Cubase 11 Pro or Studio One 5 Pro

[Trancer]

This post is linked to my other post on vst to compose Oblivion and Breavhaert style film music.

For composition, mixing, mastering, management of many vst tracks and articulations.

The one that will perfectly manage the cpu load as well.

The most stable and reliable.

The most recommended Daw, Cubase or Studio One?

[antic604]

...Cubase or Studio One?

I've Cubase Pro 11 for sale, so that one

[jancivil]

Well, first, the way actual composers for picture like that manage CPU "perfectly" or anything like it for a decade now is hosting the plugins in VE Pro. The load is going to overwhelm any DAW, all hosted in the same process as.
Cubase 11 went from being seriously unstable to quite stable (one crash since) after moving to Big Sur from Catalina OS. Can't say more, can't say how much of that is peculiar to me, even. Never connected Studio One to VE Pro. I know they've worked closely with VSL on an Expression Map, but Cubase is where Expression Map was born (meaning signs/symbols for orchestral articulations instead of keyswitches, which are obtrusive in a music score. I don't use it, don't need a score printout, which if you were an actual orchestral composer is a thing. as is the ability to set up an orchestra recording session, if not conduct it.).

Right now I have a massive orchestration up (by my lights, far short of a Holkenborg situation) that's pretty stable, but that has not been cheap or without numerous pitfalls.

[cryophonik]

I've been a Cubase user since the early 2000s and a Studio One user since v1, but neither is my main DAW and I'm not on the latest version of either (Cubase 9.5 and S1 v4 Pro, waiting for the BF sale to upgrade to v5 Pro). "Stable" is not a term that comes to mind when I think of Cubase, particularly on Windows. It's been a crashfest on almost every PC I've owned over the past 20 years, which is the very reason I ditched it in favor of other DAWs. But it's far better on my Macs and, from what I've heard, has been vastly improved on Windows - I no longer use any PCs for music, so I can't say. And, of course, many PC users have few/no stability issues with it ever, so who the hell knows how it will perform for you. Studio One has always been rock solid for me on both PCs and Macs.

Notation-wise, Cubase has been outstanding for many years now, but the new notation view in S1 v5 is based on Presonus' own notation software, so I'd expect it to be up to the task of film-style orchestration.

Regardless of my input, demo, demo, demo. Presonus always has great BF deals on S1, so demo now while you're waiting for their sale to start and you'll know for yourself which one works best on your system by the time the sale starts.

[jancivil]

Cubase was never particularly unstable here on any Mac OS (I split the windows program in q1 2006) before 11 and it instantly started exhibiting problems. Some of this, half of it even, was that this OS has a feature 'automatic graphics switching' with the machine having two graphics cards in it, if I turn that on today it's going to crash at any time, one supposes, it does that. Some of it was def. not that.

Cubase for notation is capable and deep, but it isn't at all viable as the place where you compose because it's too much work, and because if you improvise and do anything that doesn't reduce to duple or triple subdivisions it shoehorns all of it into that and this is garbage. Also dealing with the way it ties long durations crossing beats, let alone bars, is a huge PITA to sort and again it's garbage.

and yeah, no one knows if it will click, a DAW, you have to extensively demo. Nuendo btw has a 60-day unrestricted demo and it's the same interface as Cubase with added tricks o' the trade you don't even have to know about to use it.

[syntonica]

You don't say which platform you're running or how heavy of a rig you have. If you're doing orchestral, then you'll want at minimum 16Gb RAM, although 32Gb and higher is far far FAR better.

The monsters for film are Cubase, Logic and Digital Performer and work well integrating video and cues. I'm not sure how well S1 does this or not, so I'll let someone else speak to its suitability.

You can download demos of S1 and DP to try them out and see how well you get on. Cubase and Logic are a little trickier and it's probably best if you can find somebody who has them to show you.

Of the two you mention, I've never been fond of Cubase. In the three times I've demoed it, it's been ugly and I've managed to crash it within a minute of initial use each time. I demoed S1 ages ago and it was very intuitive and quick to work in. I didn't manage to crash it, so that's in its favor. So, provided it has all the features you need, I'd go with S1.

[Trancer]

Thank you for your answers.

I took the time to read your feedback and take your comments into account.

I am going to upgrade Studio One to a Pro version.

We will see Cubase 12 ..

In any case, Steinberg really has an interest in pushing hard with version 12, otherwise he risks having migrations to Studio One.

[cryophonik]

Cubase for notation is capable and deep, but it isn't at all viable as the place where you compose because it's too much work, and because if you improvise and do anything that doesn't reduce to duple or triple subdivisions it shoehorns all of it into that and this is garbage. Also dealing with the way it ties long durations crossing beats, let alone bars, is a huge PITA to sort and again it's garbage.

Those are very good and interesting points. When I first starting using DAWs, I was sorta annoyed that most of them didn't come with a decent notation editor and I was stuck with the piano roll view. But, I quickly found out that getting the best results was NOT happening in score editors, at least not for my style of music (i.e., mostly in the pop/dance/electronica genres), so I just got comfortable with the PRV and haven't touched a score editor in over a decade. I guess I just assumed that most people doing film-style music were primarily using the score editor since they seem to be the ones who are most often asking for it in their DAWs. But, my experience was similar to what you explained - I never got the results I wanted when trying to work solely in the score editor and always had to resort to the PRV and tweaking away at note lengths, especially for ties, legato, staccato, etc. notes. So, I guess it makes sense that those same issues would apply to any musical style.

[jancivil]

Because it was the normal paradigm in my training, _and_ my first experience sequencing music from a computer, I started in the current paradigm with Finale and a Roland XV job. It wasn't happening. I worked long, tedious hours getting nothing viable at all.
Durations in notation are a shorthand, quantized time isn't viable, and the humanization was bullshit.
Then, I believed I would essentially be well-rehearsed and record live in Cubase. Latency never low enough to even seriously consider it (2003-4).
I soon found the modi operandi that are viable for this are about editing the bars in the piano roll. Get your hot licks down while they're hot and construct from phrases and bits.

Only times I've dealt in a score editor for 15+ yrs was once I created a four-part writing excercise for a student out of the music theory board, or twice. And I made a pdf for a saxophonist I hired for a thing, which he didn't use because the part was impossible (or at least far too much hassle for a hundred bucks) on the horn, his version he could well handle by ear (the rest was improvisation. Chris Alpiar Kennedy, really made the track). There have been one or three times it would have been the proper way to sort my voice-leading but I took that as a challenge.
I don't even check it for anything because my rhythm is turned into nonsense by its quantizing ways.

[jancivil]

and when I did the student exercises I used Logic, and MUSE Score.

[andypryce]

This post is linked to my other post on vst to compose Oblivion and Breavhaert style film music.

For composition, mixing, mastering, management of many vst tracks and articulations.

The one that will perfectly manage the cpu load as well.

The most stable and reliable.

The most recommended Daw, Cubase or Studio One?

There are discussions about Studio One becoming slower gradually the more tracks you add to it. So my understanding is, with hundreds tracks templates Cubase is the king but Studio One also has a nice preset system that you wouldn't need to have a big template. You can get info about all of this at
vi-control.net site which is mostly about scoring for media.

[EnGee]

Flip a coin or buy the two

I have the two, but recently I'm using S1 more than Cubase. Anyway, both are great and stable and each one has its advantages. S1 seems more stable with the CPU and easier to use for few tracks and easier to manage.

[Trensharo]

This post is linked to my other post on vst to compose Oblivion and Breavhaert style film music.

For composition, mixing, mastering, management of many vst tracks and articulations.

The one that will perfectly manage the cpu load as well.

The most stable and reliable.

The most recommended Daw, Cubase or Studio One?

Definitely Cubase Pro 11.

Additionally, I own both of these... and Cubase crashes far less than Studio One 5 Professional, which is nuked occasionally by Plug-ins and Virtual Instruments.

Cubase is more stable on Windows than on macOS. The person above is giving false information. It has always been this way. Cubase is like Premiere Pro, as far as that goes.

If you go to YouTube and look at Cubase users' screens, you'll notice an abnormally high amount of creators using it on Windows (compared to what you'd expect to see with other DAWs like Ableton, Pro Tools, etc.).

As for CPU load and this other stuff it really depends on what CPU you have. The DAW can't conjure CPU power out of thin air. If your machine is underpowered for what you're attempting, there is nothing it can do but overload, slow down, or crash and burn.

System Configuration and the Software Environment on your machine is also a component in stability and reliability. A lot of issues people have with DAWs and other professional software has little to do with the software and more to do with the environment in which they're attempting to run it.

[Trensharo]

This post is linked to my other post on vst to compose Oblivion and Breavhaert style film music.

For composition, mixing, mastering, management of many vst tracks and articulations.

The one that will perfectly manage the cpu load as well.

The most stable and reliable.

The most recommended Daw, Cubase or Studio One?

There are discussions about Studio One becoming slower gradually the more tracks you add to it. So my understanding is, with hundreds tracks templates Cubase is the king but Studio One also has a nice preset system that you wouldn't need to have a big template. You can get info about all of this at
vi-control.net site which is mostly about scoring for media.

You can import tracks from projects in Cubase as well, which is somewhat similar. However, with the way it allows you to manage tracks and virtual instruments, you can hav a 1,000 track template that opens pretty much instantaneously.

These things are far easier to manage in Cubase than in Studio One.

Also, Cubase's Media Bay browser is amazing while Studio One's browser is... well... practically worthless.

[Trancer]

Being curious and not wanting to have a question without having an answer for my use, I will go to the pro Studio One version and as an interesting price, I will take the Artist 11 version, this way if Cubase meets my needs and criteria , I will switch to Cubase 12 Pro.

There will most certainly be a preferential price when Cubase 12 Pro is released.

This way, I will know which daw to evolve towards.