Questions for Cubase users. I like Version 12.

[wuworld]

Hey guys. I have been trying out Cubase 12, and I really like it a lot. I've been using Studio One since it first came out. I use FL as well. I think my bad experience with 10 or 9 kept me away. I think it was because I didn't have a great interface at the time (presonus), and not the best computer.

Fast forward now, I like the layout. The features are great, and I love the stock instruments. Chord track, chord pads, control room etc. Very impressed with them. Had some questions-
1. How is Steinberg with fixing bugs?
2. How is the online communication with them?
3. How do you find the CPU usage compared to other DAW's you own (cpu hog/light etc)?
4. How's the integration with Yamaha hardware with Steinberg software?

I'm considering the switch. Thanks fellas.

[_leras]

I don't have any issues in cubase. I think they add to it a lot over time.

Cubase 12 seems like a nice iteration. Functionality keeps increasing. It's a very powerful DAW, has a lot of depth.

CPU usage is fine. But I don't think there is a huge difference between DAWs anyway.

Control room and midi routing are great for external instruments and sound cardsm I couldn't tell you about Yamaha specific integration but I think that it supposedly to be very good.

[Obsolete187521]

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[astralprojection]

1. I don't have any bugs since 9.5. At least none I can recall or anything that has ever impeded or hindered anything.

2. Ticket system is slooow. I mean really slow. 1 month wait is not rare. However I've only ever had to contact them twice in 10+ years

3. Cpu usage is great I guess? I don't think any daw is a cpu hog? And it has great functionality for slow computers with various degrees of Asio guard, and selectable audio engine bit rate, 32 or 64 bit.

4. Perfect.. I have the ur22mk2 and its been rock stable for 5 years or so as daily driver.
Allinall cubase is for sure imho the very best daw, studio one is like a superficial baby cousin to cubase, where the latter is deep, allows you to chose your workflow in many ways, has more than one way of doing things, and the ui is not "rigid" or "stale" as studio one.


The mixer is the most powerful one on the market, and the UX is perfect. It's built and routed like you would a massive console, so you have great channel strips, phase flip, input trim, lp/hp filters, all first in the signal path, optionally, then you can chose if channel strip or insert comes next. It's pretty much flawless.

Allinall I'll be a cubase user for life there's no doubt, none of the other daws feels as deep as this one. Everything is just so rigid and locked in on other daws and doesn't feel like you're in control.

The previous user simply has no clue, imho of course. But he is welcome to his opinion. Sounds like a hater though since it's obviously an excellent daw. Better than the rest for sure, imho ofc.

[dionenoid]

1. Major bugs are usually resolved pretty fast. Little bugs/annoyances can take longer.
2. Pretty bad and usually very slow.
3. CPU useage is very good. Cubase is consistently in the top 3 of most efficient daw's and kept improving through the years.
4. My CC121 is still supported after all these years. Don't know about other Yamaha hardware.

[Obsolete187521]

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[Googly Smythe]

...
Cubase's workflow, which was once legendary for composers/producers, is FUBAR.

I suppose it's still OK for engineers, despite the abomination that is the new mixer design introduced with Cubase 7, still used today.

One man's abomination is another man's dream come true.
Although I agree with the comment about the interface - so much was re-arranged in v10 for no apparent reason. 20 years of muscle memory gone to pot.

[mduke123]

I copy - paste a post I published in June 2021. Now with Cubase 12 still the same issue:

**********************************************************************
I have several projects in Cubase with Windows 10 (now 12). One project has about 27 plugins and it takes almost 90% of the “Performance Meter Average” with 17% real CPU.
It makes impossible to work with medium - big projects. I have buffer to 2048 samples at 44.1 Khz. I have ASIO Guard enabled with multi processor also enabled. My PC is brand new i7 - 10th with 8 cores at 2.90 Ghz, SSD disk and 32 Gb RAM. I have tried the same project with the same plugins in Reaper and it only takes 5% of resources with 11% real CPU.

I use a brand new Audient ID4 Mk2.

I cannot believe this is almos useless for mixing or even producing.
***********************************************************************

Just to add that Steinberg engineer called me and he was trying to fix the issue for almost 3 hours with no sucess. The result was that my moderboard is too simple and cannot be handle to enhance a little bit the performance, just to be at the same height of Studio One or FL Studio. With all this I am telling you Cubase as the worst performance ever, bellow any major Daw. I made my tests with FL Studio, Bitwig, Studio One and of course Reaper.

At that time I had to come back to Reaper and at the beggining was a bit hard. I wanted to be sure that the return to Reaper was well worth so basically I study a lot. Now I could not leave Reaper because I have things imposible to have in any other Daw like a complete mapping to Plugins in a Midifighter Twister. Reaper has is a feature called ‘anticipative FX processing’. This option essentially uses idle CPU time to render effects on tracks in the background. It automatically keeps track of changes in the plugins on the tracks and re-renders them. This is essentially a channel freeze that is done automatically and in the background but it improves performance dramatically without interrupting work flow.

viewtopic.php?t=566103

[Googly Smythe]

I copy - paste a post I published in June 2021. Now with Cubase 12 still the same issue:

**********************************************************************
I have several projects in Cubase with Windows 10 (now 12). One project has about 27 plugins and it takes almost 90% of the “Performance Meter Average” with 17% real CPU.
...

I use a brand new Audient ID4 Mk2.

I cannot believe this is almos useless for mixing or even producing.
***********************************************************************
...

For balance:
I use an 8 year old pc (i7 4790k, 32 gbs ram, RME AIO audio interface), a typical project has about 150 fx plugins (channel and bus eq and compression, channel strips and the like, reverb and delay), 6-8 guitar sample libraries, several EastWest sample libraries, several Kontakt sample libraries, and HALion and GrooveAgent5. Buffer is at 48kHz/512 samples.
Cubase's Performance Meter says this uses about 80% and Windows says 50% cpu usage.
I suppose it depends on the kind of plugins you use and on the rest of the system.

[mduke123]

I use average plugins mostly from Plugin Alliance for Mixing. Every time I have tried to mix anything in Cubase it ran out of performance with clicks and pops. The same when I tried to produce electronic trance. No way to freeze busses. For me I have finisehd with Cubase for ever. I would prefer to learn Protools before I ever consider using a brass oldy like this.

[DonSantiago]

I´m quite happy with it.
They seem to have changed a lot of things for the better but without watching some vids on YT and some luck i managed without open the manual... Which was the main reason for me to chose cubase, its intuitiveness.
Stable and powerful. I wish devs made a Abletonesque scene view plugin.

[UltimateOutsider]

1. How is Steinberg with fixing bugs?
2. How is the online communication with them?
3. How do you find the CPU usage compared to other DAW's you own (cpu hog/light etc)?
4. How's the integration with Yamaha hardware with Steinberg software?

I've been a Cubase user since v1.0 on a Mac SE30.

1. They fix big/common bugs pretty quickly. All brand-new Steinberg drops have some pretty crazy bugs at first release, but within a few months they're usually pretty stable. (Note: They work with plugin vendors, too, since some issues are related to DAW compatibility- so you will often see plugin vendors push new updates after a new major DAW release. It just takes some time.)
2. It's always been slow, but it's now worse than ever. I have unfortunately had to submit several support tickets related to their horrible new licensing scheme (*), and it has taken between 1-2 WEEKS just to get a first, unhelpful response. It really blows.
3. I actually did some deep testing several years ago between Ableton Live 9 and whatever Cubase version was current at the time. Cubase was much more efficient at distributing multithreaded workloads (lots of tracks with complex FX chains); Live would do some interesting stuff which looked like intentionally avoiding hyperthreading scenarios for as long as they could, because as soon as they were running multiple threads on the same core, performance nosedived. I don't know if Ableton has improved their multithreading support since then, though, but Cubase still seems pretty solid.
4. Can't comment on the Yamaha hardware support. All my controllers are Roland or NI.

(*) And yes, I hate Steinberg Licensing. I've literally had 3 different issues that required Steinberg support's interventions. Steinberg had SO MANY good examples to learn from re:how to implement a dongle-free licensing mechanism (Waves, NI, Arturia), and they completely screwed the pooch. To the guys who haven't had any problems with Steinberg Licensing- I'm genuinely happy for you. But it's executed fantastically poorly and has been nothing but trouble for me. (For what it's worth, some of the issues only occur if you own multiple editions of the same product line- for example, I own Cubase 12 Pro/Artist/Elements on the same account, and their SAM application does NOT know how to handle this- and Steinberg doesn't seem to think it's worth fixing. There are other problems related to their recently-added offline activation feature... sometimes SAM decides your online-activated license is really an offline license, and it will DELETE your local license if you attempt to sign in to your Steinberg account!)

[mothra]

1. Bugs, at least major ones, seem to get fixed pretty quickly. 12 just came out in March and we've already had 4 updates for it so far.

2. Last time I had to contact support was ages ago about possibly upgrading using my old VST32 dongle, but I was way too late for that one hah. They were pretty responsive back then at least. Some of the devs are around on the Steinberg forums and they will reach out during threads with some serious issues in there. No clue about submitting actual support tickets nowadays though.

3. CPU usage is fine. Roughly the same as Logic Pro, and both are waaaaaaaay under a similar sized project in Ableton Live (which may be the biggest hog of them all).

4. No clue all my hardware is from other vendors.. No trouble with my Launchkey, or any of my other MIDI gear.

All in all Cubase 11 and 12 (I just switched back from Logic Pro in December after an almost 20 year absence) have been fairly rock solid here on my 2018 Mac Mini, and I have not even missed Logic Pro once. Seen a lot of folks having trouble with the licensing but knock on wood everything here has been absolutely smooth sailing, and I've even moved my licenses several times going through the MacOS Ventura beta installs and back to Monterey. Still up and running.

[chk071]

Cubase is one of the DAW's which suffer from the "every year a new paid version which gotta have new features and GUI overhauls to justify the expense" syndrome. Studio One is definitely another which shows the symptoms. I'd much rather have a slower pace of development (maybe a new major version every 5 or 6 years), with more focus on stability, fine-tuning existing features, and enhancing the general user experience. Maybe step by step modernize the included plugins, and add essential plugins to the DAW. You know... how it used to be in the past. Less hectic, more stability for software which has the essential need to be stable. Less fuckedifuck for the masses who get bored after a day of looking at the new major version, and act like the world would end tomorrow, and they gotta have their present today, before it all ends.

I know, just dreaming along here. Carry on.

[Obsolete187521]

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