So where is Cubase headed?

Steinberg Lounge
1

With sadness I am moving on. I have been with Cubase since the Atari days and simply need to move on due to performance and resource issues. I have a mid sized project going with maybe 45 plugs in it. As I added them over time I watched the VST Performance Meter climb. I started freezing as much as I could and ended up with about 15 plugs active. With a 1024 samples buffer the real time peak meter hovers around 45% and spikes past 100%, well it would if it could go past 100%. I was working in V 7.5.4 and was hoping the new audio engine in 8.x would help. It did not. On my system the peak meter runs about the same or a tad worse. Maybe it is just my RME 802 interface, who knows. I myself cannot fix that driver or Cubase… so what am I to do?

I also have Reaper but never really wanted to try and learn it. But I installed it and put 12 instances of Superior Drummer in it and 40 plugs. Load meter was 16%…HUH? That opened my eyes to the fact I could likely run all the plugs I wanted on that platform and not be freezing tracks left and right and taking a ton of time going that route.

To be sure I will keep Cubase on hand and use it here and there. But as my main DAW I am forced to move on. I hope Cubase can right the ship and if so I will be back.

Thanks to all that helped over years, your assistance is greatly appreciated.
LB

2

Incredible that Reaper can handle what Cubase can not…my performance meter is always maxed out but it doesn’t seem to effect the actual performance,
I never use more than 30/35 tracks though so maybe that’s whats saving me…

3

Yeah I don’t know for sure, but I was thinking the same thing. I have a lot of tracks going on in this project. A good 23 or so just for all the drums. I also kept and stored many lanes or takes on tracks in case I need to go back into them and sift the deck to find better parts.

I think the deal for Reaper is that it happens to be lightweight. Go figure, Cubase is about 9.5 GB… Reaper is about 9 MB. Now that is not a fair comparison as Cubase has a ton of samples in it and Reaper has none of that stuff. But still that gives you an idea of how tight Reaper is.

But realize my post is more to say goodbye to a wonderful, helpful forum of folks that have helped me over the years. I am not bashing Cubase at all. I will still use it for certain things. For instance when tracking vocals I put the lyrics in the Arranger Track so the vocalist has a cue of what to sing and where. Nothing like that in Reaper at all.

But the bottom line is there needs to be improvement in resource utilization for me to continue with it.

Take good care,
LB

4

9M thats amazing these days! :smiley:

I remember marvelling at how Cubase could fit in 1.2M on the Atari leaving plenty of space on the floppy for some .ARRs (they were the days) - how things have changed!

I know virtually nothing of Reaper but will look into it now. Am I right in saying as a relatively new project the users are closer to the actual developers and can feedback issues / influence the direction it goes? I like the sound of that :slight_smile:

Al

5

Hi Sonic,
Yeah 9 MB compressed and uncompressed I think it was something like 12.5 MB… But realize it is pretty bare bones. Your not going to get things like VariAudio and a ton of other things are not there that are in Cubase.

The Atari ST was a hot machine in the day. I mean it was up against the likes of an IBM 286 I think at the start. I mean you either did the ST or the green screen. Many top notch developers flocked to the Atari as it had a ton of horsepower for it’s time. I sadly chucked all of mine about 6 years ago. The thing about the Atari and programing was that most stuff was programmed in Assembler. Very efficient code!

Reaper being closer to the developers - I would tend to say so, but I have not been around it in depth for any length of time. I do know (as I am running it) that anyone can be a beta tested and report what they find. Now that is a novel concept! I am running Release Candidate 5 of version 5. It will likely be out soon and I have no issues with it.

I think I am onto something as to why Reaper is so efficient in resource usage. I was working with a plug by Waves called Kramer Tape. I was in GUI mode that shows the nice UI for the user. I happened to look over at the resource meter and was shocked to find it was 22%. Huh? I only had about 7 plugs loaded total. Here is what was very interesting to me. I closed the GUI and put away the plug - mind you it was still active doing it’s thing but had no GUI up. I glanced again at the resource meter and it was like 1.6%. So it would seem to me that Reaper is tuning off the GUI when you put the plug away and no longer need to work on it’s settings. I could be wrong but I think Cubase is leaving the plug GUI intact and on the whole time! That is unless you freeze it or disable it. But something else is going on too that I have not put my finger on as even when you freeze and or disable a plug in Cubase you don’t seem to get all the resources it consume back. That is all I have taken in so far. More as it develops.

I know one thing, under the hood things are vastly different between the 2 DAWs. Reaper has programed and figured out things resource wise. I think Steiny would be wise to investigate and apply…

Take good care,
LB

6

hi LB

Interesting point you bring up. There is no reason they should be using GUI resources when out of sight. I’ll have a play around later. Ooh Kramer master tape - love it and use in every track somewhere :slight_smile: nice animation of the tape going round, not entirely necessary for music creation however :wink: Does stopping the tape improve things I wonder?

Still have both my Ataris - STFM and STE (which is no longer working. Also the massive 170M hard disk (!) died years ago. I still keep the STs because one day Ill load up a track for old times sake :slight_smile:

take it easy

Al

7

Hi,I notice you are using windows 7.Have you tried it with windows 8.1?I had a few issues with certain plugs and performance etc while using 7.But when i changed to 8.1 its now working flawlessly and ive a pretty old machine.It was fairly solid anyway bar those few issues,but the improvement is huge since Windows 8.1.I had it the buffer on 64 for ages until i noticed some crackles and realised id forgot to up the buffer amount.I think cubase 8 is made to work in windows 8.1 onwards and just happens to work in windows 7.Worth giving it a try anyway

8

Yeah, Reaper’s multi-core audio scheduling is jaw-dropping good. In terms of raw performance, all other DAWs I’ve tested don’t even come close.

I will say that Cubase with ASIO Guard 2 comes in second place when compared against Studio One V3 and Sonar X3 (have not tried the new version); so there’s that.

As for Reaper, I have a very simple rule / requirement for what my main DAW must do: it must have an easy to access track delay (ms) offset slider. With Reaper, it’s this ugly, jankey 3rd party javascript plugin popup thing and not part of the track UI. There are a ton of other little things about Reaper that also are deal breakers for me, mostly UI-related.

But I am using Reaper as a real-time fx rack and love it for that purpose.

As to the original question of “where is Cubase headed?” For greatness, if it focuses on stability with 3rd party plugins, addresses some UI issues, cleans up its design, modernizes its windowing and drag-and-drop features, increases the insert count, and follows through on some of the newer features (like render-in-place).

9

I find it really difficult to believe that you can load 12 instances of Superior Drummer with 16 gig of ram. I had 12 gig of ram in my last computer and BFD 3 was using 6 gig and I was running into memory problems with the additional use of a number of instances of Kontakt. Notably Session Horns. All of my problems were solved by an upgrade to 32 gig of memory.

I run my machine at 64 samples with a fairly large track count with a sizeable number of plugins and don’t overly tax the cpu. See my system below. 8.0.2 seems to be doing the job for me. The real question seems to be why does Cubase work for some people and not for others. If there was something wrong with Cubase surely it would not work for anyone?

10

Hi Al,
Yeah I just got into Kramer Tape and really like it. Them reels a turning away are pretty impressive. I dumped 3 STs and my last was a very nice Mega STE 16 MHz with a good sized internal drive for the day. Sad to see them go, but the PC came a calling. I still miss things like the tight coding, efficient system architecture, ROM based OS and yes even a crash was cool as you could count the bombs and determine who had the best crash! I live in Redmond - home of Microsoft and I am no pall of Bills. I call his OS and apps, Fat-ware By BIll… Bloated programing at best. It is a shame programing these days has gotten so slack on writing tight code.

Take good care,
LB

11

Hum,
That is an interesting point on Win 8. No I have not tried Win 8 with Cubase. I suppose I should. But I would have to try it on a non production machine. I could put it up in a virtual machine on my DAW but that is not a very good environment for a DAW to live in… But it might tell me if what you saying would work for me. I know one thing, in Reaper I keep reaching for stuff that is plain not there. For one (and there are many) I love the locators control in Cubase. Nothing like in in the big R.

I wonder how things will shake out with Win 10… everyone on the PC platform signed up to get their free copy?

Take care,
LB

12

I find it really difficult to believe that you can load 12 instances of Superior Drummer with 16 gig of ram. I had 12 gig of ram in my last computer and BFD 3 was using 6 gig and I was running into memory problems with the additional use of a number of instances of Kontakt. Notably Session Horns. All of my problems were solved by an upgrade to 32 gig of memory.

I run my machine at 64 samples with a fairly large track count with a sizeable number of plugins and don’t overly tax the cpu. See my system below. 8.0.2 seems to be doing the job for me. The real question seems to be why does Cubase work for some people and not for others. If there was something wrong with Cubase surely it would not work for anyone?

Well,
Realize that when I was doing my testing it was all with a buffer size of 1024. But it was equal to that setting in both Cubase and Reaper. To be fair I had few tracks in Reaper and maybe 40 or so in Cubase. I just tested Reaper on an instance of Superior Drummer. Loading 1 instance of that took 613 MB. Loading the second instance took 600 MB. So quick math says very roughly 10 instances of Sup. Drummer would need around 6,000 MB of ram. Therefor it is entirely possible to run the dirty dozen with Superior anyways. However I was NOT running Kontakt. Most of my additional 40 plugs were just small plugs. I should have tried jamstix as that is a pretty hungry deal.

You bring up the million dollar question in that why is it some run great with Cubase and others do not. I wish I had the answer to that one. I know following these issues here in the forum video cards, OS, interfaces and more have been hashed out for a long time. No one has seemingly hit the nail on the head and for sure nailed down what it is… I will keep my eyes open here though as one may come up at some point in time.

Take care,
LB

13

I agree with you fully on Reaper not measuring up to Cubase in many areas. There are just a lot of nice navigation type things I miss in Cubase. When you pick up Cubase and operate it you can just feel the history of innovation in it. In Reaper’s multi-core audio scheduling is as you say “jaw dropping”. How about Cubase incorporates that along with all the great features it has? It would blow away the competition!

I will keep my fingers crossed!
LB

14

quote from jalcide…As to the original question of “where is Cubase headed?” For greatness, if it focuses on stability with 3rd party plugins, addresses some UI issues, cleans up its design, modernizes its windowing and drag-and-drop features, increases the insert count, and follows through on some of the newer features (like render-in-place).[/quote]




thats a lot of stuff that they probably will not do bearing in mind the problems that keep getting carried forward…

15

thats a lot of stuff that they probably will not do bearing in mind the problems that keep getting carried forward…[/quote]

Hi,
Yes that is a ton of stuff and unfortunate the focus seems to be on more features and not on these kinds of core things. But I submit that what I have brought up is a big issue and needs to be addressed. I mean if I compare the 2 DAWs right now today Cubase already has a lot more features. In the area of “drag and drop” Reaper has very little of this. There is no click and drag across the tracks you want to select like in Cubase. I miss that big time already. Though I am still very surprised that the complete audio engine rebuild in V 8.xx of Cubase Pro was not effective in reducing resource usage, at least for me. The spikes on the VST Performance Meter are really an issue on my end. The Reaper spikes jump around 3-4% while Cubase spikes up to 30-55% or more at times under heavy loading. That is simply not acceptable and is a sever limitation for those that are dealing with it. It is sad when you hold your breath as you load up plugs and wonder if you have hit the SPIKE limit. Steiny has the resources I think to address this and hopefully will. To me that is the future of Cubase as they already are very good at adding features.

Thanks,
LB

16

That is the problem. Follow the money.

Pro-sumers/hobbyists are where the money is at. Core functions and workflow only matter after newbies/casual users become experienced and join the minority begging for this. At that point their requests change from more VST’s, and a new esoteric feature to…something as basic as MIX UNDO. It’s a very simple concept, and something many people want, yet seems very difficult for Steinberg to implement.

17

Maybe I’m being overly optimistic, but software development can often be counter-intuitive; things that seem hard can often not be (and vice versa).

A new UI could happen in parallel and be folded into a build, because it’s a pretty clean separation (a.k.a. “MVC,” or a classic “Model-View-Controller” style of programming which most certainly Cubase is built on, or similar).

Drag and drop features would happen with that new UI and would be relatively painless to map to existing Cubase functions.

So those two things could be done without impacting the core team (and core code) too much.

As for insert fx counts, this is easy as they’ve addressed it in the new Mix Console UI (there’s now an expanding area for more inserts). They probably just have to change a hardcoded limit variable somewhere. :smiley: I’m oversimplifying, but probably not by much.

As for adding a pre-render option to Render-in-place, how hard can that be… I’m stunned they haven’t added it yet. All the machinery is there. It’s just grabbing the pre-fader stream instead of the post-fader stream. (As I’ve said many times, who in their right mind prints level. It’s just so wonky.)

The hardest part is going to be stability with 3rd part plugins. What they need are more beta testers that run 10gb+ projects with 200+ plugin counts and 40+ VSTi counts. And then someone dedicated to recreating those crash reports and fast-tracking them to someone on the dev team.

Even just saying that “out loud” makes me realize it will never happen. :laughing:

The other approach would be to completely re-architect the plugin containers and I don’t think we’ll see that for several more years.

Right now, they just need a good fly swatter approach to stability which will never happen with their internal team, only. Their internal test projects will never be as ambitious or ill-conceived as the ones we ham-fisted knuckleheads come up with.

But I guess I’ve given up, too. Not on Cubase, but on any DAW hosting the plugin counts I need.

I’ve split up my project across multiple computers and also switched to an audio rendering/recording workflow (no freezing/unfreezing and no live VSTis). I may never look back.

18

I do that also. For no good reason now (I used to have to do it running Cubase 6.5 on an old XP machine), except habit, prudence and prevention against badness happening during an audio take. Overkill probably, but it’s reassuring to me …

19

Right! I have vst’s - well certainly more than I actually need - it would be great if Steinberg thinks about the basic functionality and ease if use within Cubase. I don’t want new toys as I can buy better ones elsewhere. I want functions that all work. I want a well thought out GUI. I want a mixer that I can configure and order myself. I want Steinberg to look at all the issues users have been banging on about and make that their priority.
Yep I am a dreamer.

20

“So where is Cubase headed?”

To glory.