Cubase 10.5 is here now....

[Funkybot's Evil Twin]

If you would ask people “do you want a gapless engine”, most likely everyone will scream yes, but if you add “even if that means rewriting the old engine which would take years and resources that could be used elsewhere and the result will probably not be as stable and mature as the current engine especially in the beginning”, not so sure about the result...

Exactly my feeling as well.

[andypryce]

I am having gaps by selecting another vsti track on the arrange page or mixer. Or opening the plugin GUI etc.
And that is distracting while listening a song and changing the track to add something. So for me it is not only inserting new plugins.If only that, I could live with it.

[fese]

I am having gaps by selecting another vsti track on the arrange page or mixer. Or opening the plugin GUI etc.
And that is distracting while listening a song and changing the track to add something. So for me it is not only inserting new plugins.If only that, I could live with it.

That shouldn’t happen, at least not unless you have “restrain delay compensation “ enabled, which can lead to gaps when changing channels because it disables plug-ins.

[egbert]

I'm hoping for a gapless playback engine (unbelievable that it still doesn't!) and proper fixes to HiDPI, otherwise I'm skipping and possibly selling on.

I literally asked for a gapless playback engine around 2 or 3 weeks ago and someone from Cubase replied with a big "can't do it. It would require a rewrite of the whole engine"

Yeah, as I suspected. How do you rewrite the underlying audio engine to be gapless without touching just about everything in your DAW? It'd be akin to starting over from scratch, which is basically the story of how Studio One came about right? Wasn't it some Cubase developers that basically said, "we want to write a modern audio engine and can't do it in Cubase so let's leave and create our own brand new DAW?" So you get a gapless audio engine in Studio One, but it's still way behind on the MIDI side. Cubase can't possibly do that.

The two developers who started their own DAW and were taken in house by Presonus had previously worked on Nuendo. Nuendo was a new 32 bit from the ground up start for Steinberg and Steiny later released Cubase SX 1.0 as a partially crippled (lesser feature set - eg initially no score in Cubase SX) version of Nuendo. These product lines continue as Cubase & Nuendo 20 years later. Funny to think they are that old but it also shows that the tech under Studio One which was the Krystal audio engine IIRC is also of that vintage.

[noiseboyuk]

If you would ask people “do you want a gapless engine”, most likely everyone will scream yes, but if you add “even if that means rewriting the old engine which would take years and resources that could be used elsewhere and the result will probably not be as stable and mature as the current engine especially in the beginning”, not so sure about the result...

Exactly my feeling as well.

Yes, very good post. However, I think there could be more to be gained from a rewrite than the gapless thing. Compared to other DAWs Cubase is among the least efficient. It also still has issues with ASIOguard and VE Pro. It would obviously be a major deal fraught with risk, but perhaps one day the bullet should be bitten.

[andypryce]

I am having gaps by selecting another vsti track on the arrange page or mixer. Or opening the plugin GUI etc.
And that is distracting while listening a song and changing the track to add something. So for me it is not only inserting new plugins.If only that, I could live with it.

That shouldn’t happen, at least not unless you have “restrain delay compensation “ enabled, which can lead to gaps when changing channels because it disables plug-ins.

Not that but I realized that somehow ASIO guard was active and set to normal.I thought it was off by default cause I never touch that.Turning it off solved it.
Thanks for reminding.
A.

[wjoyce]

Why would I bother about a 3ms glitch when I activate an EQ?

I actually backtrack on my claim that activating EQ causes glitches - it doesn't.

However, adding a send mid-playback, for example, drops all audio out for much more than 3ms. I do most of my work in Reaper these days, and I just don't have to think about what effect my actions will have on that level - I can click, route, add without a single glitch or dropout. When you're used to that as a Reaper/Live/Studio One/Reason user, going back to Cubase is unbearable.

I love Cubase and it has so much great stuff to offer, but it's a dinosaur in so many respects and they need to up their game significantly.

[kdogg]

Yeah this is how I feel exactly, scoring film and games the track count can get pretty large and Cubase handles navigating all of that and arranging so easily. It’s the nitty gritty stuff like the drop outs / lack of better time stretching algo / slow preset browsing / midi mapping etc that makes it feel super dated.

Still love the media bay for browsing audio files though, better than most DAWs for me.

[fese]

...

Exactly my feeling as well.

Yes, very good post. However, I think there could be more to be gained from a rewrite than the gapless thing. Compared to other DAWs Cubase is among the least efficient. It also still has issues with ASIOguard and VE Pro. It would obviously be a major deal fraught with risk, but perhaps one day the bullet should be bitten.

is it really among the least efficient? In what way? How do you measure that? Some DAWbench Test where some other DAWS can run 520 plugin instances where cubase can “only” run 500? Frankly, I don’t care about such synthetic tests. Usually it’s not the number of plugins that’s the problem, but some really cpu hungry ones (u-he .e.g:) and that’s not cubases fault.
I agree that perhaps some day they’ll have to take the plunge, but for a piece of software that was designed over twenty years ago when today’s CPUs with several cores were unthinkable, I’d say it’s pretty impressive. Sure, reaper is said to be more efficient, but that was developed several years later when computers have gotten much more powerful.
Personally I’d say that for the moment I prefer them working on (finally!) unifying the UI and fix/improve workflows as that is much more relevant when working in a DAW than the last 5% of efficiency. At least in my experience.
And the problem for Steinberg is: it probably costs hundred thousands of money to design and implement that, but nobody would be willing to pay an upgrade price for that.

[simmo75]

If you would ask people “do you want a gapless engine”, most likely everyone will scream yes, but if you add “even if that means rewriting the old engine which would take years and resources that could be used elsewhere and the result will probably not be as stable and mature as the current engine especially in the beginning”, not so sure about the result...

Exactly my feeling as well.

Yes, very good post. However, I think there could be more to be gained from a rewrite than the gapless thing. Compared to other DAWs Cubase is among the least efficient. It also still has issues with ASIOguard and VE Pro. It would obviously be a major deal fraught with risk, but perhaps one day the bullet should be bitten.

Got to disagree with you, Cubase 10 is one of the most efficient DAWs on Mac OS. Way more so than Live 10, Bitwig 3 and Studio One 4.5.

[rasmusklump]

With live monitoring I can play in other hosts with way lower latencies without crackles than with cubase...

[fmr]

If you would ask people “do you want a gapless engine”, most likely everyone will scream yes, but if you add “even if that means rewriting the old engine which would take years and resources that could be used elsewhere and the result will probably not be as stable and mature as the current engine especially in the beginning”, not so sure about the result...

Exactly my feeling as well.

+ 1

[machinesworking]

Got to disagree with you, Cubase 10 is one of the most efficient DAWs on Mac OS. Way more so than Live 10, Bitwig 3 and Studio One 4.5.

I don't think your conclusions is wrong, but the benchmarks are. Bitwig and Live are the least CPU efficient DAWs out there. On OS X a fair DAW comparison is more like Logic, DP, Cubase, Reaper, Studio One etc. Lately they all seem on par.

Live, Bitwig and MPC2 etc. all come in at 20-30% less CPU friendly than the previous DAWs, and have for years.

[simmo75]

Got to disagree with you, Cubase 10 is one of the most efficient DAWs on Mac OS. Way more so than Live 10, Bitwig 3 and Studio One 4.5.

I don't think your conclusions is wrong, but the benchmarks are. Bitwig and Live are the least CPU efficient DAWs out there. On OS X a fair DAW comparison is more like Logic, DP, Cubase, Reaper, Studio One etc. Lately they all seem on par.

Live, Bitwig and MPC2 etc. all come in at 20-30% less CPU friendly than the previous DAWs, and have for years.

Interesting how different machines can garner such different results. On my iMac Pro, Live 10 uses way more resources than anything else. Logic and Cubase 10 perform the best.

[noiseboyuk]

Reaper is about twice as efficient as Cubase, as is VE Pro (ok, not strictly a DAW, but a host). It's actually a big reason why so many Cubase users also have VE Pro, you can go much further with it. Oddly, most people seem to say Cubase is particularly poor on Macs for efficiency, Windows is a bit better. As I understand it, Logic has recently made some performance improvements.