I was with you, until I tried Studio One…
It’s one of those things that you don’t even notice until you use another DAW and notice how smooth it is to add/copy/paste plug-ins/vsti’s, or add/remove tracks, or route them, and then you come back to Cubase and it feels so clumsy and stuttering.
Take this (fairly typical scenario), one producer in a room with a couple of topliners working on a song idea, producer is working on the track while the writers are doing their thing, every time the producer wants to do anything on Cubase it glitches the audio…
need to load up a new synth sound as you have inspiration for a new lead line? - glitch
need to load up a rough vocal channel cos someone has a killer melody? - glitch
need a cool creative reverb/delay effect on a vocal part? - glitch
It’s an absolute creativity killer and the writers don’t understand, as they probably use logic or ableton at home which both play smoothly, so it reflects badly on us for using Cubase.
Even if you don’t collaborate, once you get used to the workflow of looping a short section to work on it and experimenting with fx/extra vsti layers it’s really distracting when the audio cuts out every time you do one of these things, it really kills the flow of what you are working on.
Someone else also mentioned ear/brain fatigue from mentally compensating from all those tiny stops and starts whilst you are trying to concentrate on the audio. I hadn’t considered this previously. but I believe this is also a great point.