Jumping ship from Live to Cubase

[biscuitdough]

Sometimes it is good to be a hoarder never selling off stuff. Just found an old Steinberg dongle on my desk with a valid Cubase 4 license. That took off a real chunk of the price!

How did you get your Atari ST onto the internet? jk

[DrGonzo]

Sometimes it is good to be a hoarder never selling off stuff. Just found an old Steinberg dongle on my desk with a valid Cubase 4 license. That took off a real chunk of the price!

How did you get your Atari ST onto the internet? jk

You actually can. Not joking

[legendCNCD]

Yeah, even Commodore 64 has Twitter client

[Jmf1928]

I mix it up between Cubase, Ableton, and Bitwig all the time. I even use Luna as a tape recorder quite frequently. None of them does everything perfectly, so it’s nice to be able to move between them.

Cubase excels at giant template setups where you can disable unused tracks but have them ready. The mixer is also excellent. I don’t use the stock plugins as much as I should, but they’re definitely good. Bouncing is handled well. Eucon support is welcome. Retrologue and particularly Padshop are excellent, and HALeon seems worth exploring too.

Ableton is far better for nonlinear, generative, working quickly, making things interact, MAX, and surely a bunch of other things. Bitwig is a different variation on that with even more modulation and randomneesss.

[syntonica]

I'm not a Cubase user, nor a Live user. I hate Cubase and it's tendency to always explode within 15 seconds of opening it. I've only poked at Live with a stick. While hiding behind a large rock.

However, there's nothing wrong with the "clip mentality" if used right. I started using MIDI clips in Logic 6. I would build them using a 4/8/etc bar loop. When arranging however, I would copy using aliases if I wanted the loop to change if changing the original and copy as clone to make a unique copy to edit as an intro, outro, variation or whatever. Only after my arrangement was complete would I print dry clips to audio and then work on fx and mix, both as a creative exercise and a CPU-saving one. I always had the original MIDI clips as back up if I wanted to make changes.

Not sure if there's similar in the arrange view of Live, but there's no point in throwing the baby out with the bathwater when you can just let your brain explore new ways of working. You may need to manual dive a couple of times, too.

Anyway, my 2 pfennigs. I'm not sure how big of a shakeup you are looking for.

[jjpscott01]

To me Cubase and Live are both best in class at what they do. Cubase to me is kind of like the king of linear recording DAW's as it has every feature one could wish for and incredible built in effects. Live is the king of clip based DAW's and does its thing better than the rest. Which one clicks with a certain user would certainly be based on what kind of workflow is most comfortable. I have some friends that love working with Live especially using the Push Controller. I agree with the user above who mentioned Cubase excels at large complex projects and I wouldn't want to do a full mix in another software after using it for large projects. Both software's are certainly excellent at what they do.

[jonljacobi]

Cubase is a great DAW, but I kind of feel that way about all of them in a way. I go back to Pro 24 with the company, but somewhere along the way, the extra steps and stack of child windows (at the time) sent me elsewhere. Studio One, then Mulab, then Bitwig (which went in a different direction), then Logic, then finally Live after a several year flirtation. But I've tried nearly all of them and used Pro Tools as an engineer.

It just took Steinberg too long to switch to a more modern interface and workflow. By the time they fully did (not that long ago), I was addicted to scalable interfaces and more modern approaches. The fact that it's massive overkill for me was a factor as well.

I swear I thought Steinberg was going to use the Sequel interface or something similar and got excited to return back in the day, but that never panned out. Now, I'm simply way too facile with Live, despite some of its limitations and idiosyncrasies, to even contemplate switching.

Okay, that's a lie, I occasionally go "grass is greener", but not often and not for long. What might seem odd to some, is that the vast majority of what I do is record and edit. No EDM, no sound design, no sequencing (okay, a little), no live performance, no clip launching, etc.

Regardless, Cubase is a very powerful piece of software. I wish you good times with it.

[EnGee]

It seems Cubase has a better performance and stability in Mac!
I've tried it today with my mini m1 and it's great Even the midi early Notes are not there! The only drawback is very tight space with 1080p resolution, while Logic seems with more space (like S1).
The jumping performance indicator is much less jumpy in Mac. The overall experience in Mac with Cubase is much better than in Windows.

[Tronam]

It seems Cubase has a better performance and stability in Mac!
I've tried it today with my mini m1 and it's great Even the midi early Notes are not there! The only drawback is very tight space with 1080p resolution, while Logic seems with more space (like S1).
The jumping performance indicator is much less jumpy in Mac. The overall experience in Mac with Cubase is much better than in Windows.

Cubase 12 runs extremely well on my Mac Studio so far and I haven't encountered any stability issues yet (knock on wood). One of my biggest gripes in the past with Cubase on Windows were the random *poof* crashes to desktop for no obvious reason, so I had to get into the regular habit of CTRL+S as I worked. I'm sure things have improved since then though with Windows 10 and better quality PC hardware overall these days. The move away from the dongle may actually improve stability too since the program no longer needs to make all those USB eLicenser calls.

[EnGee]

Yes it runs well in my mini m1 also. I disabled Asio guard so let's see if that make it better or not.

Still, I prefer Logic in spite of me still learning it while in Cubase I know my way well. Logic has a better design IMO except the ugly old synths GUI that needs size upgrade (come on Apple! 20 years and no GUI update!!). Now I remember the old synths, maybe Cubase wins me in the end!

But in the end, I feel it is like the old days when it was Cubase vs Logic. Both were great and both still great. They dominate the musicians setup while Live dominate the producers world. It is a good time to be musician or producer

[jonljacobi]

Logic is certainly a heck of a lot cheaper. Same birth era though, and it sometimes shows.

[tony10000]

I have Cubase 12 Elements. I much prefer to use Reaper or Bitwig along with Live...