A lot of the built-in effects are not bad. They just need to be enhanced to work more like people use them in the real world.
Flanger: The MIDI sync is not very useful. It seems copied from the chorus. The longest sync unit seems to be 1 bar and the other units are 1/8ths, etc.
What it -should- be is user-selectable up to 32 BARS
Oh and the feedback should go negative and positive.
If you wanna go hog wild, the LFO should have some sort of side-chain which can take its input from a step-pattern plug.
These are little things, but there are so many items on the (endless) feature list that are just not all that useful because they’re missing one little thing.
The flanger is a good example because it’s got a TON of controls, which looks very impressive… but…
IOW: So much of Cubase is like one of those 300 TOOL SET! gifts people get at Christmas… Ten of the tools are fantastic. And the other 290 just make the massive box look impressive. OK, maybe 280.
Has ‘Great Marketing’ ever been used in the same sentence as ‘Steinberg’?
I hate to bash, but this is my central gripe with SB from which all others grow… they have all this GREAT tech that they have SQUANDERED by simply not making it all work together as a single compelling -system-.
Flanger is one of those plugs that LOTS of guys used to cobble together 15 years ago… they’d learn how to do ‘modulation’ and immediately publish like -5- plugs that are all copies with slightly different GUIs: Chorus! Flanger! Phaser! Delay! Echos! I expect a bit more from SB… even with these ‘standard’ things. It can’t be -that- hard to change the LFO rate to make the thing work like a -real- flanger.
ROFL, this is exactly how I learned the 2.x VST SDK. The odd part is when 3.x came out, I went back and tried to convert the same simple plugs to the 3 way of doing things. It was incomprehensible. Something that was super simple became ultra complex for no benefit. EXCEPT … once I got them working, adding sidechain channels was incredibly trivial. So, again … baffled why they don’t add this stuff.
…as did I… and every other guy who wanted to wow his friends: MAN, YOU MADE A PLUG-IN? YOU’RE AMAZING, DUDE!!!
If your question is sincere, there is a simple answer: as with EVERY failed initiative, LACK OF EVANGELISM.
SB always threw LOTS of great code out there and for the first few years, all 3rd Parties just went along with the program. But after a while, as soon as other DAW companies adopted VST it turned into a real business for companies like NI and they realised: Hey, we can’t do whatever SB wants without losing our other partners.
SB is always SHOCKED when 3rd Parties don’t magically adopt whatever they put out. But they don’t EVANGELISE. I am always astounded by how much work Microsoft and Adobe (and even Wordpress) do to make it EASY for devs to use their tools. Winners do that; they make it so that any idiot can make things with their tools. They don’t -expect- people to do a ton of work ‘just because we’re so great’.
I recall vividly Alexey RAILING against VST3… “I will -never- write a VST3 version!”
SB doesn’t -market- well. They didn’t give devs -reasons- to put in the time to do VST3. It -is- hard. But IMHO, SB could’ve incentivised devs to do it and when users SAW THE BENEFITS, they woulda demanded it.
Same with Note Expression. It’s such a wonderful idea, it’s INSANE that no one supports it. If it had been -me- I woulda begged the investors for whatever money it took to get VSL or LA Audio -whoever- to do Note Expression versions of their libs. Hell, HSO wasn’t half bad, they coulda re-jiggered -THAT- for Note Expression with some help.
Can any composer imagine how many problems it solves if you can NOTATE DIVISIS AND HAVE THEM PLAY BACK LIKE A REAL ORCHESTRA WITH INDEPENDENT DYNAMICS?) It makes me angry every time I think about it. They have all the tools to make something no one else has.
Or NI or Soundtoys or UA with sidechains. After 7-8 years the boat has now sailed… everybody is creating their own ‘chainers’ and making their own extra money for stuff that SHOULD BE IN THE CORE OF THE DAW.
You cannot expect people to get on board until you SHOW THEM THE MONEY. SB constantly puts out these tres cool ideas in the abstract and then they just go someplace warm to die. It’s the classic thing where they don’t budget what it takes to see a great idea all the way through. You have to pay people to have =partners= and SB does not do partners.
Actually, it was more rhetorical. I agree with pretty much everything you’ve stated. One of the biggest frustrations is that Steinberg do have great ideas, but they don’t incentivise anyone to implement them. And, they refuse to acknowledge outside “good ideas/standards”. The continued lack of addressing controller support is amazing. Generic Remote is such a disaster. And, there are perfectly viable controller implementations available that would make the stupid Quick Controls actually quick, instead of annoying clunky and slow. Anyone who has ever used mapped plugins just has to shake their head at how ignorant it is for Steinberg to not implement an ACTUAL easy way to set up and manage controls. Not the PRETEND ease of control, that’s actually retardedly cumbersome and unintuitive, that they keep tossing on the already convoluted UI.
Anyhow, we’ll keep pestering them. You never know.
yes, i was going to mention the mapping as well-- there are actually companies who believed in steinberg’s incompetence to improve controller mapping natively, so much so that they in fact invested in actual hardware controllers designed to do that very thing (novation nocturn / automap).
Well, I already took the thing off-topic as far as Saturn so…
remote control is one of those core things… every after-market device should use a clean STEINBERG sdk/api that you could build on through the years without obsolescence worries.
What annoys me almost as much as how crap have been previous SB attempts (Houston) is the fact that Novation et al. somehow figure it out via reverse-engineering.
Anyhoo… please just make the Flanger LFO rate go to 32 bars.
