Serious Problems With Direct Offline Processing

And BTW, Romantique Tp is doing the best he can – he is trying to help, and I applaud his efforts. But I think this thread clearly shows he hasn’t pushed DOP like some of us have done, but I think he’s coming around to realize Steinberg screwed up on this feature release. He’s a good guy, taking a lot of negativity, so I give him big props for hanging in there. He’s in a tough position because as a moderator, I’m sure he doesn’t want to say something bad about Steinberg… and he’s obviously a strong Steinberg supporter for voluntarily doing moderation here in the forum. But I’m sure deep down he knows there are too many of us disappointed with DOP and I just hope he conveys our feelings about the matter to the developers. Someone has to light a fire under them to get this fixed. Cheers to Romantique Tp, and please be our advocate with the developers! :slight_smile:

Thanks Brother, good advice… I’ve been on 9.0.40 for a long time… As well as downloading Digital Preformer and F-IN Pro-Tools… I’ve used CB for years and I pay for software to work and be tested for release…

THE FACT THAT THEY DIDNT KNOW ITS A F-IN ISSUE AT SUPPORT AND HERE AS OF TODAY is UNBELIEVABLE, UNACCEPTABLE, IGNORANT, and INCOMPETENT.

For the last 3 1/2 years I was working for a small Oracle Partner and Selling Our Reporting & BI Software to companies including Universal, Avis, City of Chicago, and about 20 others I personally closed. I understand software is a living breathing thing and progress comes slow BUT… I don’t pay Steinberg / Yamaha to be a BETA TESTER. I am the customer and releasing features that do no work is not acceptable, and not knowing 6 months in is sad.

Again Steinberg / Yamaha may be focused on the “Laptop Musician” and their software may work for those people. People who listen to MP3s and arrange loops of music created by other people, press virtual knobs and make virtual music… But I’m on hiatus because of a Non Compete and I don’t have time to wait to finish a self produced, self funded, self everything project. Not with 50k worth of gear and time and money running out.

I am the customer when I PAY Steinberg / Yamaha they owe me a product with updates that don’t break the product I depend on to work.

Corporations continue to as much as they can get, and give as little as we will allow…And that effects employees and customers.

Time is limited. Social media and forums are one of the last places we can hold nameles, faceless corporations accountable.

Several companies are effecting my workflow, so… Steinberg / Yamaha is one.

  • SRW

Hey Sean, I hear you and understand what you mean completely. Like you, I’ve been in this game a while, and I’ve finally truly learned – after much self-inflicted pain BTW – that you get to choose your battles, and sometimes those battles are simply not worth it. And while I agree someone has to hold these companies accountable in this example, there’s also a trade-off for accomplishing what you really want and need to do vs. getting lost in too much frustration.

Bottom line, you’ve got some precious time on your hands, you need to get to working on your special projects. Various things are holding you back (i.e. Cubase). So your experience should inform you which battles are going to be worth your time, of course. Then march forward.

In this case, there is some good news:

  1. Steinberg theoretically knows about the issues since they’ve already been improving Nuendo with a better version of DOP. Yes, it’s embarrassing that their support doesn’t know what is going on. And yes, it’s pretty insane that they haven’t ALREADY given us the Nuendo version of DOP.

  2. Fortunately you have options!

  3. You can rail briefly here to keep this thread and issue elevated in Steinberg’s peripheral vision. We can only hope they are listening.

  4. You can then cut your losses of frustration and time and just NOT use the feature, roll back to v9, etc, etc.

  5. You can try the plethora of other DAWs out there that might do the trick

  6. While every DAW has issues, and the grass is not always greener on the other side of the hill, one of the other DAWs might just have the magic combination of working features that does the trick for you

  7. We are living in an amazing time when even DAWs with bugs as annoying as DOP are STILL pretty amazing to work with. So you might need to suck it up and just work with Cubase as-is, warts and all.

  8. PLUS there’s no need to be a single-DAW kind of guy – my recommendation, use at least TWO DAWs these days.

Whatever you do, may I suggest not to blow too much steam and get back to work on your awesome creative project, which is what I need to do as well tonight. Check back in when 9.5.30 drops and see if they did anything. We can raise a little more noise if it still sucks, then move on again. Which is basically what I’ve been doing (although tonight I’m apparently spending more time than I should on this – partial self-therapy I guess). Our time is more valuable than Steinberg’s issues. It’s not even worth it to fight for a refund IMO. If they don’t fix DOP, then don’t buy Cubase 10. I’ve been quite happy phasing out Cubase bit by bit and using one of the other great DAWs too. It’s up to Steinberg if I ever upgrade again.

And above all, good luck with your project. You CAN do it without DOP. :slight_smile:

I don’t work for Steinberg.

Offline processing creates new files for each offline process you apply. This part isn’t new, and this is required to allow you to remove effects without re-rendering the whole file, which could take a very long time depending on its size and effects applied.

Direct Offline Processing takes this concept of using pre-rendered files from the Edits folder many steps further by allowing you to undo all of your edits, not just modify the last one, along with allowing you to freely reorder, add, bypass and remove offline effects from all selected events at the same time. This is all done as close to realtime as possible, and this requires each applied edit to be written to disk.

This certainly could be optimized to use less disk space in the future, and I’m sure that such changes are already in the pipeline, but this isn’t a bug.

Support didn’t mention a workaround, but there’s one. Just click Audio → Make Direct Offline Processing Permanent and any unneeded files from the Edits folder should be gone the next time you close your project. This applies to all selected events.

If you need to save space after finishing your project, you can also click Back Up Project and tick Make Direct Offline Processing Permanent. This will make a copy of your project to a new folder with the Edits folder 100% empty. You can then safely delete the original project folder.

This might be fine for Laptop “Musicians” - but not for people that work with REAL MUSICIANS> …

It’s usually laptop users who are constantly running low on disk space, not pros.

I thought you worked for them, apologies.

Would be nice to be able to restrict the number of undo’s in DOP directly. (Even Zero)
I was surprised/ignorant when I ran out of disk space normalizing 32 tracks 1.5 hour long live recording.
Not a bug, but DOP really feels like it is still in Beta stage, and that is being generous.

We all work for this company now apparently…

Yamaha Corporation (ヤマハ株式会社 Yamaha Kabushiki Gaisha) (/ˈjæməˌhɑː/; Japanese pronunciation: [jamaha]) is a Japanese multinational corporation and conglomerate with a very wide range of products and services, predominantly musical instruments, electronics and power sports equipment. It is one of the constituents of Nikkei 225 and is the world’s largest piano manufacturing company. The former motorcycle division became independent from the main company in 1955, forming Yamaha Motor Co., Ltd, although Yamaha Corporation is still the largest shareholder.

Come on Steinberg! its been a long time now since i payed for an “upgrade”. But you removed my trusty old offline processing, that I used A LOT, and you replaced it with this DOP crap that DOES NOT WORK! Cubase 9.5 is broken, bring back the old offline processing AND fix the DOP or give us a refund please!

FYI – Nuendo 8.2 was released today and yet again, they get a whole bunch of DOP bugfixes. Just wondering when Cubase will get those fixes? Let alone feature enhancements? We’ve already missed out on the last round of improvements to Nuendo’s version of DOP… I just don’t understand why they don’t merge the two code branches and have ONE unified version of DOP between Cubase and Nuendo? It just makes me feel like Cubase is a second class citizen in the Steinberg world, and we just have to deal with reduced functionality AND reduced reliability on a feature that is justifiably useful in the markets and workflows of both apps. In any case, the wait continues. Let’s see what Cubase 9.5.30 brings, hopefully in the next few weeks. Cross fingers they are listening. It’s just a shame that it’s been about six months since release and we’re still dealing with this.

Pretty disgusting I say to leave us with a broken version of DOP for all these months and not even an apology or official word on how they plan to fix it and more importantly when.
I find it even more disgusting they wouldn’t offer a refund to me after I decided after a few days I could no longer work with this crippled update, given that I’ve been a Steinberg customer and loyal to them since the mid 1990’s it just adds insult to injury :imp:

Maybe now is the time to give my money to a company that actually gives a crap and one that wouldn’t dream of rolling out an upgrade to their customers that let’s face it, feels like it’s still in early beta stages, certainly not charge for it!! :imp:

Something is changing for me, and I can now see a big shift has happened with how I look at Steinberg. It just dawned on me.

I had been getting more frustrated every time I saw updates to Nuendo’s DOP and those updates didn’t show up in Cubase. The poor business decision behind that is still perplexing to me.

Not to mention the more profound concern I had with how Steinberg messed up so badly on this feature during the whole development process. Who is making these decisions? How does that person still work at Steinberg? I don’t know how something like this makes it out of the design, testing, beta, delivery stages + 6 months of patching, and we’re still here? What’s it going to take to fix this, Cubase 10? Cubase 10.5?

This, I’m realizing, plus some other big issues I’ve had with Steinberg in recent years (why even list them? where to start?), has put the final nail in the coffin for me. I had been holding out hope, and watching as Steinberg made token efforts here and there (such as with the Cubase 9.5.21 patch which solved a minor but embarrassing issue that should have never happened). But it wasn’t enough. Cubase has been fading out of my studio project by project, and now, today, I realized I’ve had enough.

Which begs the question, why do I waste my time posting here about DOP or frankly in any other thread of issues? Why don’t I just take my own advice and move on if it bugs me so much?

Well, I’ve realized I basically have moved on. I also realize that Steinberg didn’t deserve my loyalty or money over the years.

Like a loyal idiot, I still checked back in, hoping that someone at Steinberg was paying attention. For some reason Cubase still had a tiny place in my heart after all these years, so I kept checking back in when there’s another update to Cubase and in this case Nuendo too, in the HOPE that the release notes offer real progress on features that matter to me. And for years I tried to be optimistic, and I kept sending them my money, like an idiot. And in recent years, more often I had been met with disappointment or frustration, and it got old. This DOP issue is the last one. It’s over.

I just finished another film in another DAW last week and I was quite happy with how it went (and so was my client). I’ve got another film next month. Guess I won’t be using Cubase.

Maybe this will be my last post for a long, long while. I still hope Steinberg figures out what’s wrong with their development and marketing-driven model, because there’s something at the core of how they do business that causes issues like this… and I’m not just talking about DOP. I really hope they figure it out.

Not trying to be melodramatic about it, but I’m just now realizing that the chapter really is closing on Cubase for me, right now. I’ve logged a lot of hours in it over many years, am still grateful for the good use of it I have had, and there’s a lot of nostalgia for the projects I’ve worked on with it. But it really is time to move on now for me, and I wish you all the best of luck!

One last thanks to the good folks here in the forum who have given me great support over the years (far better than Steinberg’s own support department BTW), it’s been a pleasure knowing you and I’m sure I’ll run into you in other forums!

I feel your pain couldn’t agree more, time to move on and put Cubase behind me I think :unamused:

Hey uarte - sorry to see you go, you have helped me with questions over the years. I understand your feelings about Steinberg. I don’t do enough work as a hobbyist to make it worth learning a new DAW, but I definitely understand how someone in a position like yours would feel like that.

Take care, dude!

The relationship between Cubase and some musicians is like being married…
Honey you better get it together or I’m leaving or it’s cheaper to keep her.

Or like a fancy new car, fully of software like a Mercedes that doesn’t work as expected
Because of a software issue. LOL guys :laughing: at his point unless it’s a major show stopping issue
I wouldn’t bother. Because bugs are everywhere including in other DAWs or anything that has lots of code. And they always get fixed. It doesn’t mean you have to stop buying from the company. Just be careful with new versions as they always have more bugs.

sounds like lowered expectations to me… I can’t imagine people with hard deadlines having to use cubase. Maybe thats why most don’t.

This thread is part of why I’m still 9.0.4 and holding. My system is working well for me (knock wood). I’m sure I’d like the new version, but until these things get sorted out, I’m hanging back. If I did an update to 9.5 I’d have to have it completely isolated on the drive and make sure 9.0.4 was still working and not being changed.

Me too, for the same reasons!

Why ?
Cubase 9.5 is a completely different install than Cubase 9.
While I find DOP to still be unacceptably bad, I don’t use it that often that it outweighs the other benefits in Cubase 9.5
The only way I could come to that conclusion, was to actually use Cubase 9.5 and find out for myself.

The Cubase 9.5.30 update has been released today. It should fix most Direct Offline Processing issues:
https://www.steinberg.net/en/newsandevents/news/newsdetail/article/cubase-9530-maintenance-update-4751.html

The DOP issues fixed should be the same as the ones listed for Nuendo 8.1.10 and 8.2.0, and possibly some undocumented fixes:
http://download.steinberg.net/downloads_software/Nuendo_8/8.2/Nuendo_8.2_Version_History.pdf

Some additional info and tips on Direct Offline Processing:


  • If you do a lot of complex editing involving many audio events that were split, copied and rearranged, then it could be a good idea to go to the Preferences window, then Editing → Audio and set “On Processing Shared Clips” to “Open Options Dialog”. This allows you to choose if you want to create a new version of the file before applying offline processing, which helps make the results far more predictable, specially when time stretching, reverb and delay effects are involved.
  • Your project’s “Edits” folder is automatically cleaned up when you close your project, meaning that the disk space usage is usually roughly the same as previous Cubase versions. If you make offline processing permanent, either by using the Audio menu option or by using the “Back up Project” function, then all edits associated with the selected audio events will be removed from the Edits folder when you close your project, when possible.
  • Nuendo’s DOP has two additional features: Favorites and the ability to use FX Chain Presets. These are replacements for the batch processing features that have been exclusive to Nuendo for over 15 years. Cubase’s version of DOP is otherwise identical, it simply has these two features disabled.

This thread has been nothing but unhelpful rants for a while, and also has a lot of outdated info, so I’ll lock it now. If you would like to see something changed or added to Direct Offline Processing, then please make a feature request thread. If you’re still having trouble with DOP, then please post on the Issues forum, preferably by following these instructions if possible: