Nuendo Futures

Steinberg Lounge
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Steinberg has recently solicited our opinions in a survey about Nuendo futures, including what we would (or would not) like to see in future developments. Do we think that 5.1 or 7.1 or some other audio production format will be the “wave of the future”? Would we like Steinberg to develop and offer a control surface tailored to Nuendo? As always, the information that can be provided is already limited by the questions that were NOT asked.

Steinberg never asked what we like (or dislike) about Steinberg business practices, for example. Yes, maybe I would like to see a control surface from Steinberg that has been built from the ground up specifically for Nuendo. But based on my experience with Steinberg business practices, would I trust Steinberg as a vendor for such a product? Has Steinberg demonstrated a willingness to introduce products and then discontinue them a year or two later, abandoning the commitments made by their customers and by Steinberg itself? Yes, definitely.

When Steinberg introduced “Surround Edition” for Nuendo, I happily invested in it and developed projects with it, only to find that in later Nuendo software releases, the product was no longer supported or available, and there was no replacement. For whatever short-term financial reason, Steinberg had decided to change course and abandon me and my investment. Separately, a similar result followed with respect to the capability to render Dolby Digital surround output in Nuendo. In releases prior to v5, Nuendo included support for both an AC3 Encoder and a DTS Encoder, an implicit commitment which the company abruptly abandoned in Nuendo 5. And now Steinberg wants to know if we think 5.1 or 7.1 will be important in the future? And I’m supposed to trust that they care about my opinion?

More to the point, I’m supposed to trust that if they DO in the future APPEAR to care about my opinion by introducing some product or service offering, that there will be future support for that product or service offering? That the company isn’t going to flip-flop in terms of its commitment to me as a customer in the future?

Would I be surprised if tomorrow Steinberg decided that Nuendo itself was a thing of the past because its short-term revenues or sales projections indicate that Cubase should be the flagship product, completely replacing and superseding Nuendo?

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, other companies are taking the lead in incorporating surround encoders built into their audio/video editing products, a market lead that Steinberg and Nuendo once had, and then abandoned. The computer industry is littered with the corpses of companies that were once in a unique position of opportunity for leadership in a technology, failed to follow through with support based on that opportunity, and eventually died through a painful process of talent attrition and acquisition, with their trade names now remembered only on the headstones of the past.

I love Nuendo, but I trust even Adobe more than I trust Steinberg. Adobe has never left me standing naked in the cold on a streetcorner.

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Hello Chris…

Welcome to our forum and thank you for your post.

I wished I could start ranting about it, but instead I think, it pretty much hits the nail spot on.
I have posted those concerns and complaints, especially about discontinued surround softwares, a number of times
over the years. It made me thinking, too, if it is worth to further invest dearly in short-lived SB products other than Nuendo and my privat answer is No. I also stated that I am actively looking for a DAW that can deliver those features and shows a similar feature set of Nuendo’s.

I work with Cubase and Nuendo from the year they came out, but I see that SB is often not enough with their professional customer and I do not want to set any more cash in the dirt.
They try and improve Nuendo. I give 'em that. But this mess-up with, e.g., DDE and DTS was just so completely uncool … just the wrong policy.

Servus, Big K

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I hear you “Berklee”.

They ask "I’d like to have a controller system that is perfectly integrated with Nuendo from Steinberg/Yamaha. " now???.. Really?..

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Hello,

thanks for your comments and welcome to the forum. Let me comment on the situation you described. A survey, like we have online now, is a common process of gathering information from the public. More than 1000 participants within the first 4 days shows that there’s quite big interest, and the survey runs until end of February. Only because we’re asking certain questions, it doesn’t mean that we only then start to make decisions for a product realization. It doesn’t say anything about timing and status of projects.

Steinberg has discontinued products, yes, like other companies do. If you look at some Steinberg competitors you will see that they leave people alone with much bigger investements and incompatible standards, not to name a specific company here. I agree that Steinberg didn’t always make good decisions and has discontinued some products too early. But the examples you’re referring too are many years old (e.g. Surround Edition was introduced nearly 10 years back). The Surround Edition has been available for more than 5 years, the DTS and DD encoders for more than 4 years. With regards to DTS and DD encoder, there have been many reasons to discontinue the products, because of high costs and many existing (cheaper) alternatives on the market. In the past few years Steinberg has not suddenly discontinued products.

When it comes to leadership of technology, I believe Nuendo is among the premier choices on the market and if you look at the competition, you can easily see many functions getting “copied” from Nuendo to other workstations. Be it surround panning, ADR/spotting, stem mixing, format support - I think we’re pretty well positioned in such areas, just to name a few. Yes, there’re still issues that need to be fixed and features that need to be integrated. Development is an ongoing process and we have interesting things scheduled for Nuendo 6.

Anyway, welcome to the forum.

Thanks,
Timo

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Hope, Nuendo 6 don’t get such muddle windows handling like WLab7 …

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+ a big 1 !!!


Whoever has thought this window mess out is surely a wee bit misguided…
It is the only reason why I still keep WL6 on the machine.

Big K