I don't think workflow is the only reason to use a tool. What's objectively bad is using more than one DAW and having it make being creative seem like a chore, and the same thing applies in reverse, I think if using one DAW that's missing features you want to use is making it seem like a chore, then it's time to rethink what you're doing.
For sure, I personally think Cubase is a great DAW, but I fear the stability, upgrade cycle, dongle etc. I really think they nail a lot of things very well though.That's because no-one has offered up anything better, at least so far. Because there is sure as hell plenty of room for improvement in my workflow. I still mostly bumble around Cubase and, whilst I am surprised at how much work I am getting done in it, I'm sure I can learn better ways of working that will make it even better for me.
Yeah, workflow would be key, the bit I've heard of your music it sounds like you use a good amount of track automation? That's something that makes starting in Orion and going to Cubase a PITA for sure. This sort of thing is why I always wanted a better rewire, Reaper is the only DAW I've used that rewires into another and keeps VSTs. Unfortunately it's not really that different than DP, and isn't a clip firing DAW.Ultimately, though, I still find Orion much better in many important ways and if there was a really good way of starting a project in Orion and then moving it to Cubase with a minimum of compromise, I'd be all over it. But there isn't and the compromises involved in working like that far outweigh any benefits. And if you want to add a "for me" at the end of that, then that will be a "for me" for someone who has been using Orion for 20 years, produced five albums with it, the last of which was a chart-topper in our genre (well, no. 2 for the album but no. 1 for the first single from it) and never really found Orion limiting in any way. So if the compromises are going to be unacceptable for me, you have to imagine they are objectively unacceptable, surely?
This might be just a wires crossed thing here then. I've mostly used Live and either DP or Logic over the years. For years I used Live in performance, but also for it's clip based composing at times, and DP/Logic for more detailed songs and mixing and mastering etc.Without pointlessly quoting all you points, let me say that you've listed a bunch of things but given absolutely no indication of how you use the two together. It reads as though you use DP10 for live performance and Bitwig for something else. Where do the two cross-over?
The song chaining thing embarrassingly enough I never paid much attention to until recently. I had a couple songs in my last band where I was playing clips in Live in performance, so I wrote off using DP for live use. Basically once you render songs to audio, whether stems, single files or what not, you can add them into a single project as separate Sequence Chunks, each of these can be set up easily to load one after the other when a song finishes. You can set it to automatically load, or just load to bar one. For me I mostly play guitar Live, I set up amplitube to load into a V-Rack separate from the song sequences, and fire PC messages to change patches in Amplitube. This same thing could be applied to a soft synth or two, with each song loading a MIDI track that addresses that soft synth. Theoretically you could load entire songs of non rendered tracks into a single Progect, with FX and VSTs etc. but you would be pretty foolish to do that live IMO.BTW, I really like the sound of DP10's song chaining. It is something I have been looking for since I left my hardware sequencers behind in the late 90s. I've looked at DP before and I thought it looked pretty good. I'm not sure about the clip thing, though. I tried it in Bitwig but couldn't see the point. The way Cubase does it - clips within the timeline - is really all I need to develop an idea and turn it into a song. I never saw Orion's pattern based workflow as one of its strengths, either, but it worked well enough.
It's a linear approach to performance compared to Live/Bitwig, but it's a lot better in many ways since it actually allows you to view the song in a timeline unlike the Bitwig/Live way.
Clip and Scene launching makes sense to people like me who think of a song in fairly traditional terms: main part, verse, chorus, bridge, break etc. Rearranging parts on the fly to see what works best order wise etc. or if you think of it as a huge sampler that you're playing.
Yeah crap, that's always been my fear about Cubase, stability. Don't get me wrong, no DAW is 100% stable an update or upgrade can always bring some instability, but Cubase has never had a good reputation that way.I don't just work in one host. We are using Cubase for production but we'll still be playing live with Orion, at least for the time being. Cubase isn't anywhere near stable enough to be trusted on stage and all our songs exist in Orion anyway. We'd have to port a lot of old songs into Cubase to play 'em live. What I won't be doing, going forward, is starting something in Orion and then moving it across to Cubase to finish it. Any new material we have will start and finish in Cubase. If, once it's finished, I need to port it to Orion to play live, we'll see how well that works when we need to.
Live was solid, then they messed it up in version 8, Logic had a crap 7. DP has had growing pains on Windows, with some people solid and others having bugs, IMO probably related to unstable VSTs that Win DP can't handle etc.
Bitwig isn't bad, I could see using it live, I don't think it looks that elegant for that though, besides fantastic Push2 and general controller support. but right now before posting, I just experienced a lag between Push 2 and Bitwig, the drum pattern on Push 2 is like youtube where the timing is off.
