I use Cubase & Studio One myself (one by need for a few features and one cause I prefer it)… but I’ve seen few UI’s that impressed me as much as FL Studio’s.
At first glance, I thought “holy crap it’s actually modular!.. AND SHINY!!” lol
…but then I realized that Cubase is actually pretty modular as well. You can customize a TON in Cubase. But is it easy to? I think that’s my biggest problem. I can’t drag and drop toolbar items to reorder them. Is it fair to expect that? Maybe not. But do I? Sort of. A rule in UI is that people bring outside experiences in. If I feel great about UI features in one program, I’ll feel frustrated using another. It feels like being forced to use Windows 3.1 to edit a 4K video. It’s TOTALLY unfair. But it’s inevitable.
There’s so much in Cubase that’s dialog-box heavy (and Dorico too, IMHO). And while I appreciate the desire to have a DAW that can do anything… the biggest frustration point I’ve ever had in Cubase is that it takes too many instructions to tell it what I’m trying to do. There’s other eye candy and bonus features I like in other DAWs. But EVERY program has it’s winning features. What every program doesn’t have, is an intuitive way to access them. DP’s chunks are 10,000x better than every other DAW for film scoring. Nothing could beat the modular sequences. But the DAW is at least the most insanely stupid difficult DAW out there to use.
Cubase isn’t hard to use. I’d say a lot of it “just naturally” makes sense even. It’s just the number of steps to do things that gets me.
A few things that make for more steps:
1 - Dots instead of Curves (piano roll CC lanes)
2 - Dots instead of curves (tempo lane)
3 - The tempo lane in general. The two edit modes, which one is default, and the grid feel very odd. I have to either use it with scalpel-like precision or not use it. I can’t describe this perfectly. It’s just very scalpel to me. Very capable! Just very scalpel.
4 - I can’t add 3 automation lanes to 20 instruments at once. There’s no macro way to do it.
5 - I can’t re-color 5 tracks at once. It’s one-by-one.
Note that #5 isn’t a big deal every day, but is when I build a template. When do I build templates? On day one using the program. So when I returned from Studio One, my first thought was literally “Really Cubase? You struggle with this basic thing?” EVEN THOUGH the very reason I switched back was due to a limitation in Studio One (rewire limitations, far more severe than mass track coloring), it still feels like I had to switch back to “the old clunker” simply cause Studio One can recolor 1,000 tracks at once… Again, that’s not fair to Cubase, but sometimes the littlest things annoy you the most. No program gets everything right, obviously. But honestly I’d rather the basic things be more right than the bigger things. The SECOND I can accomplish the tasks (features I need) with a program, the only thing I care about at all is workflow. Cubase can pretty much accomplish anything. It’s known for that very reason. So if the number of steps of ‘the little things’ could be reduced in several key fundamental areas… I honestly think that would go miles towards making Cubase a favorite DAW again.
I intend this to be helpful, not damaging in any way.
-Sean
CORRECTION:
It was pointed out to me that you CAN in fact recolor many tracks at once. You just can’t do it from the inspector pane on the left. I get why. There’s a logic to that. But if I have multiple tracks selected, I’d rather the track inspector behave according to multiple tracks wherever it can. For instance, it’s super easy to add 200 MIDI tracks and have the channels auto assign in ascending order. It’s a life saver… until I have to reassign all of them later. After adding all my automation lanes by hand (no macro option dang it) and adding transformer plugins to various tracks… finding out I have to reassign tracks is a nightmare. To be fair, reassigning is tedious in every DAW. But to my original point about the inspector… if I could highlight multiple tracks and use the same inspector to EDIT multiple tracks… using editing features DESIGNED for multiple tracks, then I’d feel far more at home in Cubase. This isn’t a complaint about what I have in front of me. It’s just a thought about what it could turn into. Cheers
