I can’t say how truly amazed I am with Cubase 8.5.20. I can work for days, sometimes weeks, without a crash, but the following issues continue to persist:
When duplicating tracks, or even simply moving parts from one track to another, tracks become irreversibly linked. So, deleting a part on one track deletes the other. This is a consistent problem in my workflow.
Importing tracks from other projects, or track presets, does not recall the MIDI input (defaults to No MIDI Input), so this has to be selected for every track.
I would also LOVE to see separate key commands for Snap On and Snap Off, rather than a toggle. This would speed up workflow significantly for me, at least.
MIDI timing inaccuracy. What you play often isn’t what gets recorded in Cubase.
I can’t believe that a MIDI sequencer can be left for so long with such a hideous and obvious problem for some. It’s persisted for many years and across numerous major versions. Affects VSTIs and external MIDI devices. For me, USB devices often worse than other connection methods - but not seemingly tied to any one interface manufacturer or range.
Some notes early, some notes late, not usually any consistent pattern. Always requires manual editing or quantising to correct just about every damned note.
No amount of tweaking MIDI ports to ‘use System time stamp’ has ever made a noticeable difference to me.
Other sequencers (Sonar, Reaper) running on the same PC hardware and operating system, with the same MIDI interface, work just fine…
Imagine if you bought a watch, and it couldn’t keep time. The one thing that it is designed to do.
I’ve always found MIDI timing issues to be related to buffer latency. Higher latency, the earlier you learn to play, so notes get recorded early. But that might be different to what you’re experiencing, of course. But worth investigating.
I have never experienced a problem with duplicating tracks. I’m assuming you know about the function “convert to real” I think it’s called…that takes a duplicate and converts to a real part? If you don’t do that, then of course it’s just a copy and if you delete the copy then the actual part would be deleted too.
Key commands appear to be a huge and royal pain for coders. At least that’s what I’m told. Over the years they have been added and that is part of the problem. You ask for a non-toggle snap command. Just be happy you got a toggle. There are several KC’s that don’t have either toggle or on/off. A couple examples are the Export window…no way to turn that one off. Or the History window…again no way to turn that one off. And no, Windows KC Ctr+W is not a good substitute to close a window when you have multiple windows open.
Noticeable jitter is a pain to deal with - that’s for sure. I am surprised when you say that it is better on other DAW’s with an identical setup though - Cubase has always been really good for me regarding midi timing. I have had problems in the past but it was due to my USB audio interface from M-audio. The recorded midi was very jittery. I changed to an RME interface and everything has been solid since Cubase 5. The Jitter is negligible. I record Midi in through a USB device too - the iConnectMidi4+ and this too is pretty solid. One thing I will say is that the Cubase midi clock has always been a disaster - probaby the most jittery clock I have dealt with. Luckily there are devices which can fix this though.