this is recording to the same system that reaper can for hours on end record 28 channels+ without a hitch, so why is cubase randomly bugging out with only 15 channels after a few minutes.
Luckily I run RME durec (which runs a safety copy to the front port of a fireface UFX) so the tracks cubase failed on were not lost, but due to cubase, much time was lost having to import and sort that data to the correct channels
Sods law when cubase dropped out the first time, was when the band did a perfect take of a song that had taken 6 or 7 attempts already… so if i would said “sorry guys that songs not recorded” i think i would of been shown the door.
My feeling that Cubase 8.0.10 was “ready” was obviously wrong! I wished now that I would of started the whole project with Reaper
Anyway luckily it was only 4 songs and eventually got them down safe.
Then came to editing… horrible lag while resizing the starts of items, resizing the ends was instant, cubase actually hung once and needed to ctrl & alt & del and loaded the last saved project.
2 BASIC things and cubase cant do it reliably! (audio recording… audio event editing)
mixing was a breeze, I love the new Mixer, and cubases integration with Softubes console 1 is another reason that brought me back to cubase.
From the prices of these 2 applications you would guess that one is a pro audio app and the other is an amateur’s app
Cubase Pro 8 - approx £400
Reaper 4.x - Approx £35 (small business license)
But I know I still do not trust cubase for important projects, in this instance RME’s durec saved the day. I wont be using cubase for any live projects, and will just keep it for midi/mixing work possibly