Pretty bummed to hear this but will reserve judgement for the official release. Because I’m doing more and more podcast work, I guess I will be becoming more and more intimate with Reaper.
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Agreed to reserve judgment until official release, and agreed it will be a bummer if they don’t release a great ripple editing feature in C13/N13.
Like you, I keep Reaper around for ripple editing. Podcast work is just one of many very good use cases for a top notch ripple editing feature. With you 100%!
I want to be optimistic though, since Steinberg has acknowledged that it’s important. I can’t remember where I read that (maybe this forum or the Nuendo thread?) but I have to believe that they wouldn’t say that and not mean it.
Steinberg’s guys are good guys IMO, they are likely pulled in many different directions, and it must be difficult to balance out the feature requests given the huge diversity of their user base. And TBH meat and potato features like great ripple editing may not be what Hans Zimmer is requesting, and I’m SURE Steinberg listens to people like him more than others.
And BTW, I love Hans Zimmer, and he’s done a lot for Cubase’s popularity, but Steinberg really needs to get with the times and realize a huge professional market is also podcasting, not to mention the MANY other workflows that would benefit from a great ripple editing feature.
Anyone know Hans Zimmer personally? Could you ask him to ask for ripple editing? 
Anyway, I do think we’ll get it eventually. But if the leak was accurate, then it looks like we have to wait some more. Still crossing fingers though. Lots and lots of crossing fingers, they’re kind of sore from crossing them so much…
Yes, 10 years ago I was doing more music & post so I didn’t even know what ripple editing was. I was using the usual work arounds in Cubendo and didn’t really know what I was missing…until I had to use Reaper for a new place I was working it. A real revelation working with real ripple editing. I love Cubase and am, still (for now) a loyal customer. But I’d really rather not work on two different apps.
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Though they did provide a specific solution for this called WaveLab Cast. Haven’t used it; looks very capable.
Which in turn, I can imagine, postpones yet again the decision for SB to devote resources/time to developing a full ripple-edit solution inside Cubendo…
Anyhow, it is the new way; we all have to turn to many tools these days, to the get the work done (I think Hans Zimmer and his ilk calls them ‘assistants/interns’.! 
)
Absolutely +1.
So let’s not confuse the issue though – and I LOVE WaveLab Cast’s features (all of which are included inside of WaveLab Pro BTW!), so I want to commend Steinberg for their work on this. But we need to clarify what this is (and what it is not) so Steinberg doesn’t get complacent and think their work is done with ripple editing. WaveLab Cast is indeed a great tool for a certain subset of use cases, but it doesn’t solve complex podcast/broadcast productions, not to mention it’s not the right tool for the many other use cases that benefit from ripple editing.
So I’ll expand on this issue, and please forgive me for posting such a big response, but I hope Steinberg’s team will at least read this and take it into consideration.
First, to clarify, WaveLab is written/developed primarily by Philippe Goutier (aka “PG”) and he’s a GREAT guy who has been developing WaveLab for a LONG time – 25+ years. You can find him in the forum, and he’ll probably answer you. WaveLab is his brainchild and he’s taking good care of it. Philippe is a force of nature, kind of legendary in the audio world, and he has relentlessly pursued his vision of an audio editing/mastering application, and he gets 100% credit for how good WaveLab is. Well, we’ll give some kudos to Steinberg too for keeping him part of the family. I hope they pay him well. 
HOWEVER, WaveLab is NOT a full-featured multi-track DAW. Now it’s true that in recent years that Philippe has added all sorts of neat features that have started to blur the lines a little, since if you look at WaveLab from the Audio Montage point of view, it could now technically pass as a very basic multitrack DAW. Barely. That’s stretching it. And that’s obviously not its primary purpose. The Audio Montage is in no way a replacement for the massive complexity of the multitrack features of Cubase/Nuendo. The Audio Montage, by comparison, is super simple. It’s an extension of Philippe’s approach to full-album mastering, and it’s a great feature. And it’s evolved to become a simple multitrack audio editor.
So what Steinberg/Philippe have done is that they realized that most podcast productions are relatively simple and so they’ve adapted the Audio Montage as a basic editing environment, and honestly, it’s pretty good for many podcasts! Hats off to Philippe. And to his credit, Philippe added the much desired ripple editing to the Audio Montage! Yay! Huge respect to Philippe – this was and is a very welcome addition to his fine application. I’ve been a user of WaveLab for many years, and I’m always impressed with what he has done.
In addition to ripple editing, Philippe added some excellent quality of life and workflow features for many kinds of podcasts, even down to exporting an RSS feed. Fantastic! So this is really a wonderful tool. They decided to bundle up the key podcast related features into WaveLab Cast. And boom, you have a new product to cover an emerging market with an existing codebase. Again, hats off to Philippe. And it’s a brilliant move from Steinberg marketing. And again, all those features are inside WaveLab Pro.
HOWEVER, the Audio Montage is NOT a replacement for a full-fledged powerhouse multitrack DAW like Cubase, and if you want to produce a more complex production, you’d want to have the traditional full DAW tools available in Cubase.
But Cubase does NOT have Philippe’s ripple editing.
So what do many high-end podcast producers use for putting together their podcasts? Reaper. Yes, Reaper. It has perfect ripple editing, and a full-featured multitrack DAW environment.
Don’t get me wrong, WaveLab Cast/Pro can probably handle most of those podcasts, but if a podcast producer wants to do something a little more complex, like add a VST with some complex automation or routing, or even a VSTi for some background music or sound design, he will want a full-fledged multitrack DAW. And he’ll want that DAW to have ripple editing to handle all the quick nudging and moving and on-the-fly real-time tweaking he needs to do to the timeline. And Reaper does all of that fairly well for the most part.
But Cubase could ALSO do all of that really well, with all the great Cubase features that we all love, if they would just add good ripple editing. How fantastic would that be? And we’re not even talking about the other use cases for ripple editing!
So one might reasonably ask the question, why can’t they just bring Philippe over to the Cubase team temporarily and/or ask him to consult on ripple editing? Philippe CLEARLY understands good ripple editing! But then you need to understand the massive differences of how Cubase works vs. how the WaveLab Audio Montage works. They are completely different beasts. Hence, why I think this is taking SOOOOOO LONG to arrive in Cubase/Nuendo.
Basically, the Audio Montage in WaveLab is very simple by comparison – a linear audio environment with virtually no complexity. Each “track” in the Audio Montage consists of basically one class of content (well, two, if you include a video track)… thus, adding ripple editing to WaveLab is comparatively easier to do than adding it to Cubase.
In Cubase, on the other hand, you have massive complexity of the kinds of content and tracks that would go in a project, such as tempo track, different kinds of automation, MIDI events, not to mention variaudio, ARA, comping, etc., etc., etc… And thus adding the same good ripple editing feature from WaveLab is likely not possible, at least not easily and quickly. I imagine that even the real-time UI updating issues with a good ripple editing mode in Cubase could present a challenge since all those different classes of objects may change how the rippled objects might appear visually (i.e. if you ripple out tempo markers, and slide them around, etc.).
It seems to me that there may also be fundamental framework issues and even audio engine issues that could be impacted by a great ripple editing feature, perhaps requiring deeper under-the-hood work. Again, WaveLab’s audio engine in the Audio Montage is relatively simple by comparison.
You might ask, how did Justin (the main developer of Reaper) add such great ripple editing while Reaper is also very complex? Well, Justin designed ripple editing right from the beginning of his engine. So Reaper’s implementation of ripple editing has been there forever, the whole engine takes it into account, versus Cubase, which predates Reaper, and didn’t have that feature from the beginning. So I think it’s reasonable to conclude that adding ripple editing after the fact is clearly much harder to do.
So the bottom line is that adding an elegant and smooth ripple editing feature to Cubase/Nuendo is NOT trivial. However, it is very much needed. Not just for professional podcasters/broadcasters/sound designers who are creating complex projects, but also for lots of post production workflows, film/media producers, etc…
In sum, great ripple editing is NEEDED in Cubase/Nuendo ASAP. There’s a massive market of proaudio producers and engineers, who need the tools of a full-featured DAW like Cubase/Nuendo, AND the flexible power of a great ripple editing feature. And to the point about WaveLab Cast, let’s also not assume that podcasters are already fully covered by WaveLab.
Again, I commend Steinberg and especially Philippe for what they have done, but it’s a relatively simpler task in comparison to adding ripple editing to Cubase/Nuendo. Yes, the podcasting features (and ripple editing!) are useful tools in WaveLab, but it does not solve the ripple editing needs for Steinberg’s own DAWs.
Here’s to hoping that Steinberg is really listening on this issue!
Cheers and much respect!
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Wow… that’s some post @uarte - thanks for all your detail/insight/thoughts.!
I can imagine a lot of this is known and has been/is being well discussed internally by the SB devs/powers that be.
Interesting you pointing out how ‘ripple editing’ will of course have to encompass things like Markers and Tempo/Time sig tracks, automation, Midi CC data, etc. as well. The complexities and scale of implementation of the task, is indeed huge to get right.
BTW - do you know if Reaper copes with all this too.? I don’t run it myself. Bravo to them, if they’ve really nailed it there.!
Though, seeing as we have all continued to manage this far and coped somehow, I will just sign off with a large ‘Fingers Crossed’ .! 
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Yeah, I’m sure Steinberg knows all this, no doubt! I think part of the reason why I posted all that is that I’m honestly just trying to get through to the Steinberg team, to also remind them about this fundamental feature, and also to let them know that there are people out here who do understand the potential complexities of the feature request.
I think it’s become clear that it’s not trivial to add this feature after the fact, deep into the lifespan of the Cubase codebase. It’s a big ask. But they really still need to add it… since each passing year, more and more DAWs implement this key workflow feature. Even their buddies over at Presonus down the street in Hamburg added it in Studio One. And when one watches the breathtaking speed of development of apps like DaVinci Resolve, which has an increasingly capable DAW built in now, one can easily wonder why Steinberg hasn’t added ripple editing yet.
I’ve seen in other threads where people think this is something really simple to do, though, and they reference other DAWs… but when you look at something like Reaper, for example, it was designed from the very beginning along these lines… so when your own legacy codebase is structured around these kinds of objects/models, then it’s comparatively easy to maintain that feature while adding new features. But Cubase/Nuendo, as advanced as it is in so many other ways, clearly wasn’t built around these ideas. It doesn’t mean one is better than the other, but it does mean that it’s likely a big job to do.
But I do believe they’ll add this feature, hopefully soon! A real-time audio application is no doubt a highly complex system, and over time, I’m sure they’ve refactored or replaced a lot of legacy code, but there are likely lots of things to work through. I just hope they don’t rest on their laurels with Philippe’s work on WaveLab, thinking they’ve satisfied the need for ripple editing in the Steinberg catalog;.
In any case, as long as I’m checking in on Cubase 13’s release, I figured I’d chime in on these threads! People like to criticize developers (as I have many times!) but sometimes it’s good to let them know people also understand that their job is often more complicated than a “simple” feature request might imply.
Yes, it works very well. I haven’t tested edge cases (every app has bugs!), but I’ve used Reaper in complex projects with their ripple editing, and it behaves surprisingly well, moving lots and lots of tracks/automation/etc. Kudos to Justin for his design on this, but in all fairness, he had the benefit of observing other DAWs and their missing features before designing the core architecture of his app. He also was influenced by video editing apps too, as I understand it, where ripple editing has been the norm for a long time. So his basic frame of reference was different than the early days of Cubase/Nuendo, which was very much music/sequence oriented. The progression of the apps over the years is consistent with the legacy of both developer’s origins IMO.
So each DAW has their strengths of course, and one cannot do a true one-to-one comparison IMO, as there are features that Steinberg has that Reaper will likely never have. So one just hopes that something fundamental like good ripple editing (especially in the modern media production market with people who blur the lines from video/film/audio/post/music!) will be implemented soon.
Cheers again!
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Hey, I remember it was in a Nuendo thread where you offered Timo sausages/fine whisky/beer if they implement Ripple Edit . Maybe he didn’t want to get accused of bribery, so they couldn’t do it then? Can’t find it now though, even when searching for sausages or whisky… 
Here’s another one, where he also acknowledges that’s indeed A LOT of work to implement Ripple Edit (“rewriting the editing system”), and it’s a trade-off for several other features:
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Haha! Yeah, that’s right, the whisky offer! 
And that offer still stands! Not sure if that will pass Steinberg corporate policies, though!
Or maybe I have to improve my offer! 
All kidding aside, it is good to be reminded that Steinberg knows that it’s important, and also it was good to see insight into their decision matrix. And we don’t need to explain ripple editing to them either, since Philippe can remind them to look inside WaveLab’s Audio Montage.
Well I guess we’ll find out with C13/N13 soon enough!
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Ok, so it’s a lot of work to implement Ripple Edit, but it’s also a monumental workflow feature.
Imagine having MS Word (or any other word processor), but there’s no Insert Mode, only Overwrite Mode… 
Not having Ripple Edit is not as bad like that of course, but with Insert Mode you get the idea of what Ripple Edit could do for you.
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+1 for Nuendo 14, i’m manifesting it
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