Just curious as to what your main type of work that you do in cubase. I use it for electronic music production. Most of my stuff is vst’s but i also use a couple external synths. On my imac i havent had a single spike but the macbook i do get a few when using cpu heavy vst’s. I haven’t had any major show stoppers tho that affect me when I’m working on a track aside from some mixer GUI things. Maybe knowing how everyone uses cubase it will help pin pointing the main area of concern. There’s just too many people with no issues while some can’t use it at all.
I use Cubase to compose music via MIDI.
I particularly enjoy Chord Recognition in the Inspector and infoline, as well as velocity editing in the Key Editor.
I use the VST rack for most instruments to save RAM but I use the odd Instrument Track.
Groups are useful for combining instruments before a Stereo Out and FX busses are great for differentiation when using reverbs and sends.
Inserts for dynamic effects such as compressors and equalizers, which for me are UAD/Duende.
Mixconsole allows me to more easily use the mouse to set volumes and check the order of insert effects.
Most of my work uses Kontakt sampler and I dig acoustic sampled sounds. Not into loops, but electronic drum samples are a nice change, as is a bit of lead synth. Orchestral sounds blend nicely most of the time with notated guitars.
Mostly audio here, electronic music. Even midi I convert asap into audio.
I allways use folders to sepatare channels into groups. I hate it because I cannot apply routing to folders. It is the only single function that I’m really missing in Cubase. It would make my workflow sooo much easier if I would be able to drag channels between folders and output would automatically be adjusted to the one specified for entire folder.
Cubase has too many functions I never use. But no problem, let it satisfy many needs. If folders with optional routing would be implemented as option, I would use it hapily, and others who don’t need it would just skip it.
In the 9 years I have been learning Cubase, it is strictly an audio recorder and mixer for me. I came from a long line of 10" tape machines. I never learned a thing about midi until a few years back and as a guitar player when it first came out in the 80’s I had no use for it. Ive recently implemented some midi synth stuff into my audio tracks and it does sound good.
I play with a few old jazz guys and some good rock players and always invite them into the studio to record a few tracks. The tracks are always raw and live. Whatever goes in is what I will work with to add my guitar to it. I may jam with some but isolate them in the tracking so I can modify my own inputs later. I am getting one big collection of stuff and I should start sorting out and finalizing what is there. Some of it might actually turn out to be ok. Since the cutting room floor is now just a recycling icon…not a big deal on the massive cuts I may need to make.