Cubase or StudioOne?

[Kalamata Kid]

However if FL Studio with the best piano roll editor teaming up with Cubase? Wow! As stated earlier run FLS Studio as a VSTi in Cubase if they are compatible with audio and midi file exchange. As far as I know they are not. Any suggestions to get these two great DAW's to coexist? If the Cubase/Fl studio marriage did work out I would then have Studio One for when i need to use ARA.

FL Studio running fine as rewire slave or as a vsti since years inside Cubase.

Thanks but I am not interested in the rewire suggestion.

The combo FL Studio 12/Cubase 9 would be useful to me is if I can copy and paste or drag and drop audio and midi files between FLS Studio and Cubase (or even Studio One). If the issues of using hot keys has been resolved that would be great. Can you do this now? Are thee other issues in this combo?

Apparently you are happy with this Combo. Why do you like it and use it? What benefits have you gained?

[koolkeys]

Since my last post was more about why I love each host, I forgot to mention one huge area where I feel Cubase excels. And if your work is designed around this area, this could be a big deal.

One area where I feel Cubase excels; composition.

Brent

For certain. Like... there's no doubt about it... at all.

What puzzles me (often enough) more than anything else is why any real music producer type would ever have to be told that something like Cubase will have way more features like that than any more new-ish product like Studio One, Reaper, Bitwig, whatever else. You'd think that would be obvious to anyone with half a brain but when these threads happen you always hear it, which is kinda stating the obvious.

There are always people new to music production who'll look at their respective web pages and graphics and marketing and to them, they kinda all look the same on the web pages, and the 30+ years of development underneath Cubase and similar things (and the lack of similar in S1) is not something they may consider or even be aware of ... but for people already involved in music production, they should already know that.

The real "competition" for or with any new-ish product (in the market, say Bitwig) is really "hearts and minds", not overall features. The latter thing takes at least a decade (and likely a good bit longer), to become comparable enough feature wise overall to make it less of a thing, to have enough advanced features where it maybe doesn't matter so much to power users.

The only theoretical way around that reality would be for a wealthy company like Microsoft to build a DAW, and put a team of 50-60 full time developers on it, and they could probably crank out something quite advanced and really deep in less than 5 years.

There is no universe where any product will show up and fully match the feature sets of Cubase or PT or Logic or similar in 6-7-8 years. It just doesn't happen, ever.

So... yeah. Not with you here, but when I hear someone say... "Cubase has WAY more features than Studio One."... my initial thought is typically ... "Uh... ya think?"

While you are correct, it doesn't really matter in this conversation. When somebody asks about a comparison between Cubase and Studio One, they are asking about the current state of things. Of course Studio One won't have the feature maturity Cubase has, but that is irrelevant. The OP isn't asking whether they should choose Cubase or whether they should choose Studio One in 15 years. All we can do is a comparison now. The OP also didn't add many qualifiers for the comparison, so most replies will be of a general opinionated nature.

But if somebody is asking for a comparison between two programs, it is completely fair to state that one doesn't come close to the other in a certain area. It is true that Cubase is far more advanced in the composition arena than Studio One. Just because it might be obvious to some doesn't mean it is an irrelevant point.

I love Studio One. I use it virtually every day still, despite my switch back to Cubase. And I was simply sharing my thoughts on one area where I believe Cubase very clearly outshines Studio One. Nobody is saying that Studio One should be expected to have the feature maturity that Cubase does. But with that in mind, the OP didn't qualify his question with anything like "outside of more features in Cubase, which host is better?".

If we're not allowed to state that Cubase is more powerful because it is older, then we also can't say that Studio One has modernized workflow because it is newer and has learned from the past. Products can only compete in their current state, and all comparisons are fair. Again, these are my two hosts that I use, and my statements are merely why I personally choose each one.

Brent

[daw.one]

Apart from the lack of MIDI tools etc., when working with virtual instruments there is one major thing I find annoying about Studio One compared to Cubase, which is additional latency.

Since my first day in Studio One (1.6) I could not understand why my musical data was placed earlier than Cubase or why my notes intended for the left locator, always ended up at the right locator on loop recording. I always blamed Studio One's super accurate MIDI equivalent in combination with a missing catch range feature and my sloppy playing.

However after running some tests I noticed when playing virtual instruments in Studio One, the real time latency is almost twice as high compared to Cubase. For instance latency at an ASIO buffer size of 128 and sample rate of 44.1 is 6 ms in Cubase while in Studio One it's 10 ms. Even at 32 | 44.1 Studio One hardly goes below 5 ms.

Apparently I'm the only one in the world who's suffering from higher latency in Studio One, because I never hear/see anybody mentioning it. For me it's enough to stick to Cubase for composing though.

Although I'm a huge fan of Studio One's Control Link system, straightforward console, plugin management and project page. If you just want to record your band or (input) quantize everything in your track or only program your music, I couldn't tell which one to pick! But when you compose with a lot of virtual instruments and low latency is important, I recommend Cubase (or at least compare the two on your system).

[chk071]

Just wondering, but, when you talk about the lack of midi tools in S1, what do you mean by that? What is missing compared to other hosts in that regard?

[LawrenceF]

If we're not allowed to state that Cubase is more powerful because it is older, then we also can't say that Studio One has modernized workflow because it is newer and has learned from the past. Products can only compete in their current state, and all comparisons are fair. Again, these are my two hosts that I use, and my statements are merely why I personally choose each one.

Brent

For sure Brent. You misunderstood my intent there.

The OP, the guy that asked, afaict, is pretty much gone (or maybe not, not sure). The discussion now is pretty much we KVR daw addicts talking about things we all know about... and the rest of my comment was just an observation of how those discussions kinda always go.

But sure, you're right, that's why I was careful to frame that one paragraph that way.... "There are always new users who, to them, they all kinda look the same on the the Internet (I get that)."

My intent was to suggest that comparatively speaking, you can only really compare those kinds of things where they have commonalities, and that the other stuff kinda goes without saying.

Sorry if I didn't express my intent clearly enough. It wasn't a criticism of anything, it was an observation.

[aMUSEd]

I presume the ASIO guard thing that speeds up performance is just for Windows?

[LawrenceF]

Just wondering, but, when you talk about the lack of midi tools in S1, what do you mean by that? What is missing compared to other hosts in that regard?

Lots of things you might find in Cubase or other similar sequencers ... like... reversing midi notes, logical editors, input transformers, more than just 3 midi plugins, filtering of the key editor (like moving drum notes around), drum editors, list editors, midi sends, etc, etc, etc, etc. It's a pretty long list tbh and (imo) the Cubase Midi Logical Editor by itself is a really, really big one.

The biggest hole in S1 on the midi front is no midi plugins. Note FX is supposed to fill that gap I suppose but the current pickin's are rather slim. I use ReaJS standalone for that as a workaround.

I know about all of that in Cubase because I used it long before it even had audio tracks. Not that everyone needs those things, but they do exist in other sequencers, and Cubase has a shit ton of legacy stuff related to midi that most modern users probably don't even use, like custom devices, where you can literally put your audio / midi hardware on screen like plugins.

FL Studio (and some other products) have some other things that may be more unique to them, like FL's really great "seeding" in it's pattern editor thing, and like it allowing note groups in it's key editor (which might be exclusive to FL, not sure).

I know a lot of people here use Cubase but I tend to think they don't really use a lot of it's midi editing the way I did, that they focus more on the more shiny stuff, not the lower level stuff. It's one of the few DAW's I know of where you can edit midi directly in an arrange clip (do anything to it, with just about any kind of filter you can imagine) without ever splitting anything or even opening a piano roll editor. You can literally draw a selection range on a midi clip and tell it to do anything to any (or just some random parts ) of notes or controllers in the range... directly.

On paper, technically speaking, list wise, bean counter wise, in that context, comparing S1 to it for midi would be kind of a joke... except for the fact that you know that nobody can do all of that in a few years. And keep in mind that my comments above are only valid up to v 5.5, and don't include anything related to midi they added after that.

Cubase, the sequencer, fundamentally speaking (not so much EDM speaking, subjective modern EDM tools people use now or whatever) was like... literally, the most powerful professional midi sequencer on the planet, before all daws starting adding audio tracks... and almost (if not all) of that stuff is still in there somewhere.

Cubase, the midi sequencer, is a beast.

[chk071]

Thanks Lawrence. I must confess that i haven't delved nearly deep enough into midi to know all that. As for the midi effects in Cubase, i rather considered those a nice "bonus", but nothing i'd really need to work with it.

[LawrenceF]

Thanks Lawrence. I must confess that i haven't delved nearly deep enough into midi to know all that. As for the midi effects in Cubase, i rather considered those a nice "bonus", but nothing i'd really need to work with it.

Yeah, it's a beast. I was able to let it go so easily because my work shifted much more away from midi, and midi hardware synths and all that. On the audio front (imo, anyway) Studio One fares really well against Cubase. The comparison there is much closer, as a practical matter.

I think - as relates to more advanced midi features - midi development may actually be more difficult than audio in some cases. Feature wise I mean. I'm sure developing an actual good core audio engine is pretty hard, but the other stuff doesn't seem so difficult and S1 is faring rather well on the audio front... generally speaking.

The other third general area, musical housekeeping, is another area where there's no real comparison between the two. Markers, rulers, modifying time and tempo with tools that otherwise would be... very difficult to do ... without them. Studio One has markers and now the Arranger Markers, but Cubase has a few different kinds of markers, and ruler tracks, and similar other things.

I also recall it's midi list editor being the only one I'd ever used then that was a combo list + key editor, a list editor with a key editor also in the same view, which (at least at the time) I found quite useful. That app must have... probably 5 completely different midi editors... at a minimum... when you count the score editor.

[Orbit-50]

Judging from pics, i found the GUI of S1 v3 ugly too, but, it's much better when you actualy use it. Still feels a bit crowded due to the lack of contrast between the sections sometimes, but, it isn't half bad really. At least, when you used v2, you have no problem operating it really.
It's IMO the nearest to Cubase's wokflow from the DAW's i tried. Ableton was the furthest. (ok, FL Studio even more so)

Well said. You spoke for me. I'm now settled into Cubase, but I'm dying for an update which might address some of those visual annoyances in Studio One 3 that you mentioned. I doubt very much if they will ever change it though. To me, nothing beats the ergonomics of Studio One 3. There are many things that I love about that software.

[troggg]

If using external midi gear I found StudioOne overcomplicated that with how you need to configure everything.
And they had strange anomalies like if not having monitor through on a midi track, it only recorded note events, no controllers. Don't know if they fixed that since 2.6 I used. If using VST instruments you never notice, but with external midi gear you do.

They haven't fixed it and it's beyond highly unlikely that they ever will. This is a really big deal and the reason I'll never upgrade from S1 2.6 to 3.x -- and am considering Cubase 9. Basically Presonus' (S1 parent company) philosophy is that hardware workstations are dinosaurs not worthy of support. I beg to disagree -- there are millions of them out there and they all work. It is extremely annoying to record a track on my Jupiter 50 -- then see no way of adjusting volume or pan directly after like you easily can if you'd recorded a VSTi. So you're forced to commit to audio way sooner than you'd want to. It's just hugely kludgey.

On top of that, the previous friendly company won't even comment on their philosophy of discriminating against hardware instruments. The Studio One forum used to be regularly read by any number of helpful Presonus persons -- all of whom are now gone from the company and replaced with the usual cold unfeeling programmers you get everywhere else.

In fairness, this is my only bitch about the program which is quite helpful with just about everything else you'd want to do. But I'm really put off by it.

[Funkybot's Evil Twin]

The audio guy in me loves Studio One. Sure, it could use Mixer Undo, improved metering (post-pan), separate loop and punch regions, and a better tempo view. But other than that, there's not much to dislike on the audio side.

The MIDI guy in me HATES the lack of:

1. A MIDI smart tool (the PRV has some tricks for a faster workflow, but still much tool switching)
2. MIDI Input Transformer
3. Drum Editor
4. Recording/Transmitting All or multiple channels on an instrument track (strictly one channel per track)
5. MIDI event list
6. MIDI logical editor
7. Notation view (I mean, c'mon, you aquired a Notation program to basically Rewire it in?)
8. More Note FX
9. Clunky humanization options
10. Broken velocity scaling (you can scale MIDI velocities upwards but not downwards, and once you go to 100% then scale down to 80% you've lost all dynamics entirely)
11. Poor hardware controller integration (Eucon, Nektar, even users of HUI/MCU type controllers complain of jumpy faders)
12. Shows strange controller names instead of CC's (General Purpose 8, Control 7...how about CC77, or CC104 instead?)
13. I hate a PRV that shows a MIDI clip boundary (I want to compose in the PRV, so the clip boundary is just in the way)

I can work around most of this stuff, but I get frustrated sometimes doing so. I keep copies of Reaper and Sonar for when I need some of this stuff, but I really hope Studio One begins to shift focus and start taking itself seriously as a MIDI DAW.

I've also been looking enviously at Cubase but 1) the lack of a demo, 2) along with no crossgrade pricing, and 3) the Syncrosoft dongle requirement (if it were iLok I'd be fine, but I don't want the one dongle I already have, let along having two) mean that I'm just trying to ride out Studio One development for a bit longer. I wonder if a Cubase Elements license would do the trick...

[4damind]

Studio One has some interesting features but Cubase is more "feature complete" if it comes to audio/midi editing. In the past Studio One had also problems with timing and external devices (in the meantime it should be fixed but I have not tested Studio One since this time).

[nIGhT-SoN]

First of all I haven't used Cubase since Studio One 1.0 came out, that was around Cubase 4 or 5.

Performance: Cubase
Stability: can't really say about latest versions of Cubase, but I would go for Studio One here
Workflow: Studio One
Features: It depends on what you actually need, but if we were to count them Cubase wins which also makes it bloated imo
Package (Instruments, Effects, Soundbanks etc): Cubase
Upgrades: StudioOne - Only charges for 1.0 steps, so you'll pay only for v4.0, v5.0, v6.0 etc.
Price: StudioOne

[troggg]

Studio One has some interesting features but Cubase is more "feature complete" if it comes to audio/midi editing. In the past Studio One had also problems with timing and external devices (in the meantime it should be fixed but I have not tested Studio One since this time).

Timing is not the problem. In fact the timing is a strength, as are the things you can adjust while MIDI is playing back. It's the stuff funkybotseviltwin pointed out in addition to what me and Ifm talked about. I mean it's just prehistoric.

Heck, I used Cubase SX back in the day around 2003 and the MIDI stuff then is light years ahead of what S1 has today.

What's also irksome is that they're just too cool to even comment on MIDI development right now, as if people like us all over the world aren't worthy of being communicated with on any level.

I mean some of the top MIDI composers on Earth have rooms full of old but vibey and working MIDI hardware; S1's message to them: too bad. Use VSTIs.

Now I happen to like VSTIs too ... but that doesn't mean I'm gonna relegate my Jupiter to a doorstop.