Although this forum is the unofficial group therapy room (via cathartic ranting) for momentarily-frustrated Cubase users, I thought I would interrupt for just a moment to say a few nice things.
1.) The new lane behavior and the consequent streamlining of multi-take comp editing is perfect. (I know that the MIDI folks are not too pleased with the change; I do mostly audio, so my glowing comments only apply to audio work.) In Cubase 5, I frequently found myself angrily muttering, “Why can’t it just…” while doing vocal edits. Every way in which I ever finished that sentence has been realized in Cubase 6. I’m very impressed, and the new workflow is vastly better.
2.) Group editing, including slicing/quantizing based on mulitple hitpoint-containing tracks is a time-saver like few others. They did a fantastic job with this, and it has moved drum editing from “painfully tedious” to “as effortless as one could realistically expect”.
3.) The program as a whole–and especially the arrangement window–looks way better. Some people don’t care about this, but if I’m going to be staring at something for hours on end, I want it to be as un-ugly as possible. Steinberg did a great job updating the look of the program, including the immediately-noticable look of the parts and events. Cubase 6 is very easy on the eyes and now looks as good as or better than any other major DAW out there (in my opinion).
and, just because the details count…
4.) The Fixed View/Lanes View control that used to be a drop-down menu–with only two options–is now a toggle. That always irritated me, and they improved it. Mouseclicks add up, and reducing them is a big deal. ‘Click-aim-click’ is now just ‘click’. Awesome.
There will always be things that could be fixed or made bettter, but I thought that it wouldn’t hurt to throw out some appreciation for the things that Steinberg got right.
The Lane behaviour has been altered for a specific task, rather than multi-task capabilities that it had. “It” presumes now, rather than allowing me the choice to work as I desire. There is no option that even allows me to use a key modifier to properly operate as before. In one fell swoop, Steinberg have REMOVED functionality I utilized, and such functionality was one of several reasons I chose Cubase over Pro Tools. If that seems like a light statement, a little investigation might raise an eyebrow or so.
I truly wish Nuendo would include this new behaviour modification/removal in it’s next update; I am VERY interested to see if it would result in uproar, or wide spread embracing, with very few complaining. Loss of C5 Lane editing has me wishing I could get my money back from the "Up"grade. The positive aspects of C6 over C5 are completely and absolutely rendered moot due to the destruction of Lane operations (for me).
minus 1000000.
And, yes, you’re absolutely right. This shouldn’t be a group therapy room for ranters. It should be a place where users get assistance before they become ranters. That happens if you arrogantly ignore your user’s friendly questions over and over again.
But I won’t berate you for unquestioningly siding with Steinberg. I remember another new forum member, a long time ago, who once thought and posted similarly. And I for one hope you don’t have to experience the same complacency and arrogance that made him the ranter he is today.
ontopic: +1
The program as a whole (+ a number of little and big changes that please me personally a lot.)
…another Forum member? I bet it was you…
… “unquestioningly siding with Steinberg”? -No…it doesn’t look like that.
User-Forum is for users to help and question other users. (Click to->Steinberg Home->Forum-…and read. If you dont get it, it is not Steinbergs fault)
The e-mail support sux…just like with any other company. (i hate that…)(+i hate e-mails…)
(I started with Sequel + ranting on (and about) the Forum…Then bought Cubase4Studio…Then went away to Ableton… came back frustrated…bought Cubase6Full…and now i am very happy…and the forum is new and good.)
Product-forums tend to look negative (depressing) or like group-therapy, because the most people come with problems, looking for help and not the other way round.
I didn’t intend for this to turn into another geyser of MIDI people being slurmed off about lane behavior, and I thought that making a specific exception in the original post would prevent it.
I was only saying that for doing AUDIO MULTI-TAKE COMP EDITING, the new behavior is nice. There are other threads addressing the issue of other uses for lanes. That wasn’t the point of this thread.
The point was that if someone does 96% of what they do very well, but only ever saw hundreds of pages of forum threads about the 4% that was problematic, it would be a bummer. I thought I would point out that they have done some really great things that have helped streamline a few common processes that used to be far more tedious.
Should they have replaced the old way of doing it rather than adding to it? Perhaps not. Start a new thread about it. This one was simply a (naive) attempt to say something nice about Cubase.
Sorry- my post was inclusive of Audio… in fact, it is primarily audio manipulation in Lanes that is the main issue for me. The Lanes feature now presumes that every user will want a single workflow type. That alone would not be an issue if key modifiers and/or toggle options were present. They are not, so broad functionality has been removed, and this renders C6 useless for my needs.
I have not run into such feature set/legacy behaviour excision before. But, I may be rating Lanes operational feature set importance a bit higher than other users would rate it. Lanes, Scoring, and VariAudio as compositional tools were my only reason to choose C5 over PT. Scoring is more a convenience thing, and if Melodyne would integrate more seamlessly… well…No other app provided functionality like Lanes provided in C5; C6 has removed that functionality for Audio and MIDI (currently),
Because C6 has streamlined functionality and dropped some feature details it does not stop anyone from installing an older version of Cubase that has the features you need.
What it does mean is that you’re now a minority user of those features that the programmer thought C6 didn’t need and, but only applicable to the latest version, has decided for whatever reason not to continue it’s inclusion in C6.
And C5 isn’t that far behind C6 in most ways.
Maybe. I had a fun time these last days finding out for myself (and with the help of WALDORF’s support department) what was wrong. Simply put: Cubase no longer supports pre-VST2.4 plug-ins. I’m not going to rant about that, and a simple update put me back on track. What I’m getting at is: Steinberg probably knew this. Did they post anything on the lines of “Attention: C6 will no longer support older plug-ins”? Nope. Did they include this information in the version history & known issues pdf? Nope.
If they had, I cold have prepared for the upgrade, and would have done it cheerfully. I understand that a complex product like Cubase has to lose some code-ballast every once in a while and won’t hold a grudge about that. But I do like to be informed. By the manufacturer themselves. That’s all I’m asking for.
And just for the record: I love the new lane behaviour, the multi-take comp editing is fantastic and all the other new features are great, and I still favor Cubase over any other music production software on the market.