Hi
I’ve had a search on the net for how to get refunds and it doesn’t look promising since the iTunes Store policy is that sales are final and I bought this app over two months ago. However, I’ll still have a go.
Frieder, I don’t want this to come across as some disgruntled user with an axe to grind criticising everything and everybody, I’ve read plenty of those type of posts over the years, but it will probably come across a bit that way anyway, so I apologise in advance for that. This is not intended to offend in any way.
For the reasons why I’m not satisfied you only need to go back through some of the posts. There are many areas that I feel are deficient and yet two updates don’t seem to have altered this at all.
This app has some very well thought out parts, especially some of the UI. It certainly has the most attractive UI of apps of this type that I’ve used. The beauty is a little skin deep however.
The reason I bought this app was because I needed midi. Cubase has such a good reputation in this area that I didn’t hesitate to purchase it. But the implementation in Cubasis is extremely weak (in my opinion of course). Editing is difficult and there are simply no tools beyond the most basic. The only parameter that can be edited is the velocity. The velocity lane at the bottom is a carry over from the desktop DAW paradigm. But because of the size of the screen the height of the editing space is about half an inch and can’t be adjusted. Even trying to edit with a stylus is frustrating. Even when editing, hitting undo sends you back to the start of the clip at the previous zoom. It’s just not practical to use like this.
Some other issues. The instruments although obviously not in the same league as their desktop/Halion equivalents (an assumption since I don’t have Halion), were still useable for sketch work. But the drums, which I wanted to use, I couldn’t as a closed high hat doesn’t stop an open high hat. I would have thought this was fundamental. Someone in another post asked about the ‘swing’ feature in the quantize menu. I too spent at least half an hour experimenting to work out what it does. It certainly doesn’t relate to ‘swing’ as I understand it, being the first and third notes of a triplet. It doesn’t seem to do anything predictable. I notice his post still has no response at the time of this writing.
Fortunately I’ve only had the screen dim on me once but for some users it seems to be continuous. There are other issues but of course I understand that there are limited resources and not everything can be addressed immediately.
I thought that some of the issues were serious enough to warrant fixing but the 1.3 update came out with the main improvements being an EQ and a limiter. Of course these are welcome, but if your going to compete in the audio arena there’s a lot of work to do to catch up to Auria. And the midi side, which I thought would be Cubasis’s focus, seems to get no attention.
Again, I guess that for me, the audio side is not as important. I don’t really care about 24 bit or even automation, I’m sure others do. The mixing I was going to do in Auria anyway.
I suppose to put it in a nutshell I’m disappointed because I bought this thinking it would have a strong midi implementation only to discover that it’s rudimentary at best and after two updates it hasn’t changed.
For people who have Cubase on the desktop, of course it’s ideal. But for those who don’t it just seems under done. I have no doubt that Cubasis will become a killer app in time, but at this time it surely isn’t for me. And by the time it does Auria will probably have midi.
Regards
Rob