- Audio engine, audio engine, audio engine. (On Mac especially).
- I have spent hundreds of hours benchmarking the top DAWs over the years for plug-in load and Logic X now wins by a landslide. I can load 200+ Kontakt plug-ins into Logic X all playing simultaneously and they don’t break, crackle or pop even once. On a suped-up 12-core Mac Pro I can barely load 40-50 before Cubase goes thermonuclear. This is unacceptable. If this is supposed to be a professional DAW, it needs to meet or exceed the competition - not pitifully get trounced by it. I have seriously contemplated jumping ship to Logic X for this reason alone.
- If a session gets unstable because of this, MTC sync output is affected and jitters like mad. Also, retrospective record for MIDI data works maybe 1 in 10 times. Most of the time it’s a jumbled mess of MIDI data. I am almost certain this is due to the instability of the MIDI buffer.
- ASIO Guard is a total non-starter. It doesn’t reduce the ASIO meter, doesn’t improve performance, and in fact introduces more problems - not the least of which is unreliable initial playback.
- Sessions take forever to load and I can clearly see as each instrument is loaded one at a time, Cubase is maxing out one CPU core at a time even though I have 12 at its disposal. Implementing a multi-core loading scheme that loads multiple instruments/plug-ins simultaneously could speed up session load times dramatically. When opening dozens of sessions a day, this adds up fast. In film/TV, time is money.
- Random crashes. Long-standing issue for years.
- Guaranteed, several times a day Cubase will just seize up and have to be force-quit. Not traceable to any plug-in or reproducible process.
- Enabling EuCon remote devices causes Cubase to crash constantly, most notably when deleting instrument tracks. This has been an issue from 7.0 thru 7.5 and possibly back to 6.x if my memory serves.
- At least once a day the Video Service will stop functioning for no reason, and Cubase (and my active session) has to be restarted/reloaded.
- Inconsistent preference commitment to disk: Some preferences get saved only at the time Cubase is gracefully quit. With the number of times that Cubase crashes, I often find tweaks and preferences/settings are not remembered on next launch because there was no chance for them to be saved. Please, make all prefs save to disk immediately when changed.
- MixConsole shortcomings. I love the new mixer, but it’s killing me…
- On a large resolution screen like 27" Thunderbolt Display, zooming or scrolling is so slow it’s turned me off of using MixConsole for all but the most critical functions.
- In 7.5, still no import/export global layout presets for import into other projects.