Hi -
Can you smart guys (you know who you are!) please help me understand:
Thank you!
(Formatting edited for clarity)
Hi,
The Folder with Group is the same as a Group Channel from the routing point of view. But it’s different from the VCA.
The VCA is on the top (input) side of the signal on the Channel. The Group Channel comes after the output.
…If I’m allowed to answer.
That depends on how you use group channels.
I use a group channel for every track being sent to an external summing mixer because Steinberg have still yet to properly implement handling of this type of external hardware that existed before Cubase or even computers themselves. Because if you don’t do this, you have no meters going out and soloing gets messy.
Another thing is you may have a folder of midi tracks called drums and you have to send each of those parts to a different group that requires different processing and the source and destinations may be mix and match. This depends entirely on how you setup your projects and your workflow after that.
Steinberg created this because some people asked for it because it would help their workflow. For others like me it will never get used.
One thing I still want to test is importing track from another project… If importing one of these group folder tracks does it import all the tracks contained within because I may just want to import the actual inserts or routing portion of the group channel itself.
…theoretically, IF VCA faders would work as advertised. Will VCA faders ever be fixed or properly documented? After 10 years of silence I have almost given up hope. I would love to use them if only they were reliable (easy to use).
Anyways, a question for another decade. Today, I don’t want to steal Steinberg’s thunder: Cubase 15.0.20 is a fabulous update 
BTW: I think it’s fair to say that you can definetly consider yourself as one of the smart people, if I may add 
I ran into a scenario where the group-folders don’t work for me:
For example: 9 Drum tracks:
Nested in a regular Folder (Drums Folder), Group Editing activated on the Drum Folder Track for editing all Drum Tracks together:
Kick
Snare Group:
Snare top
Snare Bottom
Hat
Tom Group:
Tom 01
Tom 02
Tom 03
Overhead Group:
Oh L
OH R
I was so excited to have the new option of Group-Folders. So I replaced
Snare Group, Tom Group and Overhead Group with a new Group-Folder.
PROBLEM: The Group Folders don´t obey to the Group editing of the main Drum Folder
so editing is no longer possible.
I think this is a major oversight.
This not a new issue in the folder groups, but unfortunately must have been that way for folder tracks since the beginning. But imho yes, would be good if group editing works with nested folders. It’s not as easy to change, so I can’t make any promises if and when this can be achieved.
Cheers Dirk
Yes, it also was a problem with nested folders in the past.
I had high hopes that group-folders would adopt the group-behaviour and not the folder behaviour for this situation.
As always thanx for chiming in and being aware! Much appreciated!
I can think of at least a few reasons why (unless I’m missing something or change my mind) I’ll still need group channels.
The first, and most obvious (probably not subject to changing my mind?) case is for the Andrew Scheps “rear bus” technique. This is where you route all your submixes, except drums (and maybe bass in some cases) to a bus. (I gather he called it the “rear bus” because it originated from surround mixing and something that would go to rear speakers.) That bus gets compressed with independent left-right compression, and then sent to the main mix at some relatively low level. Because of the drums’ not feeding into this, there isn’t an obvious hierarchical folder structure – e.g. it’s not the instrumental submix, which would contain drums, but not vocals. Rather, it’s separate group channel with sends from other submixes (in my first use of it, it had bass, electric guitars, acoustic guitars, brass, keys, background vocals, and lead vocals). I suppose you could consider it to be an FX channel instead of a group channel, but I set it up as a group channel before routing anything to it, and that just seems to make sense to me since what would get routed to it could vary from project to project.
The second is that I just don’t see myself wanting my whole project to be one gigantic folder with lots of subfolders. So, for example, I still think I’m likely to have an instrumental submix group, a main mix group, and the eventual stereo out (my master bus for the mastering chain processors). However, I do expect to replace my lead vocal group bus and background vocal group bus with group folders, and the instrumental subgroups will also likely be set up that way.
I mostly use VCA faders for late mix corrections, where I’ve already done a bunch of automation, especially at a submix level, and don’t want to mess with that but do want to raise or lower the level of that automated bit in the mix without disturbing the automation. While I could nominally just select all the automation and change the change one value up or down to do a similar thing, using a VCA fader feels a lot safer because I can experiment with the level of the offset easily at a later point where Undo would no longer be available. My most frequent use cases on this front tend to be my background vocals and lead vocals submixes, and I’m most generally using the VCA on a single track or group track, rather than to control multiple tracks in parallel.