Cubase 10 expectations, hopes, etc.?

Cubase
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I don’t have any rumors, but I do have expectations and hopes:

  1. I expect Cubase 10 to be released in late October or early November, before Black Friday for sure.

  2. I hope Cubase 10 is NOT released in late October or early November. My biggest hope is actually that Steinberg stops the yearly update cycle, which I think has caused too many rushed features that haven’t been properly tested before release. So I hope they take a long time to methodically develop the new features and test them meticulously.

  3. I expect they will keep to their yearly update schedule though. Therefore while I’m sure there will be some landmark features in Cubase 10, I expect at least one major feature will require 3 patches before it works properly.

  4. I hope they spend more time on the new video engine to bring it back at least to feature parity with the old video engine.

  5. I hope they give us some major workflow feature for multi-cue film composers and sound designers like the “chunks” feature of Digital Performer or the “subprojects” feature of Reaper. Both of which would be super powerful for many other users too. I’m just dreaming though.

  6. I hope they finally get around to adding true ripple editing. It’s been requested for a long, long time. But I doubt we’ll get it. Judging by the responses I have received over the years, I don’t think Steinberg really “gets” what true ripple editing is all about. But still, I can hope, right?

  7. I hope they spend a lot more time refining and perfecting (and testing) Direct Offline Processing, but I expect they won’t do that since it seems the nicer version of DOP is reserved for Nuendo, so whatever improvements we get in DOP will likely be derived from Nuendo… so we might have to wait until Cubase 10.5. Or perhaps they might give Cubase the same version of DOP that Nuendo has?

  8. I expect they will spend time optimizing the audio engine for high-core-count computers. General optimizations are always welcome too.

  9. I expect at least one new softsynth, and it will be pretty good, although I’m not sure what kind it will be. Wavetable synths seem to be all the rage lately, so maybe they’ll take the WT module out of HALion and build a nice WT standalone synth around it, or perhaps something sort of like what they did with Padshop and Padshop Pro.

  10. I expect a bunch of new “anniversary” content. It will be a mixture of loops, vintage sounds, EDM sounds, and a token orchestral/string collection.

  11. I expect they’ll release a nice step sequencer and possible “pattern” workflow. I hope they don’t chase too much after the Ableton and FL users though.

  12. I expect full support for MPE. They’ll call it VST Expression 3 and it will be a superset of MPE + their previous stuff like Note Expression + VST Dynamics + Expression Maps. It will likely be totally state-of-the-art and retain their dominance in that area. After all, Steinberg can’t be known for falling behind in this area. So I expect some sort of new hardware to go along with it too, or a promotional deal or collaboration with ROLI.

  13. It’s also about time we get the next gen of VariAudio to keep up with the current Melodyne OR perhaps Steinberg will give us ARA 2 support, OR perhaps both! Personally, I don’t believe Steinberg will support ARA 2 due to their increasingly in-house mentality, so I expect we’ll get the next gen of VariAudio, which will likely be pretty good, perhaps not quite as good as Melodyne, but it will likely have polyphonic improvements. On the other hand, Celemony sure is taking a long, long time releasing ARA 2 officially, so that might be because Steinberg is holding them up with Cubase 10. So it could go either way. In any case, I expect something to happen in this area.

  14. I expect Steinberg will give us at least ONE new, very nice core plugin following in the footsteps of Frequency. They did well with Frequency and I think they’re slowly working on adding better plugins like that, one by one… so the next most likely candidate after Frequency will be a nice new high-quality, flexible compressor in the style of Fabfilter Pro-C 2.

  15. I expect Steinberg to continue their evolution of Zoning, and there will be slight improvements in that area… like Zoning 2.5.

  16. Lastly, I expect Steinberg to launch more hardware soon, including an 8-channel version of their Neve design, and it’s been a while since they released something like CC121, so maybe a new, more affordable motorized channel controller of some kind.

Those are my expectations and hopes. Let’s see what happens!