Any news on the Cubase dongle divorce?

[kritikon]

That will likely be C17 . I upgraded C12 to C13, the first time I ever bought next version...usually keep the same for several versions. And once the excitement of new toys settled down, it was painfully obvious I wasted my money. The new things I thought would be useful turned out not to be. The single channel side mixer thing is incomplete and almost useless. First time I tried out their vocoder it turned out to be rubbish compared to my usual Mvocoder. Weirdly, the stuff I was least interested turned out to be the most useful - the vocal tools, yet I rarely use vocals .

I didn't find any actual DAW stuff that made working any better or easier or faster. So, $100 or whatever it was just for a quit button that finally works after 34 years .
I won't be getting C14 unless it's a major upgrade. I learnt my lesson. I do like the lack of dongle now, though the dongle never bothered me before. When they switch off the servers at least it'll hopefully stop SB reinstalling that shit on my computer every time I dl an update. I deleted it ages ago and it keeps reappearing - 200 MB of redundant program.

[concealed identity]

The single channel side mixer thing is incomplete and almost useless.

Can you elaborate on this? I'm not planning on updating to 13 but this was one of the new features that interested me.

[kritikon]

The idea of it is great - whatever channel you're working on shows up on the left without needing the whole mixer screen, and it'll change the corresponding side channel when you select another one from the arrange screen. But its height is limited, so you can't get all of the inserts & sends to show up on it. Personally I do a lot of trying out different inserts, sends etc while I'm programming or editing a channel and if I do any of that I basically have to load up the proper mixer screen or use the inspector etc to actually fiddle with inserts especially. It's not unusual for me to have 5 or 6 active sends maybe even more - I regularly have at least 3 different delays on the go. If I have to use the inspector - there's no point in the side channel. And I personally don't particularly like the inspector - mostly I have that turned off. So now I still have to use the mixer screen to access my channels for full twiddling. You can scroll up and down with the side channel, but unless I've missed something it won't scroll all the way up to show all the inserts. I can only get to see 2 inserts/sends max which for me is useless. A really simple thing that Steinberg missed. It's possible there's some way of getting it to show everything on the channel, but I can't find it. Apparently it can be customized to a degree but I find it doesn't show all the important bits I wanted it to show. Such a let down.

It is useful for the real basic things, as it'll show the fader, mute, solo, record enable etc, so it's not a complete loss. But if you want to play around with various sends/inserts, forget it. 2 is all you get (or can see). I was excited when I heard about it - one of the few things I bought C13 for in fact but having tried it - nah. It's broken. I still have to flick into the mixer screen to properly play with any channel for FX. I don't think I'm that unusual having multiple FX on the go, surely?

[kritikon]

Hmmmm...I had a surf over at Steinberg and they said the view on channel tab AND inspector would be changed in 13.0.30
I didn't even realize they'd also f**ked up the inspector by limiting the number of FX slots visible. There was a thread where apparently there was a scroll bar that showed up in the side channel to enable scrolling down to see more slots - but no sign of it on mine. Also supposed to be editable but not on mine. And Steinberg mods couldn't understand why we would want to leave empty slots, say 1 and 2 but insert FX lower down - and of course it turned up shitloads of people regularly do that for good reason, me included. I admit I'm on 13.0.20 or whatever - the one where they fixed the awful graphics glitches, so I've been reluctant to update beyond the version that's actually usable just in case they f**ked it up even more. But I might have to go and dl the latest - seems like maybe the side channel is now hopefully properly visible for sends & inserts. I hope so, because I like the idea of it.

[concealed identity]

Thanks for the answer! Yeah that sounds like a pain, and I hope it's fixed in 13.0.30.

There's not a whole lot I REALLY want added/changed in Cubase, but one of those things is a less unwieldy Inspector. I get used to it when I'm working, but as soon as I have to do something in Studio One, I realize how much less clicking I have to do to see and do things.

The other thing I really want implemented is a "last touched parameter" feature like in Studio One- just makes automating things so much easier, and I'd imagine this would be a relatively easy thing to implement. It feels silly to have to arm recording, hit play, then change a parameter in order to automate (the alternative is just to choose it from a list, but that's probably the slowest option).

[swilow11]

The other thing I really want implemented is a "last touched parameter" feature like in Studio One- just makes automating things so much easier, and I'd imagine this would be a relatively easy thing to implement. It feels silly to have to arm recording, hit play, then change a parameter in order to automate (the alternative is just to choose it from a list, but that's probably the slowest option).

Absolutely agreed. Never understood why Cubase is set up like this, unlike every other DAW I've used.

[kritikon]

Yeah - automation is not one of the strong points of Cubase. It's got better over the years, but still plenty of room for improvement. Editing automation can also be awkward in it - when writing/deleting new automation points, I find it randomly flakey. Fortunately I use far more hw than sw synths, so I can live with it.