Yep, it’s another opinion - no reason for anyone to care, but maybe Steinberg will read it and/or others can chime in. I like a lot of the improvements, while I also feel like they didn’t spend enough time on more workflow and speed improvement (and even took a step backward in that area with some things). Hopefully we’ll see further refinements and improvements with upcoming updates – I’m going to try to be hopeful instead of pessimistic. It’s good but not a full-on winner IMO, with some new features that are very nice but many old issues and workflow problems that are still stuck where they were.
GUI: I love the new transport panel – it’s much clearer for me, but the toolbar at the top feels more cluttered and hard to read. These are things that one will get used to, though (hopefully). The overall visual crispness is a significant improvement, and it’s definitely faster on Mac now…though still not as fast/crisp movement-wise as Cubase on Windows or Pro Tools on the same Mac. Some things like the Export Audio panel are hard to read and arranged very strangely. The colors are fine for me – it imported my 9.5 settings so it doesn’t look very different in that regard. Some third party plugins have messed up GUIs now.
There is not a performance improvement for me. In some 9.5 sessions, it hits the redline a bit sooner than it did in 9.5. So, about the same as 9.5 and just a tad worse at times, on my system anyway.
Many of the new features are great:
- Plug-ins in the Right Zone are great, though you can’t drag them onto actual audio events at this point.
- Edit Mode is very welcome for us composers. Haven’t put it into use yet, though.
- Some things that have been longstanding problems are fixed, such as some of the automation editing bugs and many more.
- Mix Snapshots are great.
- Vari Audio improvements are all great.
- Distroyer is another good distortion option
- I’ve been crash-free so far, which is great. Though 9.5 was mostly stable for me, as well.
- There are other little things that are nice and welcome, can’t remember all of them right now.
Some features, for me, just don’t work well such as:
- Audio Align. It’s almost always a fail here, unfortunately. Not sure if I’m doing something wrong (I followed the instructions to the letter), but the aligning just doesn’t work that well here.
Some things are inexplicably bad decisions, such as:
- The way right click is handled is a great concept but poorly implemented and often requires more fumbling/clicking to get certain things done that I used to be able to with a quick right click.
- Some things are now missing, like volume in the import page, etc.
Some things are still many years overdue, such as:
- Multitrack warping and warping in-place in the project window. These are both so needed it’s not even funny, and unfortunately Cubase is far behind any other DAW here.
- Being able to move channels in the mixer. Still can’t do it.
- We STILL CAN’T SEE THE ACTUAL SEND NAMES IN THE AUTOMATION LANES. ARRGGGHHHH!!! It still only says “Send 1” etc., instead of the actual name that we’ve used for the FX Track. This is really fun when you regularly have mixes with 20 - 30 sends!
I just can’t understand why this very basic DAW requirement is still an issue after so many years. - We still don’t have basic controls like Volume and Pan in the headers of all tracks (as an option in the Track Controls Settings). Having to click on the track then navigate over to the the inspector then click again (possibly a couple of times if it’s on the wrong Inspector page) to do a very simple thing like change the volume or pan on a track is archaic and needs to be brought up to the level of all other DAWs. If you haven’t used another DAW with this (all of them that I’ve tried/used) then you might not get how much it makes things quicker on a regular basis.
- No multitool
- Bezier curves for mods in the MIDI editor aren’t there