I was not familiar with any of the facilities mentioned here (i.e. Nuendo’s ADR, VST Live’s lyrics module, or Studio One’s lyrics track), so I just spent a little time looking up videos that gave some sense of how they work, and how they might, or might not, be useful in the context of lyrics in Cubase (at least for my purposes, which are centered around recording songs). My quick thoughts:
Nuendo’s ADR facility seems way overkill for these sorts of needs. While I would never complain about having too much power, sometimes that power comes at the expense of complication, for example in what would be involved in entering lyrics in this case, how they display (e.g. with respect to following in real time, potentially from a distance). While it could well be that Nuendo’s ADR may provide views that simplify things, the video I watched did not suggest any such thing, and ADR is really a different animal since it is starting with audio dialogue whose timing needs to be matched, whereas recording lyrics is starting from nothing on the audio track.
The VST Live video I saw made it look like you had to enter one word at a time, matched to timing. Perhaps it can be less granular than that (e.g. a line at a time)? But is it possible to just paste a lyric sheet into its lyrics module, then move the timing around in some way? That would be pretty key to making a facility useful for the purposes discussed in this thread. It also felt, though, like VST Live’s display of the lyrics might be more like karaoke in the sense that you might only get a line at a time. (Again, I may be missing something as the video I saw was relatively short and talking about all the real-time display modules – metronome, chords, lyrics, and notes – which makes sense for a big production with multiple people, whereas what we’re talking about here from a needs perspective, as opposed to how complicated it may be to implement, seems much simpler.)
The Studio One lyrics track looked very appealing, potentially displaying the entire lyric at one time, highlighting a lyric that is active, being able to click on a lyric line to move to that area of the recording directly (similar to how the Cubase marker window works), being able to shift lines around to match the timing, and, of course, being able to paste the lyrics in the first place. I could imagine this sort of thing being implemented in Cubase as a special purpose marker track with it’s own display window that works similar to how the marker window in Cubase works (which is also similar to the ADR window in Nuendo), but with user interface improvements that both make it less cluttered and simplify operations, like dragging a line of lyric on the timeline to move it.
Side note: In the case of entering lyrics in the score editor, it would also be helpful if lyrics entered there could also be displayed in a special lyrics track display to prevent double duty for anyone who wants to use both. (Going in the other direction would probably be tougher due to considerations like melismas.)
I do think something like the Studio One facility could be quite useful.