Question about modulation capabilities from a new user trying using nuendo for sound design

Hello all!

I mostly work as a sound editor and sound designer, I’ve worked a lot with pro tools and logic, but I mostly rely on reaper and bitwig when I work by myself, especially for my sound design.

I’ve recently started working on more collaborative projects and reaper compatibility is not the best, exchanging aaf’s sessions requires a bit too many steps, on top of that I’d like to start working on something that would allow me to have atmos mixing capabilities on par with those of pro tools (not doing much mixing right now, but I’m working on changing this!) so I decided of trying out nuendo since I really like a lot of what I’ve seen it do.

I have to say it took me a while to start feeling like I can actually start familiarising with it, the resources available are pretty bad, I either find superficial looks at very specific functions and fx, or cubase videos that mostly pertain to music production.
I also had to spend some time to find all the key-commands I needed but I think that I’m now in a place where I can start working on a scene with it and I’m looking at what it can and can’t do for my workflow.

When I design sounds, I rely heavily on modulations. Very heavily!
Nothing comes close to bitwig’s flexibility for that, reaper is somehow usable in that sense, but I often find myself combining bitwig and reaper through blackhole and internal IAC, using reaper as a master and multi-track outputting to it directly from bitwig.

I still have to try this setup with nuendo but I wanted to see what I can do modulation-wise within it first.

I noticed that midi tracks do have some sort of basic modulation capabilities but I’m more interested in using modulations on audio tracks.

Since I can’t find a way to modulate from within nuendo, I tried using Reason Rack; I put together an envelope follower, a trigger generator, an audio modulator, a few different envelopes and lfo’s, and a per-trigger generator of random values.
Everything goes out different cc’s on the same midi channel (I could set it differently).

I was hoping of using this rack to modulate fx values via cc, but I can’t find a way to do it.
In Reaper this works pretty easily, I can access those cc’s for modulation from wherever, but here it looks like I can only use external controller to manually modulate things on audio tracks…is that the case?
Am I missing something? Is there a workaround for this?

On a side note, has anyone ever had success linking nuendo to other DAWs, using it as a midi master and receiving audio from virtual sound cards?

Thanks a lot, I hope I worded all of this clearly enough!

So, today Cubase 14 launched and it features “modulators”.

From what I can see (I’m downloading the demo right now out of curiosity), it should be a pretty similar concept to what I was describing here.

How long does it usually take for Nuendo to catch up on a feature introduced byu cubase?
I
'm asking because I kind of assumed Nuendo had the same features of Cubase plus more sound design/post specific ones: correct me if I’m wrong!

Nuendo 14 will have everything Cubase 14 has plus more. Nuendo 13 only came out 2 or 3 weeks later I recall from Cubase 13 however it has already been confirmed by Steinberg that Nuendo 14 will not be coming in 2024 but early 2025. They need a little more time for some new features they are working on.

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