Well, that’s a loaded question, and goes to a long-time gripe I have with many developers that never seem to finish a particular feature the way I wish they would. YMMV of course, and it’s all dependent on your own unique needs and workflow, but IMO Steinberg has been guilty (again, along with many other developers!) of releasing half-baked features at times, and taking quite a long time to make those features robust enough that I trust them for hard core production.
For example, DOP is still not great. I have been complaining about DOP for a long time, and it’s only now that it’s basically usable. But I still don’t trust it completely for harder-core work. My gripe with Steinberg was the sloppy condition in which they originally released it, and the insanely long time in refining it. Keep in mind, they also made the mistake of replacing a previous functionality and workflow when they first introduced DOP. That was disruptive to workflow and should never have been launched the way they did it. Of course it’s much better now, thank goodness, but still doesn’t feel totally trustworthy enough to hammer it the way I truly like to work, with lots of slicing and dicing and adding more processing even after the initial processing is done. I can still make it buckle. But DOP is at least now good enough for basic and some intermediate tasks. Might be just fine for many other people with different workflows.
Another example is ARA support. Congrats to Steinberg for finally jumping in with ARA, and it is basically usable right now, but could use several improvements. It’s already had one good patch which gave me a little confidence boost. Refer to the many threads about it. I am thrilled they introduced it, but it still has a ways to go.
Another example is the new video engine, which has been a work in progress for years, since the the demise of the Quicktime-based video engine. Again, big kudos to Steinberg for continuing to refine the new video engine, which is taking FOREVER, and which just got video rendering support in 10.2, thankfully. However, this feature is still very limited and forces a re-render to specific codec and settings, and needs to be much more flexible. Ultimately, it needs to be able to “replace” audio without re-rendering the video, with far better codec and settings support. So for my use, it’s only partially useful, not to mention not that solid yet for me. Again, I’m happy it has finally reached this point, but still has a ways to go, not just in features but in reliability too.
There are many examples, but those above are just a few… where I am hoping for and frankly expecting more bugfixes and refinements. Each release gives me more confidence to use those new(-ish) features. Hope that makes sense.
Overall, though, this needs to be taken in the context of comparable DAWs and apps of this level of depth and complexity. Again, I want to be clear that I think N10 is definitely mature and one of the best releases from Steinberg in a long time, a real professional powerhouse in the DAW market, but nothing is ever perfect. Just trying to be realistic and honest. When I compare to Avid, for example, Steinberg has been on a good roll lately and sometimes Avid looks positively inept and neanderlithic, but Steinberg still has a lot more to do. They need to keep their standards high and not allow features to be released before they are ready. But again, overall, 10 is very good and I say jump in with your eyes wide open, and still hope for and push for refinements. And truly, nothing out there really matches N10 anyway, but I just hope that Steinberg doesn’t ever get a big head and allow that to lower their standards. YMMV.
