I only got 12 about 4 or 5 months ago and I’m happy with it for the most part. There are still many legacy issues I wish Steinberg would fix and I’m talking about poopies since version 5 and earlier! But it’s the sound quality that keeps me here. Workflow could use a lot of love and so could the fact that it doesn’t come with a REAL sampler.
This is a good video to have a look:
Cubase 13 is Here! 25+1 new features you SHOULD know! #cubase13 (youtube.com)
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If nothing in the list below attracts you, then wait it out for a good sale, or wait for Cubase 14:
However, IMO, workflow saw some very nice improvements indeed, which were more than worth it for me. YMMV, just read in detail the page above, or test out the trial. EDIT: Or watch the video posted above by @somecomposer (I missed his post before I posted mine).
The plugin additions were not relevant to me, however, on the other hand, they are decent plugins IMO, which would come in handy if I didn’t have time to install my third party plugins on a laptop, for example.
BTW the Sampler Track got a little love too, but it won’t qualify as a “REAL” sampler compared to what you are probably thinking of. I think the Sampler Track + HALion is a killer combo. Start something in the Sampler Track, then bump over to HALion when needed, fantastic sound design capabilities.
Good luck, only you know what you need!
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Thanks, will check it!
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It added the toggle button to turn tracks from mono/stereo, which I’ve been asking for, but I started realizing during the 30-day demo that Cubase 13 still doesn’t do what I need from the DAW (proper plugin control). Therefore, I’m going to hold off and hope that they cater to folks in my demographic in v14.
The mono/stereo feature will be useful indeed, though not enough to make me upgrade from 12.
And what do you mean by plugin control? Curious.
The price is a factor you’d need to consider too.
Example. V12 to v13 cost £85; V11 to V13 cost £171. IMO if you were to wait for V14 and upgrade you’d pay twice as much and get nothing that came in-between where as if you upgraded to 13 now and then V14 you’d pay the same price and get everything inbetween.
Honestly you wont be disappointed by upgrading.
All the Best! 
Unless you stick to a version that works and maybe wait for V15 until they finally bring in some serious features 
It is not like you are only getting something when going from C12 to C13. Steinberg also removed some things like Beat Calculator, undo for VSTi, Project Browser, good contrast color scheme…
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It wouldn’t hurt to post direct links to your main poopies, or if relatively unique, list them here just in case any have recently been resolved? You may get the “yes it’s a known issue” reply, but I know some get resolved without even a mention from the fix list.
What you really “need” only you can decide. For myself it is all the new C13 features in the Key Editor.
As you may know, according to Martin, that was an accidental “feature” that was removed. But it is definitely needed.
I know but I am a customer and I don’t care what Steinberg calls it, I care how I perceive it. And I perceive it as a functionality that I use all the time and this one alone would be a reason not to update.
There might be something in C14 that will really tempt me to update but C13 is not such a version.
What is your definition of “proper plugin control” ? I have found Cubase 12 has issues with plugin window size control issues when using multiple monitors that may have different screen resolutions.
Hey Lance,
To answer your question, I feel like proper plugin control involves having as many encoders available to us (per page) as we want that we can manually modify per-plugin.
I either have to use limited Quick Controls (I have 32 encoders but am stuck using only 8 for Quick Controls), or we can map the plugin parameters directly to the encoder itself (but there are huge downsides to that, which I discuss in my feature request thread about this), or we can map “parameter 1” to knob 1, but there’s no telling what parameter 1 will be from plugin to plugin.
So there’s no good way to dynamically map plugins and have as many encoders as we want. It’s either one or the other, but never both.
Yes there is.
You know, the amazing thing about that is that I was playing around with this before I made my feature request, but because I hadn’t yet gotten the information from @m.c about manually creating many parameters per page, this Remote Control Editor wasn’t working out for me.
So now that I’m starting to understand how complex it is, how many steps are required, and how many different areas of Cubase we have to configure before we can have the plugin control I’m asking for, I’m going to have to modify my feature request to say something like, “consolidate it down to one system.”
I’m going to attempt this again and will report back. Thank you @mlib !
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The multi part midi editing is 10,000x better, and there are some other small improvements. Mono button is nice. For single monitor users the fader on the left is handy too… lots of small improvements.
That is the earliest I’d upgrade again. I only got this version so that it worked optimally on the Apple Silicon CPU. If I was still Windows-only, I’d have stayed on v12 since I run AMD Ryzen CPUs there.
Would not be surprised if I end up running current versions of these products until 2024-2027.
I’ve gotten pretty good at not spending money these past couple of years 
Why can’t we just get something like Ableton Live’s Midi Learn function to control just about anything with anything without any complex UI at all?
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Agreed. Trying to route my Expression pedal through my USB keyboard controller to a VST FX insert today via Track Controls was quite a time consuming challenge. Not that intuitive, even if it works.
A robust well-designed midi learn system with an integrated smart modifiers system like in Bitwig would be awesome.
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I finally upgraded to pro 13 from pro 12 and happy to report slightly better performance and no issue so far.
Best thing is actually to try the demo of 13, it can run alongside 12.
I will do the same when 14 comes out.
I hope focus is more on useability, modulation, , controller integration, songwriting tools, rather than add more plugins.
Happy Cubase-ing everyone !
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