And…I have no clear sense of where things are headed with Nuendo.
The real revolution is beginning to happen on the hardware side, and Steinberg is not tapping into it. With the Mac mini, we can suddenly achieve 500 tracks without relying on a Fairlight Audio Accelerator card, which used a brute-force engine optimized for high-end TV post-production. That system allowed a single PC to handle massive projects, with up to 2,000 mono tracks at 48 kHz, real-time EQ and dynamics, up to six plugins per track, and 256 channels of MADI I/O.
Now, that PC remains unused.
Similarly, the new M5 Pro can effectively replace multiple HDX DSP cards. This shift will allow DAWs to scale far more efficiently. But Avid Atleast knows and communicates where they are heading.
We have already started integrating speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and background scoring internally. We even created a tutorial demonstrating how to implement these workflows.
I am not allergic to AI; it is just another tool I use to get work done faster.
Imagine that. In nine months, you could be running Suno locally on a soapbox-sized aluminum box, drawing just 80 watts without the need for air conditioning. AceStudioAI has already released its full AI model as open source. What you do with it remains entirely in-house.
I hope so. These capabilities are no longer experimental or optional; they will be table stakes. The key question is whether future versions can build meaningfully on V15’s foundation once on-device AI, hardware acceleration, and seamless, integrated workflows become standard. If the innovation gap widens, the platform risks falling behind more agile ecosystems that are already adapting to these shifts.
I really hope the features they showed in the premiere aren’t the only ones coming. I understand we get the Cubase features as well, but that is a different team I assume. This looked more like a 0.5 update. We’d have to wait another full year to get any of the requested features.
Dialogue Transcription launched in the previous version is still so basic compared to what Protools implemented and sadly no updates through the year to improve it unfortunately.
Not very happy with the communication by the dev team in here and the yearly update cycle where nothing is added until a full new version is released.
Do you mean what am I referring to when I write “at the rate things are progressing”? What I mean by that is that the competition is moving in certain directions and in my mind there probably are certain things that need to be addressed to stay competitive. I could list several things here but I’ve started multiple feature request threads and you can just read through them to see some of what I think is essential (though I didn’t specify which features are essential in my opinion). But I think the short version and bottom line is that I can’t tell really where feature requests go, if they are heard, and that includes not just new ones but also expanding or changing existing ones, and the same for “issues”. Therefore I can’t anticipate where things are going.
Look, 160 isn’t that much money if you’re making a living off of using Nuendo, so that’s not the issue. The problem is (for example) that I buy v14, wait over a month to use it so that issues are ironed out, do my first job which includes me (after midnight) going through hundreds of events that got f-ed up by DOP which is somehow unpredictably worse in v14 compared to v13, reporting it, hearing someone say “oh yeah, they know”, then hearing nothing for months. You literally have to tag Steinberg people to get some response and then be on them like a hound to get some interaction, and even then it is unsatisfactory to me. So here I am not knowing if or when that will be addressed, and I actually built my workflow on top of this functionality, so it’s disrupted in v14. Now add that I have to use a 3rd party app to import AAFs multiple times per month, and since I use and pay for PT to get that done, and Steinberg again say absolutely nothing about improving AAF import why should I bother paying for v15 when I can just use the other software instead? I’m already paying for it, right?
@TimoWildenhain I think a lot of goodwill with the community could be easily regained by interacting with the folks on here who are desperately pointing out workflow-killing bugs over and over again to try and improve the product they love with zero acknowledgement from anyone at Steinberg.
A good case in point is the post directly above yours.
Would a subscription mean decade old bugs get addressed and fixed? This is a genuine question - if a subscription model is the only viable financial model to allow Steinberg to address these issues then that’s a case some of us may be willing to hear!
In all transparency, I’ve been treating my yearly upgrade costs as a “subscription” anyway. If I want bug fixes beyond the current release - even without feature sets - I have to pay every year as it is. And if I choose not to upgrade one year, then I have to pay the difference anyway if I then upgrade over a skipped version. I would pay the subscription even if I didn’t get the yearly version if it meant more meaningful features and the modernization of modules like MediaBay which today I completely ignore.
Not that my opinion necessarily matters, but I’d already made the decision not to purchase Cubase again, but rather, just settle on Nuendo. If you have an overarching subscription model that covered everything, I’d buy that if the price made sense even if you skipped year of releases in order to catch up. Just my thoughts.
Please no subscription model. PLEASE. Steinberg is one of the last few refuges against the awful subscription model. Steinberg has been a safe haven, IMO, and I hope that doesn’t change.
I do think some extra communication with the community would of course be welcome, as many have requested, but we don’t need to go all the way to subscriptions!!!
I understand the market pressures, though, and they must be immense with all the changes going on. But it’s been a little miracle that Steinberg has been able to resist this subscription model nightmare, and personally, I would consider it the beginning of the end, and a harbinger of doom TBH.
If Steinberg goes subscription too, then the market will be screwed IMO. Steinberg has been a strong example in the DAW marketplace, resisting the momentum. Please don’t fall too.
What will I be stuck with? Reaper. Seriously.
I don’t mean to sound melodramatic about it. But if Steinberg went subscription model, I would not be able to continue forward, as I have resisted ALL subscription models from ALL developers so far, from Adobe and Avid onwards.
Cheers and much respect, but you just gave me the shivers, Timo! If things are getting so bad in the market that even Steinberg is considering it… oh man, that’s not good.
I agree on the bug fixing. This can always be improved. Another update to respond to N15 feedback is already scheduled. So far we release 4 bugfix updates per year.
But the comment was also related to feature dev. If we get rid of full version feature releases in favour for smaller, more regular updates, this would very likely turn into a Subscription model, because development would have to be organized in a different manner.
I’m not saying I’m a big fan of this.
I am very grateful you are being transparent about this, and understand your reasoning.
I don’t know what percentage of your userbase will accept a subscription model, you probably have your own internal numbers already, and so if you are seriously considering it, please at least continue to be open about it with us out here in the community!
However, as I posted just a couple of minutes ago, I personally would not be continuing with Steinberg if you go subscription. As much difficulty as that would cause my work and studio to transition away, I won’t be part of software subscriptions at all.
But I totally respect reality and that market forces may drive you to do it. I just can’t be onboard that trip. I will go down with the old grumpy people from the old generation I guess. I might be a tiny minority of users though, but that’s how I feel.
I really wish Steinberg the best no matter what, I respect you, and I really mean it when I say I appreciate you being transparent about it, instead of just surprising us with it one day. Just please be open about your process deciding this, as I’m sure there will be passionate people on either side of the argument.
My side of the argument is maybe illogical and the small minority, but I am 100% against subscriptions for software.
Much respect Timo! And much appreciation that you are talking about this openly. That means a lot to many of us for sure.
Reaper is good. Not Nuendo class. But throw in some scripts and you have production grade dialogues ready to sync with deep metadata in DR… all on Linux.
Thank you for your open and nice words, much appreciated. You nailed it. It’s about reflecting market realities, and I have always been transparent about it.
In the current market situation we try to keep pricing stable.
Reaper is my backup/secondary DAW software, I know it well, and indeed, it is not Nuendo/Cubase class IMO. Hence the emoji. And hence why it would be a difficult transition IF I had to do it. I’m very grateful that Timo is openly discussing the subscription situation though. That’s MUCH better than just dropping it on us like a bomb like so many other developers have done.
I’ve literally been using pretty much ALL industry standard media production (film and audio) software for decades, and I’ve canceled every single one of them when they went subscription. I’ve survived each time.
Even if Steinberg gave me the most beautiful click-and-drag ripple editing feature that I’ve been asking for a long time, but at the same time they told me I needed to subscribe to get it, I would regretfully and respectfully decline.
And yeah, Reaper makes me sometimes, but I’ll go there if I have to.
Thank you, Timo! Just keep those communication lines open with us! I respect the tough decisions you all have to make! Moving to subscription would frankly be big news out there for many people in this community. Perhaps not all bad news for some people too, since I’m sure some people would welcome it. And maybe it will become necessary given the market conditions. Here’s to hoping it’s not so.
But reality is reality, and business is business. I understand it, should you decide to do it.
And you know my own feelings about it… I’ll be standing on the shoreline waving goodbye with the tear in my eye as the Steinberg ship sails away without me into their new subscription market reality.
And I will probably end up growing older and more eccentric on my little no-subscription island, lol. And I’ll happily walk along the shoreline on my lonely little island as I make my music with my own little brain with no-subscription music software, lol.
Cheers, Timo! And much respect! You have a tough job!
@TimoWildenhain Thanks for acknowledging this. I think one of the big sources of frustration for some of us is the wall of silence we get from Steinberg when we talk about these bugs. I’m sure that in some of these cases these bugs already have CAN numbers and may be already being worked on, but with no communication from Steinberg we just feel completely ignored.
For example: the long-standing Elastique glitch which has been brought up time and time again on so many threads across the Cubase and Nuendo forums for years, there has never (to my knowledge - and I’ve read pretty much all these threads!) been any acknowledgement from Steinberg that you’re even aware of this well-documented issue. Even a simple “we know about this but it’s not currently a dev priority” is infinitely preferable to silence.
I’ll echo uarte in saying your transparency about subscription models is very welcome and appreciated. Is there a future in which we can have this level of communication and transparency with more issue threads on the forum?
My wife still uses Reaper on her nine-year-old MacBook Pro, which refuses to die. I gifted her WaveLab, and she tried using it for her next audiobook, a 40-hour Hindi novel. She left it halfway, and I had to finish the editing for her. After that, I never brought up WaveLab again.
As for subscriptions, I am already used to them. I maintain Pro Tools for various reasons. Recently, I subscribed to Adobe Creative Cloud. They offer special pricing in India, and it is very affordable, around ₹7,000, which is roughly $75 per year for the full suite. That is quite reasonable, so I paid for a full year upfront. You could approach Nuendo the same way by treating it as an annual subscription, which would effectively amount to a similar cost over time.
Seriously.
If things are getting so bad in the market that even Steinberg is considering it… oh man, that’s not good.