An open plea to Steinberg

“just making Cubase as lean, reliable and powerful as it can be” I agree 100%.

Cubase is a good DAW, which I daily use. But there are so many bugs, graphic inconsistencies, and half-baked features, they really have to streamline the product and fix bugs.

+1

Since 8, the asio guard situation is just crap. you was hoping for a fix with 8.5. Unfortunately, I think I may try Studio One. I have Sonar…and it DESTROYS Cubase in terms of audio latency and reliability. I just like the workflow better in Cubase.

I have a has well 5960k processor ($1000 for the processor alone), and a Lynx Aurora card via pcie. 64 gigs of ddr4 ram.

Anyone who purchased the license to use Cubase has the same right to their expectations as the next guy/gal, regardless of how or where its used.

Sad part of this whole six page topic is that there is simply no response from Steinberg. Perhaps having the monolithic Yamaha behind them makes for this indifference to customer comments, I don’t know. I’ve worked in various service industries outside of music/media throughout my life, customer service is key… and quite telling here.

Perhaps some of our hybrid users, the green moderators could poke someone in the ribs about this? Perhaps they know that they cannot placate everyone.

Myself, I can cope with the things that don’t work properly, or which are missing, and to those who have stated “they’ve given up because feature x does not work, or bug y is not fixed” my sympathies, but there are always workarounds. A good carpenter has more than one type of tool in their toolbox to get the job done. Cubase will always be in my toolbox.

My 2 cents…

Steinberg will not reply, you can’t debate every person and every opinion in this.
And some of us get very (too) emotional and will say stuff they later regret.

I guess they have consulted their juridical and marketing departments and made the decision to stay out of this one :slight_smile:

Yes I’m a hobbiest and have loads of time to post replies on this forum, If you were a pro you wouldn’t have the time nor the money these days.

More like the accounting department. People buy the stuff. Why bother?

My apologizes to you, Matjones, and Winterrat. “Hobbyist” was the wrong term. I should have said “new user or casual user.” I too am a hobbyist and what little money I make these days in the studio is generated by Wavelab. But Cubase is more fun. :laughing: IMO new users/casual users, that 90%, is what drives the prosumer market, and it’s a main reason this horrible cycle exists.

My point is that while I too very much agree with the OP, I don’t think a plea works. I wish it did! Sure some issues such as the hovering issue was addressed, and I would guess that mix undo will happen with C9. But there is so much more that doesn’t happen because resources are always limited. The 10% vs. 90% is simply a wild guess. But you have to follow the money. Assuming one believes a problem exists, how is that cycle broken? Don’t spend money to upgrade? I wish that worked, but IMO it hasn’t. The concept of a new “pro” DAW that costs much more I think is a solution, but obviously it’s determined by market demand and that demand isn’t there…just yet.

although this is a very nice suggestion, at this point in time, you can be relatively sure they´ve already got 9 as an internal alpha/beta stage, with feature decision locked down months ago. So I wouldn´t count on something like that to happen before C10

Greggybud…much appreciated, thankyou!

Something that has been slightly bothering me over the past few days is a) the conspicuous absence of an official response on this, we can be sure this thread and others are being monitored and b) the inclusion of a ‘premium’ subscription based vst transit. It strikes me that this could be Steinberg dipping a metaphorical toe in the water to see what its uptake will be on the subscription side. Sure this was talked out some months ago and there was even an official statement from Steinberg that they had listened to us and they would not be pursuing that course… However, reading through this entire thread and others some people are now calling for this to happen as a way of guaranteed and more frequent hot fixes and updates. This concerns me somewhat that there could possibly be a bit of an agenda to do just that!
Personally the argument that a company would receive a steady trickle of income holds no water with me as ANY half decently run company understands the concept of budgeting…the same as most people who are monthly paid manage not to blow their entire month’s wage in one go…mind you I’ve met one or two idiots over the years who do just that.

When a new versions is released every year, ie 7.5, 8, 8.5 you are never going to iron out the bugs as SB will always be thinking of the new upcoming release rather than doing real fixes for the present release, after all what is the point in fixing it when a new one will be due out in a few months and the old one forgotten about.
There is just not enough time between releases to make any of them work correctly, I think software companies really need to rethink how they release software. I don’t know the solution but I do know it doesn’t work well the way it is and I definitely don’t want a subscription model.

I do hope the decision to go 64 bit only in the next release is so that the core software can be completely re written from the ground up removing lots of problems from having to make things work in both 32 and 64 bit. If this is the case then CB9 could be a completely new beast.

greggybud no problem.

matjones: I do agree with you, but rightly or wrongly I don’t think that Steinberg comments on these kinds of issues. Personally I think that Cubase qualifies as over-complex. There are so many functions and options that it must be impossible to alter one parameter without it affecting another. Solve one problem and you create another. Surely there must come a time when Steinberg have to do a fundamental re-write with a modern computer language?

I agree more money will not necessarily translate to bug fixes, that’s idealistic. I fully support one core system that is stable and solid with alacarte modular add ons that we can choose as mentioned in this thread. The gripe by professionals and others here is not with hobbiest or casual users, it’s that Steinberg appears to have gotten ahead of itself trying to grow user base with New VSTs and gimmicks leaving bug fixes, performance, and stability a lower priority.

That’s my perception, if bug fixes are a high priority then I ask that Steinbetg do better.

I find it kind of amusing to read, not only in this thread, the impossible demands the users set.
We want bug fixes, workflow enhancement, and new features that are better than in any other daw.
During the Cubase 4-5-6 cycle people would complain endlessly about the toy mixer.
Cubase 7 arrives, and people complain about the new mixer that no one asked for, and that the arranger does not have the right look.
Cubase 8 arrives and people complain about new stuff, we want workflow enhancement.
Cubase 8.5 arrives that primarily has workflow enhancement, and people complain about missing bug fixes, and to many shiny new stuff. ???

And hey I’m not better than anybody else, it’s only human to be carried away when there is something you feel passionate about.
But where is the realism.
Steinberg is a tiny company, even though they are owned by Yamaha that makes little difference when it comes to the actual coding of their products. How are they to satisfy all those contradicting demands, and still make a living ?
IMHO they do a great job balancing the needs of their costumers, all things considered.

I have the system as you have, how come I do not encounter your latency problems? It is a dedicated DAW, running windows 10 Pro, Cubase & Wavelab + plugins. No games, office and other fluff.

Change your Bios settings; e.g. Turn off C-states & Intel speed step. Do you have DDR4 memory that is recommended by your motherboard supplier? Do you run insane OC speeds?

Another +1 - hope it works

+10000 …! :smiley: Well said.

And don’t lets forget the two major OS upgrades recently, they’ve had to deal with. One of which screwed over their entire product range. Including hardware. Lost them easily a month or two I’d estimate, of their original planning/scheduling/fixing/testing/improvements programme…

I paid full price for Cubase 8 Pro. GUI is so broken that my audio stutters in front of my customers, singers, musicians etc. I myself find it hard to edit or scroll through anything while playing audio.
Reported bug, it is recognized as legit - as I’m not the only one with the problem, and the problem is hardware independent. Forced to work in 7.5 version now…
Check it for yourself:

So, paying money for (almost) broken product and expecting fix is not contradicting demand, you must sure agree?

I really appreciate your stepping in and defending poor, cornered Steinberg, it’s a nice thing to do, but yes, I say this with a little bit of sarcasm.

I’ve used Cubase since the Atari times, but I’ve only recently joined this forum because I wasn’t understanding where Cubase was heading after v7. This means I missed all the complaints about the old mixer, which by the way, I still find superior. I am hearing this for the first time, but again, I wasn’t on this forum long enough to contradict you.

But this is not really the point, as far as I see it. There will always be people complaining, other asking for the moon, other asking for a “Make The Song Under the Mouse Cursor a Hit” button. This is nothing new and yes, it’s hard to please everybody, it’s definitely a hard thing to manage, but this is no excuse for releasing a buggy software.

If SB really is that overwhelmed with the tempo that it’s user base is trying to set, it’s their job to prioritize things in such a way that they can deliver a solid release, and not a heavily bugged one as was the case with pretty much every release since 8.0. Fixing bugs should always be priority number 1 since people are paying actual money for a certain feature set that is supposed to work exactly as advertised. Did you notice how many people on this forum rolled back to a previous version after each 8.* release? Do you find this ok?
Did you notice how old some of the major bugs reports are? 1, 2 or even 3 years. Do you find this amusing too?

But then they find the time and resources to rewrite the mixer in 7, then the UI in 8 or the cloud thingy in 8.5 for example, which I am pretty sure nobody asked for. Instead on focusing on functionality and workflow issues, now they had to fix a broken UI.
Why?

Have the Cubase 8 UI issues been ironed out, a year after the 8.0 release? Really, really not, on the contrary, in some cases they’ve multiplied.

What about the constant changes they make from dot-release to dot-release without asking the users if they’re OK with it?

So, for the sake of the good old times where Cubase was the best DAW out there, I too would like to cut them some slack, but it’s getting harder and harder, with every release, which is why we’re here, debating about this.

This is a very important point. People are paying actual money for this product. Really, from custommers view, software should be without bugs, everything should work as advertised. Ther should be ZERO crashes after you pay full price for software.
Some try to say that it is ok to have bugs, and even that it is nothing wrong with bugs, that we must be real, reality is such that there will always be bugs. Really, we’ve come so far? We are expected to pay full price for buggy software, and should just live with that as if this is all normal? Since when is that the new normal?
If you buy any goods, and it is flawed, you can get discount for it, to compensate for flaws. OK, if they want to sell buggy software, but bugs should be listed up front for all to see, and price should be discounted due to bugs. I would buy buggy Cubase at discounted price. But they shouldn’t charge full price for flawed product.
Maybe software companies should be obliged to pay back to customers for every crash and bug that is there in final product. This would be fair. That for every crash you get 5eur back from your purchase. That would teach them a lesson not to release buggy software.
And Cubase is really buggy, I don’t think there is any “Pro” software out there that is buggy to such degree, and with old unresolved bugs since years ago. For most companies it is simply unimaginable to release such product and charge actual money for it.
If Cubase was free product, or “pay what you want”, then they could do whatever they want. Or if it had policy like Reaper, where you get really A LOT for those 60eur, then one could live with bugs (and in stark contrast to Cubase, Reaper fixes bugs regularly, all the time, even weekly).
Steinberg is doing its business very badly, in a typical consumer oriented money hungry way - a lot of fancy advertising for not so many features. Consumer is paying a lot for very little real gain.
Ableton did a good step some time ago - they stopped development of new features, and focused only on fixing bugs. I think it is time that Steinberg does the same.

I find it kind of amusing to read, not only in this thread, the impossible demands the users set.

I sincerely hope you are not sitting there chuckling away at other peoples frustrations;-)

*Kennedy’s famous message to Congress on May 25, 1961, set the goal:
*

This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.

Everyone knows what happens next (apart from those of this world who choose to believe the conspiracy theories)
This comparison falls down but shows that goalposts are constantly shifting, ‘The impossible demands’ are now that Steinberg addreses a number of issues. Achievable? a resounding yes, as Kennedy shows it was with his challenge.

updated: to keep this thread on target.