Where is Cubase 12.5 or 13? [Update: It's here C13 is released!]

[noiseboyuk]

Also, mono tracks had a point when using mono or stereo plugins was important CPU wise, say 10-15 years ago.

Still true today, surely. If a mono plugin version takes 50% less CPU, great.

[jens]

Also, mono tracks had a point when using mono or stereo plugins was important CPU wise, say 10-15 years ago.

Still true today, surely. If a mono plugin version takes 50% less CPU, great.

But you can load them on stereo-tracks too without a problem... I do that all the time.

[vurt]

never thought id live to see the mono vs stereo wars

[kritikon]

Just wait till we get around to snowflake surround nonsense. Stereo, I get it, because we have 2 ears, and I can stick a finger in one ear to listen to mono. But surround...do snowflakes have 7 ears? Exactly.

[Sahul]

Another problematic thing with mono tracks in Cubase was that the inserts were also monophonic, so if you wanted to apply a specific stereo process (say, a ping-pong delay) you had three options until now:

- Routing the track to a stereo group first, and inserting the plugins there.
- Using stereo send effects.
- Creating a new stereo track and moving there the content from the mono track.

That's why including a switch to automatically convert a mono track to stereo had been a common request for years, now hopefully implemented.

[jens]

Just wait till we get around to snowflake surround nonsense. Stereo, I get it, because we have 2 ears, and I can stick a finger in one ear to listen to mono. But surround...do snowflakes have 7 ears? Exactly.

Ah, "snowflake" - is that all you can come up with after I swiftly pointed out in this very thread how ...uhm... intellectually challenged you are?

Snowflake, moi? I promise you that you will be the first of us to cry, darling.

[kritikon]

Oh dear every post seems to be about you. Just a little egocentric perhaps? You had nothing to do with my last post, but you'll continue trolling until the end, because obvs everything must be about you. WTF would I call you a snowflake, (even though you now seem to be behaving like one)?

[Sahul]

Also, mono tracks had a point when using mono or stereo plugins was important CPU wise, say 10-15 years ago.

Still true today, surely. If a mono plugin version takes 50% less CPU, great.

But you can load them on stereo-tracks too without a problem... I do that all the time.

Not in Cubase, at least with the Waves mono plugins. Just checked and using mono plugins as inserts in a stereo track results in only the left channel being processed. So these mono versions are pretty useless unless you instantiate them in mono tracks.

[lfm]

Not in Cubase, at least with the Waves mono plugins. Just checked and using mono plugins as inserts in a stereo track results in only the left channel being processed.

By default that is true.

But you can go into details on routings and there is a patch bay and you can add one channel to both in plugin if you want.

This is what many daws do when you shift track to stereo.

Was possible in C9.5 Pro at least, think it is a Pro feature. So 5 years ago, don't remember where that option was.

So you can use stereo plugins on surround stuff and say where each plugin go etc.

Reaper has a similar patch bay to tell exactly how you want routings.

[mixtur.se]

The other (pretty obvious) thing is you can treat mono channel left and right with completely different FX chains by default, where you'd have to add additional routings to achieve this with a plain stereo signal..

tbh I tend to do this when recording piano - but then I still use stereo-tracks for it which I just pan hard left and right, which is the same as if I used two mono-tracks in Cubase, except of course that I keep the flexibility of having stereo-tracks, which also means I can still process both individual channels with stereo-fx if I want to (e.g. have a rotary kick in later just on the right channel), so even for this situation a mono-channel doesn't offer me any advantage.

I like to use mono tracks for mono sources to remind me that these are mono, and it declutters the project windows/editors. It might also provide a performance benefit as there’s one less channel to process in the audio path.

Sometimes I record a mono file as stereo by mistake, and then I’ll usually go back and use the convert feature in the pool, which also saves space.

I guess Cubase could just have 1 type of track and automatically configure it depending on the number of channels in the file though,

[kritikon]

If for nothing else, it's just habit. It's the way I've worked for decades, with mono channels and that's the way I want to continue. I want to continue working the same way in a DAW that I do in a hw mixer. Which IIRC is exactly what a DAW is...a digital version of a hw recorder/mixer/processor. And the bonus is it has lots of stereo channels too. Why anyone should think I shouldn't want to work that way is beyond me. It needs no justification. I could demand justifications as to why anyone needs to work with everything in stereo channels. But I won't because if that's what they want to do, good for them. Dunno why the reverse isn't true? I'm pleased Cubase does still emulate what it's supposed to be emulating, but IMO it's more tortuous than it could be. Likely other DAWS do mono easier, but I'm not going to change a whole DAW for that.

[kmonkey]

If for nothing else, it's just habit. It's the way I've worked for decades, with mono channels and that's the way I want to continue. I want to continue working the same way in a DAW that I do in a hw mixer. Which IIRC is exactly what a DAW is...a digital version of a hw recorder/mixer/processor.

No, but people these days will tell you this is pointless because 13 forum people never heard of mono tracks

So their logic is you must be doing something pointless even though most of the tracks from their favorite artists came out from mono channels in production because hardware mixers have mono channels. This is as you observed reflected in the software. Because you wouldn't know, it probably is by mistake

This is the best performance of their two neurons these days

[Sahul]

You guys are still not getting what we are really talking about here, hence your overreaction. What we were questioning is the need for a particular kind of track in Cubase to allocate monophonic content only, considering that a stereo track can also do that and, moreover, it offers additional advantages, such as the possibility to use stereo inserts. That was the discussion about.
As very well jens pointed out, more modern DAWS simply have a generic type of audio track, whose number of channels depends on the source you record or the content you throw into. Adobe Premiere also offers that, called "adaptable" audio track. Then it doesn't matter if you are recording a mono microphone or a stereo hardware synthesizer. You are still recording the microphone to a monophonic file and the synthesizer to a stereo file, but the DAW simply adapts to that. Nobody suggested here that you should record mono sources to stereo files, that doesn't make any sense and is a waste of disk space.

[jens]

So their logic is you must be doing something pointless even though most of the tracks from their favorite artists came out from mono channels in production because hardware mixers have mono channels. This is as you observed reflected in the software. Because you wouldn't know, it probably is by mistake

Look, monkey, someone told you before, but apparently you still did not get it, even though that makes the mind boggle a little, since it is really not hard.

So I will try to explain it to you once again, and I honestly believe that even you may end up understanding it:

Hardware is not software. It really totally isn't. On a classic console a stereo-channel meant having to use two mono-channels. That means it is physically doubled up. With "physically" I mean things you can touch and grab, such as the channel-fader, but also the electronic components underneath.
Electronic components are diffferent little things that are produced produced from different materials such as minerals (think of these as some kind of stones (the little round things you may find at the beach your momma used to call "pebbles" are stones, but of a different kind) and metal (do people eat with knive, fork and spoon where you live? These are made of metal too, but a different kind - Yeah, I start to wonder if it may get to complicated for you after all - sorry about that but I really do my best here).

So these electronic components are connected to each other in a way to make the eletricity (the stuff that powers the light-bulb above your head) flow in a certain direction and strength. Now it gets a little complicated and I really don't want to completely exhaust you, but anyway - all of this is doubled up for a stereo-channel but used only once for a mono-channel. Think of it like this: if your momma gave you a coin to buy a scoop of ice-cream, doubled up means she'd give you two coins instead so you could buy two scoops. While two scoops of ice-cream may be a good thing, using two channels instead of one isn't, because the mommas of the audio-engineers (the people operating the channels) didn't pay for the channels and also one coin wouldn't do - think a bucket full of coins (or a truckload of ice-cream) instead. So that is why they used mono-tracks whenever they could. But it doesn't stop there because two channels needed to get recorded to two tracks of tape instead of one and here is where it would certainly overwhelm you so I'll not go there...

just think two truckloads of ice-cream versus one.

Software: no pebbles and no ice-cream at all. Momma's gone and so are the ladies and gents who knew how to operate the hardware-channels and tape-machines. All that's left is a bunch of weirdos on an internet-board who are too daft to get the difference between the real world and the computer in front of them.


See, I can be nice...

[kmonkey]

So their logic is you must be doing something pointless even though most of the tracks from their favorite artists came out from mono channels in production because hardware mixers have mono channels. This is as you observed reflected in the software. Because you wouldn't know, it probably is by mistake

Look, monkey, someone told you before, but apparently you still did not get it, even though that makes the mind boggle a little, since it is really not hard.

So I will try to explain it to you once again, and I honestly believe that even you may end up understanding it:

Hardware is not software. It really totally isn't. On a classic console a stereo-channel meant having to use two mono-channels. That means it is physically doubled up. With "physically" I mean things you can touch and grab, such as the channel-fader, but also the electronic components underneath.
Electronic components are diffferent little things that are produced produced from different materials such as minerals (think of these as some kind of stones (the little round things you may find at the beach your momma used to call "pebbles" are stones, but of a different kind) and metal (do people eat with knive, fork and spoon where you live? These are made of metal too, but a different kind - Yeah, I start to wonder if it may get to complicated for you after all - sorry about that but I really do my best here).

So these electronic components are connected to each other in a way to make the eletricity (the stuff that powers the light-bulb above your head) flow in a certain direction and strength. Now it gets a little complicated and I really don't want to completely exhaust you, but anyway - all of this is doubled up for a stereo-channel but used only once for a mono-channel. Think of it like this: if your momma gave you a coin to buy a scoop of ice-cream, doubled up means she'd give you two coins instead so you could buy two scoops. While two scoops of ice-cream may be a good thing, using two channels instead of one isn't, because the mommas of the audio-engineers (the people operating the channels) didn't pay for the channels and also one coin wouldn't do - think a bucket full of coins (or a truckload of ice-cream) instead. So that is why they used mono-tracks whenever they could. But it doesn't stop there because two channels needed to get recorded to two tracks of tape instead of one and here is where it would certainly overwhelm you so I'll not go there...

just think two truckloads of ice-cream versus one.

Software: no pebbles and no ice-cream at all. Momma's gone and so are the ladies and gents who knew how to operate the hardware-channels and tape-machines. All that's left is a bunch of weirdos on an internet-board who are too daft to get the difference between the real world and the computer in front of them.


See, I can be nice...

What a miss. I'll be nice as well.

See whenever you need a text of biblical proportions to make your point - you are likely wrong. Besides...I have gotta tell you I laugh every time someone tries to explain software is not hardware like it is a thing to be confused about. Touche.

Your software type (like pretty much any DAW existing out there) which works in a specific way and has a mixer - is made to (big big surprise) reflect a workflow that people worked for decades on hardware. It even tries to implement VU needles hahaha. So it has a mixer and it has a mono channel (among many other things).

But you geniuses still think that the mono channel is pointless because your brain can not process it, even though there are literally thousands of "mono out" gear at this point in time- So like you know people would love to mix mono in their computers - and you know you are right in your own world - it is pointless from your limited comprehension on this subject (I am not saying you are less gifted - clearly you are not and there's a chance in real life we are same silly people).

This is as as nice you will see from me.