[Caution: The following text could be construed as quite rant-like ( which it is) but I believe it to address reasonable concerns
I’ll preface my gripes with the acknowledgement that the Cubase software does a lot of amazing things and I can appreciate the time and thought the developers put into it.
That makes it all that much more disappointing when, with every update I buy, I spend hours dealing with issues that should not occur.
To wit, in “upgrading” from Pro 9 to 9.5 so far Cubase failed to:
- copy the list of “recent projects” from the prior installation - relatively trivial but how hard would it have been to reference the prior storage area ( as is commonly done in commercial software)?
- find the VSTs used in the prior installation - they didn’t move so why couldn’t 9.5 locate them? On top of that, when I loaded a prior project, Cubase assigned these weird “instrument names” and then created an error message saying they couldn’t be found… so I had to go through and set up all the folder locations; restarted and the bogus names were still there. Maybe a reboot will do something. More likely I’ll just have to go through locating all the prior VSTs and get them all set up again.
- load in the key shortcuts I had previously set up. Now this is a good one… When you save or load a key file, Cubase won’t show the file path of the location - it just uses it’s own listing of the file names it knows about. I went looking for the key files and eventually found the location. I opened up my version 9 and saved my key setups - it created an xml file. Fine and dandy…went into v 9.5 to load in the file…and got an error msgbox exclaiming “This is not a key commands file!”. The drop down file extension list includes *.mac, *.key, “all types (mac/key)” and “Any type”. So I selected any type and of course it failed.
The punchline is that I then saved the default 9.5 as a file and it created an XML file!
This stuff is just silly and indicates contempt for customers’ time.
Of course, program developers are considered the culprits because they “write the code”, but if I were to guess the reason for this stuff (which I guess I am…!) I would wager the project managers or their bosses kept rushing and pressuring the devs to “git 'er done” and out the door.
I don’t know that’s the case here, of course, but I DO know that lack of management appreciation for the time it takes to create and assemble complex code is a, if not THE, biggest cause of software project failures. It’s just a disappointing shame.
End-of-Rant… flame away~