Melodyne ARA and Cubase 12 - what a mess!

I’m trying to get my head around all the problems I am having with Melodyne ARA and Cubase 12. Maybe someone can help me with some things or that helps me to write a mail to the support from… let’s see… Steinberg or Celemony. Whoever will feel responsible for that. And maybe someone else has problems with it, which we can collect here.

  • If Melodyne is set as a track extension, the level meters in the mixing console do not show any signal if they are set to pre-fader.
  • Any change to the tempo, no matter where - even at points where tracks have not yet been edited (i.e. a rit at the end), seems to irretrievably delete all data from Melodyne Ara in all tracks. (You usually don’t change the tempo while recording most of the time. But sometimes it’s necessary. Also, I’m coming back from Logic after many years, so I think sometimes I accidentally use the wrong keyboard shortcut, because sometimes an entry appears in the tempo track which I deliberately didn’t set. And because I do a cappella, I unfortunately have to use pitch correction very early in the recording process. At least that was never a problem with Logic.)
  • Region editing sometimes becomes extremely laggy when using Melodyne as an extension.
  • Re-recording parts of an already edited track sometimes doesn’t work at all. Then either all changes in Melodyne for the track disappear, and/or the whole track is no longer audible. So far, only deleting the extension helps, which means that all edits are gone. Anyway, I haven’t found any other way to solve this.
  • If you use the *.bak files to restore a project after a crash and then rename them, it can happen that all the edits in Melodyne disappear.

In Logic Melodyne ARA was really bad also. But in Cubase it is getting extra annoying. For the moment I do most of my work with Variaudio now, or get back to the old workflow with transfering audio. But… UH! Come on! ARA is here for years now.

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Same here…I also notice annoying pops happening during the playback of an audio track which is affected by Melodyne processing in some cases. It seems to be a great integration to CB, but it comes pretty unusable; I also tried Studio One 6 and I have to say that the integration works really good, everything is smooth and you are not afraid of applying ARA extensions to an audio track like in CB. As already said, ARA is here from years and VariAudio is definitely not the same as Melodyne…Hope Steinberg finally release an update (possibly a free one) that makes me feel comfortable on using CB for everything instead of going back and forth through many different Daws to do my job.

Unfortunately the only way to confidently work with Melodyne ARA is on a clip by clip basis of invoking it and once you are finished your edits then bounce it to turn Melodyne ARA off.
Using it on the whole track is incredibly unpredictable and leaving it on clips is also a minefield of blank audio and glitches.
It needs a whole lot more work so we hope that is being improved in the background

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