I’ll be honest, I never use them because I can’t stand the look of them. I think they’re by far the worst looking plugins in the whole plugin industry. That black on black drab funeral casket design with grey wheels theme is just so unwelcoming and looks cheap and makes me think the actual plugin will sound cheap. I know they don’t. But deep inside before I reach for, say, delay, I’ll load up Waves H-Delay because it looks so cool and my instinct is always to go with the prettier plugin, just looking at it makes me want to work with it. Just picturing Steinberg black funeral boxes in my mind before selecting the plugin just revolts me and my mouse floats to the next thing. It’s pretty much the same story for every plugin, they all look ugly. Even the quadrafuzz is ugly, looks like someone enlarged the 320x240 screenshot of a space station equipment from some 1992 PC game. I don’t want to see any of them on my screen. If they looked nicer I’d be using them all day as I like integrated stuff for recall compatibility and such and prefer to limit amount of “outside” plugin. These are my feelings about them.
I love the actual interface/color scheme of Cubase itself, it’s only plugins that I think need some life in their skins.
I was going to post this in “Feature Requests”, to request “design” but I’d like to know first what Cubase community thinks. Maybe it’s just me.
I don’t understand the question. Which plugin? There are hundreds of them in the box…
I’m a big HALion and Groove Agent fan. I LOVE the UI, work-flow, and sheer power of these two ‘plugins’ so much I didn’t bat an eye to invest in the full blown flag-ship versions. I think the content that comes with them for choosing and customizing our own sounds are diversified, and rather useful, while also being relatively compact and resource efficient.
While I use it often, I’m not crazy about the UI for the multi-band compressor that ships with Cubase and Dorico. It works and does the job well, it’s just NOT as open ended as I’d like. When it comes to the UI and flexibility of the compressors, I actually find myself preferring the way Reaper does them. In ReaXCompressor for instance, while it’s not very ‘pretty’, the user can add as many bands as he wishes, and for me at least, it’s a bit easier to get all the parameters either using the mouse, or click-typing them directly into the ‘ugly’ fields they provide.
If you are talking about the plugin management system, how it’s all presented on the mixing console and in the master project window, etc…I don’t have any major complaints. I don’t own all that many plugins either. The ones I do have (in combination with those that come with Cubase) function just fine, come across as being extremely flexible, and for the money invested, are down right impressive. Then again, I’m so old that I can remember when a very simple reverb unit cost over a grand, and we needed another $100 worth of cables and patch-bays, plus a big fat EXPENSIVE mixing console to make any of it work.
Every release of this DAW (as well as similar products by competing developers) just spoils me rotten…
I wouldn’t want Steinberg to spend any development time at all on this topic.
I would however like them to focus on bug fixes please, followed by improving user-interface and controls inconsistency.
Maybe I’d then vote for making sure that my existing plug-ins don’t stop working when subsequent DAW and Operating System versions are upgraded. I’m really not happy with my old versions of Groove Agent, Halion, Hypersonic etc becoming worthless without enforced paid upgrades. That’s also true for 3rd-party developed plug-in products too - even many well-known products from established suppliers. I fully support the move to 64-bit-only, but I’ve resented paying for upgrades to achieve that.
There are quite a few plug-ins that would be improved by being size-able and being dynamically more responsive to higher (and lower) resolution screens though.
I also feel that the long-time acknowledged Window-management failings of Cubase are becoming a bore and, for me, these are most annoying with plug-ins.
…but, as Brian Roland says above, "Every release spoils me rotten’ - Me too!
Did you ever not buy any real out-board hardware because of the colour or style of the knobs, or the font and size of the text? Imagine what it would be like to be a non-English-only speaker and have to rely on the text on the front panel of most electronic equipment?
