O.K., all of the above being as they may, what’s the bottom line?
Is there a cross-grade price from Nuendo to Cubase, so I don’t have to wait on the music features?
Devs, please come in.
It’s not very clear if you want to own both Cubase and Nuendo?
If it’s that you wanna just move to Cubase instead, it doesn’t make sense to talk about “cross-grade price” as Nuendo is a more expensive program.
If you want both, in my opinion it would be more sensible if the Nuendo license could open both Cubase and Nuendo, meaning that you could still only use it on one machine. But that still leaves the open question what happens when Cubase is bumped a version, which obviously is the talk here.
I actually thought that crossgrading meant giving up one license. If that’s not the case then…
Crossgrade is usually when you get software cheaper from a company because you have similar software at another company. If you crossgrade from say Logic to Cubase, Steinberg don’t/can’t take away your Logic license.
That’s also why talking about a crossgrade from Nuendo to Cubase doesn’t really make sense too much sense as it would be a “downgrade”, unless it ment that you could use both programs…
How Steinberg did their features when they bumped both programs to v10 was having everything that exist in Cubase also existing in Nuendo, which is why I “upgraded” to Nuendo. So with that in mind you don’t really get anything in Cubase you don’t have in Nuendo, it’s only now and until Nuendo gets an update, that it sucks cause we have to wait on all the sweet new features 
Personally I’m still super duper happy with the few Nuendo only features I use, and I’m ready to wait for some time for the new features to get to Nuendo.
I own both but tend to do all productions in Nuendo. I know it’s a drag waiting for features, but I have to say that Nuendo 10 is so much better than any previous version. I’ve used Nuendo since version 2. Working in Variaudio is a dream now. They solved all the weird display glitches I’ve had on previous releases. I really don’t know why I hang onto two different licenses. Seems like a monumental waste of money, keeping both up to date.
Desperately want the PT style smart tool, absolutely huge for me!
I just LOVE the idea!
What you all forget:
We will probably get all of Cubase 11’s functions that are already finished in April 2020.
The Cubasers then have to wait until the end of the year.
So we also test in april the new functions for the new Cubase 11 coming end of the year.
The programs are already being developed together.
We basically get Cubase 10.75 with Nuendo 10.5
The release dates are different because the team has now to work on special functions for Nuendo.
I still think that if Nuendo has all the features of Cubase, plus a few more,
and we pay much more for Nuendo, then Nuendo users should have access
to both Nuendo and Cubase.
Otherwise it’s unfair to wait for newer features and pay more.
Frustrating to say the least.
I doubt that. Is there any history of that happening?
I agree. I just migrated (crossgraded) from Pro Tools last year during the sale. I mix both music and Post, so I went to Cubase 10 first, then quickly upgraded to Nuendo for the Post features. As soon as I gave up my Cubase license, 10.5 was released. We pay a lot more for Nuendo, and it would be nice to have access to both platforms. Pro Tools Ultimate and Standard/Vanilla are the same program with the extended feature set turned on for Ultimate.
It would be nice for Cubase and Nuendo to function in the same way.
tg
Ok, well, just to address the color of the grass (green) for a second:
I’m sitting in a studio right now where two PT licenses need to be upgraded. Both are “perpetual”, not rental. Both have lapsed upgrade&support plans. Avid will give us two options:
-
Pay $1,000 per license to be allowed to continue with the upgrade&support plans. Those plans upgrade each license as long as you are on those plans. If you don’t renew them annually you have to pay the 1k. The plans are $400 per year. So over a three year period each license/computer is looking at $1,800, just to stay up to date.
-
“Crossover” to their rental program. They offer a discount for that. $600. So it’s $600 per license/computer to cross over to rentals, and when you rent the software works as long as you’re paying. Stop paying and it stops working. It’s a discount for the first two years, and after that it’s $800 per year for the software, paid up front.
$1,000 - Nuendo regular price for a perpetual license.
$ 615 - Nuendo current sale price for perpetual license.
$ 200 - Upgrade from previous version.
Easy to navigate.
So for option #1 above over say three years I could buy 2 new versions of Nuendo today and have enough for 11 upgrades (i.e. 5 years for two licenses), or 2 and 4 years of upgrades once the sale ends.
Option #2 would get me 2 new Nuendo and 5 years of upgrades at the full price, or at the sale price 2 new Nuendo and about 7 years of upgrades.
And that assumes we’re paying $200 for Nuendo upgrades every year, which we don’t. In fact, we probably pay about every 18 months or so and all the other updates in between are at no extra charge. So really we can multiply the support time by 1.5…
So, grass sure ain’t greener, and while I understand that not everyone is made of money I find Nuendo’s pricing to be very, very reasonable and competitive. As a matter of fact I don’t see how anyone in their right mind who isn’t tied to PT because of the market they work in could not pick Nuendo over PT at this point.
O.K., so we’ve looked at the economics.
Could we look at the features and workflow, pound for pound?
Newbie here.
Features and workflow?
Features, Nuendo wins on walkover. No contest.
Workflow, Nuendo wins most areas but is weaker in a few important ones. In my opinion those are:
Slightly messy GUI (otoh PT’s is pretty dull and tiereing on the eyes, but the Gui design is logical and consistent, Steinberg just isn’t), Multitrack editing, automation editing and VCAs.
As for the rest, Nuendo wins.
Are the negatives important enough to make PT a better choice? For existing PT users that do not want to change tools, the answer is quite likely yes.
Would I choose to go back to PT from Nuendo? No I would not.
Writing all the good stuff Nuendo has that PT doesn’t is just silly, but a shortlist is, control room (hardware needed to get even close), ADR solution, marker tracks, quick link, solo/mute logic (so you can choose to solo/mute where ever you are in a signal chain), visibility agents (show hide in a much more advanced form), preview or scrub any event regardless if muted, or on a Inactive track, sample editor to edit any sound before placing it on the timeline (+ stuff like vari audio, processing and pitch correction and more), folder tracks (finally coming to PT it seems), unlimited latency compensation, built in reconfirm engine, multiple editin paradigms, user controlled key commands and macros, Project logical editor (no other Daw has anything like it), proper panning in all standard format tracks (no need for spanner), edit channel settings window, loudness metering, processing and loudness track, clip packages and the list goes on and I am getting tired.
I agree…but Steinberg don’t 
Yeah, I only did that because price was brought up. Steinberg walks all over Avid in this regard.
I agree 100% with what Erik said (always trust the Swedes).
I think that if we isolate what the DAWs do and look at them as they’re sold, and then imagine a post production facility that does almost everything then Nuendo is the clear winner. Some of what Erik mentioned you have to pay for separately with PT, like a decent media browser, ADR functionality, EDL reconform and more. It’s not that it’s hard to do that with PT, it’s that you have to buy it separately. So literally Nuendo has the clear edge here, and it’s either that or you pay up for those softwares as well to be up to par in which case PT just got more pricey.
Of course, I don’t particularly care if I’m on Nuendo or PT if someone pays me to do work, and I don’t think studios care that much if they’ve invested in PT and are looking at an upgrade or crossgrade to Nuendo. They just write those costs off. No biggie as long as the business is healthy.
I do think though for new buyers - as I said before when there are no other constraints - Nuendo offers so much more for so much less that it’s pretty much a no-brainer in my book.
So again - the grass isn’t necessarily greener on the other side…
Nuendo is literally just all of Cubase + a few more features on top. Why not get rid off all of this confusion and separate update schedules by making Nuendo the beyond-Pro version of Cubase or something?
Cubase Elements → Cubase Artist → Cubase Pro → Cubase Ultimate.
Steinberg already offers a crossgrade (upgrade) from Cubase to Nuendo, so this is clearly the way they see it anyway.
I don’t understand what your point is.
Steinberg should stop treating them as two different programs, since Cubase is at this point just a subset of Nuendo.
Make it one program. One update schedule. No one has to complain about the other one getting new features first.
K. We’ve been through all of this before though.
Cubase as a brand was different back when Nuendo came out. Nuendo as a brand is still different. It actually does make sense from a marketing perspective.
From a practical perspective one argument against what you’re talking about can be illustrated by a thought experiment: Suppose new features are 100%. 30% are exclusive to Nuendo. Suppose further that it takes 1 day per feature, so 100 days to program. Suppose also that it’s a linear process.
Option 1 is that 100 days go by and everyone gets an upgrade.
Option 2 is that 70 days go by and Cubase comes out, and then 30 days later Nuendo comes out.
The question is why Cubase users should have to wait 30 days just to make Nuendo users complain less.
Now, obviously it isn’t as ‘linear’ as I make it in the example, there’s going to be some overlap and also some ‘redundant’ work being done “twice”. But the objection is well worth considering. Why should Cubase users have to wait just because otherwise ‘we’ complain? After all, it still takes the 100 days for us regardless.
Lastly, if you read through the thread (or some other thread) you’ll see that they indeed did at least say that they’ve adjusted their production. So we’ve already heard that there has been changes made.
PS: I’m absolutely in favor of Nuendo owners having a license that runs either Nuendo or Cubase at any one given time. It would possibly solve some legit concerns some people have.