Interesting points from the OP, appreciate the thoughts. I happen to use and love Bitwig BTW along with several other DAWs, including of course Cubase, Nuendo, Reaper, Studio One, and others, etc., but I feel very differently about these issues, mainly because I understand the origins and history of all these various apps, and how the various business models generally work, including at Steinberg. Maybe I’m getting old and I’ve had enough personal exchanges with various DAW developers and plugin developers over the years.
First, the OP needs to look at the history of the various apps and who their developers are, over their whole development lifecycles, where those developers got their start, when they became the experts they are today, and in the case of Steinberg products, how, why, and when they became part of the Steinberg family, and then the OP would see vastly different approaches and business models over decades of work and millions of lines of code from different paths that wind up in these different products, and it will all make sense.
Not to get into a lot of details (since I think that could be a hundred pages long!), but you cannot divorce the history of the app from where it is today. Additionally, the OP seems to lack an understanding of the complexity of the development process and general momentum of institutional knowledge and market forces and budgets over time. Not to mention that the DAW market is a tiny, niche market. There’s NOT a lot of money to throw around.
In other words, to over-simplify this whole thing, you can’t take a big “battleship” like Cubase or Nuendo, with all their intricate legacy code and millions of lines of interdependent code written by many developers over many years, and expect it to have all the raw materials, the plumbing and wiring to easily convert it into a speedboat, or a yacht, or a sailboat. Hope that analogy makes sense. Not to mention that it has a specific market of customers, and you can’t shake up the ship too much each iteration. With that kind of institutional and market gravity, companies tend to go slowly and methodically, and yes, they have become conservative.
The OP’s main points are well taken, but consider that each of the main Steinberg apps were developed by different teams, at different times, sometimes acquired or distributed from different companies or independent developers in the past. Steinberg is more like an evolving FLEET of merchant vessels coming together from different places and times… it is NOT a single, unified nationalized fleet of ships designed from the beginning from ONE top-down visionary commander.
Another way of putting it is that Steinberg acts a little more like a publisher than a single-minded single-vision focused team. That’s not precisely accurate, but it should help give more context.
Take Wavelab, for example, which has been largely developed by one legendary developer (and all around nice guy), Philippe Goutier. Is it any wonder that the icons, features, UI, approach, etc., are all different than Cubase/Nuendo? This might confuse the OP since it is so “out of place” in some ways in the Steinberg catalog. But if you understand its story, and actually Philippe Goutier’s story and his relationship with Steinberg, you’ll understand why it is what it is. (And Wavelab is great! Cheers to PG!)
This is the case with many of Steinberg’s apps. Most recently, you have the stories of Dorico and SpectraLayers. Look at their interesting back stories to understand how and when they became part of the Steinberg “family” or “fleet,” but more importantly, look at the specific experts and amazing developers who make those products – their work and incredible experience PREDATED being part of Steinberg. This means their entire development process, lifecycle, application frameworks are all DIFFERENT than the team that builds Cubase, for example.
Now you can argue that Steinberg’s business model of being a sort of quasi- “branded publisher” approach causes confusion and a sense of lack of cohesiveness. And you can argue that Steinberg needs to unify a lot of things. And you can argue that Steinberg needs to get their various apps synced up in a development sense too (i.e. look at the score features in Cubase vs Dorico, etc.).
That’s all well and good. But in order to accomplish a true unification of such DIFFERENT codebases and teams, you’d literally have to rewrite ALL the apps to share one common application framework, and that would cost way too much money and take many years to do. Remember, the DAW market is very small, there’s not a lot of extra money rolling around.
So Steinberg has adopted, in my view, a very slow “evolutionary” approach where general principles are slowly being brought into alignment among their unique “ships” of discreet teams. The biggest project coming up from what I can tell, is going to be the eventual addition of Dorico features directly into Cubase/Nuendo, since the main developer of the current score editor in Cubase is retiring soon. The Dorico team will no doubt take over his codebase and likely slowly replace it with Dorico features. That’s my personal take on it, I don’t have inside knowledge on this, but the chess pieces are all there in plain sight. But no matter how Steinberg does it, it will be OPEN HEART SURGERY, not some easy replacement of the score editor. So no wonder it will take a LONG time to “unify” those aspects.
Anyway, I don’t disagree with the lack of ecosystem coherence in many ways, but I understand exactly why the situation is what it is. And I’m totally fine with it. I get it. It’s kind of amazing what Steinberg has accomplished actually, even though I sure have my own personal feature requests I’ve been asking for forever (ripple editing please!).
The OP completely misses the reality of the unique background and institutional history of Steinberg. And it’s silly to contrast all this to Bitwig, which is ONE app, that started with a unified vision and has former people from Ableton who brought all their experience with them, or Presonus, which is ONE app, that also started with a unified vision and has former people from Steinberg, with all of their prior experience.
Is it any wonder that Bitwig and Studio One can evolve so quickly and become so mature in such a short time period, and retain coherence within their specific domains? Of course it’s clear. One product, one vision, one domain, one focused team. In time as they grow, they may start to face similar challenges to Steinberg. But Steinberg is in a different place, with a different story, a multi-domain entity, for better or worse.
Once you wrap your head around all this, and especially the histories of each product, you get the picture of why things are the way they are.
Maybe some day, Steinberg will build a unified application framework upon which ALL the apps will be built, and then you MIGHT get some real cohesiveness between all the apps. But until then, it’s best to think of Steinberg as a quasi-publisher of apps with discreet teams that joined Steinberg at different times in its history, and each team already had their own development process and application frameworks, and now Steinberg is trying to bring them into alignment over time, while making sure that each application continues to be profitable within each prior market segment.
Like it or not, that’s the way it is. Cheers!
