Should the Pros Upgrade to C11? Here's my experience

I’ll start by saying that I work with Cubase since Cubase 8. I use Cubase around 8h to 10h per day and have done for years on a Windows PC.

Here are my thoughts on the latest update from 10.5.20 to 11.0.0

First and foremost, Cubase needs to be stable and bug free. Cubase 11 broke all my templates with the addition of the scale assistant. All my tracks that have midi modifiers as inserts are now locked to a Locrian scale. This is a huge setback. Add all the features you like but it should never break the pro user’s precious templates.

Secondly, HiDPI support is not stable at 125% in Windows 10. My play cursor disappears randomly, the grid lines are not equal and the new marker drop down lines feature also disappears depending of the zoom percentage.

The C11 upgrade comes in without fixings any of the basics like triplets grid in the audio editor, expression maps midi channel still resets on stop, inspector tabs needs to be resizable, video exports need to have render settings, expression maps need to support multiple midi ports, track presets that saves audio routings. Key commands for all the fonctions The only real pro features that actually works of C11 is the new audio mixdown features and better ARA integration. Good job with that, we need more pro features like that.

I’m not saying the new plugins are bad but we all have our favorite plugins and content. So stop justifying the update prices with plugins and content and please fix what’s wrong with Cubase. Content should only be a bonus like all the free stuff you get when you buy a keyboard controller. The new release mainly focus on features for hobbyists and half of the new stuff is broken on arrival anyway so why should we upgrade?

One last thought is that maybe Steinberg should start charging a yearly subscription and release upgrades when they’re good and ready instead of pushing to meet the November release every year that ends up disappointing professionals for it’s lack of quality control. I’m sure Hans Zimmer has a few people fixing is problems for him. Most of us dont.

Cheers,

So your conclusion is that ‘pros’ should not upgrade. Cool cool well as a pro I upgraded and am happy with my decision. Just providing a counter point.

I dont really provide a clear conclusion do I? You can do that on your own. I’m raising the questions. If none of the issues affect you and you’re happy with it then good for you. If like me the main reason was the HiPDI support and Audio mixdown, then maybe wait for the maintenance update. Dont want to start a war. Still, I’m curious as to what’s 11 provides for you that’s a clear advantage over a more stable 10.5.20.

To me C11 is worth the upgrade if you limite your expectations the audio mixdown revision and the ARA revision for clip gain and fades that’s a welcome addition. I also forgot to mention above that the new pitch controller lane is very nice. The download assistant that allows to single out upgrade is also a nice touch. But all of these small goodies get buried under a bunch of bugs and long overdue fixes that are still unaddressed. The fact that it broke all my templates and that HiDPI is still unusable is a hard pill to swallow.

I think they should, based on my experience. c11 has been extremely reliable for me on Mac and the improvements to the key editor are small but significant. Don’t dismiss the scale assistant as a beginner thing - I made that mistake until I decided to try generating some harmony lines. It saved me a huge amount of time.

Sorry you’re having problems with your templates - that’s a strange problem.

The particular issue with the scale assistant messing up my templates and all of my existing projects for that matter is because it’s set to a locrian scale by default in the midi modifier inserts. They should have set the default scale to “none”. This is not actual bug, it’s negligence. I can fix it going though all of my templates and change the setting but whenever I’ll load an older project, I’ll have to go through all my tracks again and reset the midi modifiers. It pretty much a nightmare.

Well, I must say “Windows 7” saved me!!

I am sticking to Cubase 10.0, since it’s the last one to speak Win 7.

Because of that I didn’t upgrade to 11 and haven’t gone through the recent nightmare.

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Maybe I will buy Cubase 11.5 if it sucks less than 11.0

to answer the subject question: yes, they should. multitrack rendering incl. busses, fx etc has saved me already at least 40 hours of time on the computer, that is a lot of money i saved.

11 is a huge upgrade for me. Sorry for your problems.

I really fail to see what good this would do in solving the issues you state? Why do you assume the updates would then be good? It would still be upgrades on a yearly basis. Just as it is now actually.

And yes, it’s complicated software that can have issues on several levels after an upgrade. Using Cubase it helps to know about where settings/templates are, how you can solve occurring issue like these. A lot of the issue you mention can be solved by just copying some configuration files over to the new location.

I agree that ‘in a perfect world’ this should not have to be done by a user and you should click on install, lean back and after the install have everything set up as it was? But unfortunately this is not how it works with software like this most of the time.

As a professional you’re the captain of your ship! If your crew f/u/s up your load you should be the one to be able to restore things to a workable situation! And if you can’t you should have people stand by to solve this for you! In the year 2020 where software and plugins just become more and more complicated you just can’t expect to press an update button and not even remotely anticipate to possible problems like these!

What I’m suggesting is to stop the annual scheduled updates and release the updates only when they’re ready. Maybe more frequent but smaller updates. The yearly updates are no better than a yearly subscription when you think about it but it puts pressure on the release date and marketing. The perfect DAW exemple for this is Reaper. Many years between 5 and 6 but almost weekly or monthly maintenance updates with bug fixes.

I agree that it’s c11’s most attractive feature. In my case, the bugs and setbacks made me lose more time than that feature made me safe. And be ready to wait because rendering with buss fx takes forever. A session with 100 channels will render 100 channels individually. It’s better than doing it manually but still can be very long. My experience with it is that you waste less time as you can go and do something else but the actual rendering is taking a lot more time. The overall process is not that much of a time saver if you can’t work while it renders. It’s not smart rendering but simply automated tasks. I might have missed something. Maybe you could share your experience in more detail, I’m curious to see how you saved so many hours. I guess if you leave while it renders and go do something else but if your mixing engineer is waiting for the stems, than don’t expect this to be a huge time saver.

In a perfect Pro world you do your rendering on a second machine which i would highly recommend

Rendering is done parallel not serial, so render times in my experience are much faster.
Unless rendering is done in real time, for whatever reason.

But is it in parallel when you include sends? When I tried including the sends in the signal chain, it took almost about an hour to render as it was rendering every tracks in series. Maybe I did something wrong. If it does render with sends in parallel, then I would have to agree it’s worth the upgrade for this single feature.

I tested multiple (mp3, flac, stems, with plugins, sends and clean…) myself a week ago and it all finished within 3-4 minutes for a 7 minute song. Make sure you have ‘real time export’ disabled! This is only useful is you have external effects or instruments connected that also need to be part of the export.

On the other hand? I encountered in the past that some plugins you use may not agree with Cubase’s fast export? Even if you have ‘real time’ disabled it will still export in real time? Maybe that’s happening in your case?

Well, I am all against any m9nthly subscription. Call me old school, I just hate it. I think the current model is fine

I know what you mean. I was against it when Protools started doing that. That being said, with a little step back and as time went on, I dont see any difference between a yearly subscription and yearly payed upgrades anymore. I’ve been upgrading Cubase yearly mid November for 5 years now.

I expect to pay 100 usd every year mid November. It would make absolutely no difference if it was a yearly subscription instead of the upgrade at this point. We would get less frustrated if they released more often but more stable updates. Spread the releases all year long and make sure the new stuff works 100% before releasing it. Less chances of messing up workflows, no drama, no fuss, just a stable software getting frequent updates.

Instead, every year we get a bunch of unstable features dumped on us mid November because they have to meet the deadline. Half of it gets fixed in the spring while the other half never gets fixed because they’re too busy planning the next release. Or, they fix some of it and have us pay more to get the updated revisions. Like they did with ARA and HiDPI support that we’ve payed for twice already.

The same goes for the video exports. I was all exited when they announced it only to realize there are no render settings. The file sizes are gigantic and it cannot render projects above 48k. We’ve payed for a barebone feature most of us cant even use and they’ll ask us to pay more for the render settings that should have been there to begin with.

There’s a lot to love about Cubase but I hate the way Steinberg is doing business. It’s really starting to feel like a big corporation trying to syphon as much cash as possible without any concern for quality.

I am just wondering if “actual” pros need guidance from a user forum about whether or not to upgrade…

Except by the fact that I didn’t upgrade either to 10.5 nor 11, so I didn’t expend a penny during this time.

But it’s a matter of personal preference.

Also, I don’t like the idea of getting my working enviroment locked if payment is not made.