Cubase 10 released [10.0.20 update]

[Guy Rowland]

https://new.steinberg.net/cubase/new-in-10/

What's New:

VariAudio 3
Ultimate control of your audio, with more creative tools and Smart Controls to speed up workflow.

MixConsole Snapshots
Instantly recall different project mixes and settings to quickly compare mixes and add mix notes.

Audio Alignment
Stack and match recordings quickly, easily synchronizing them to a reference track.

New Channel Strip
Channel strip overhaul offers better metering and functionality.

32-bit integer and 64-bit audio
The Cubase audio engine delivers ultimate, no-compromise quality.

Easy side-chaining
Quickly and easily set up side-chaining to make space in mixes or create distinctive effects.

Groove Agent SE 5
Many improvements and a new user interface enhance the best drum production tool.

5 GB of high-quality sounds and loops
The included sound content is brought to you by six highly acclaimed producers.

AAF support
Exchange multimedia data with all the most commonly used applications.

Distroyer
Add everything from subtle analog warmth to searing heat for mixes and individual instruments.

Vintage Verbs for REVerence
Better management, smoother workflow and 20 new impulse responses bring REVerence greatness to your projects.

Latency Monitor
Know exactly where — and how much — latency is occurring, quickly and easily.

Full support for high-resolution displays
Enjoy high-definition quality under current macOS (limited support for Windows 10).

Effects in the Media Rack
Radical improvement of plug-ins workflow, with drag-and-drop functionality and improved display.

MPE support
Easy and convenient setup of MPE controllers.

Improved editing to picture
Enhanced tools for video soundtrack production.

Steinberg Virtual Reality
VR production suite adds a suite of professional yet intuitive virtual reality audio production tools.

ARA support
Forthcoming support for extended communications between ARA plug-ins and Cubase.

Even more
Experience a wide range of usability, performance and quality improvements.

Aside from the crushing disappointment of a lack of Track Preset / Disabled Track / Track Archive bug fixes / enhancements, this looks like a pretty solid release to me. Loving the look of VariAudio 3 and especially Auto Align, this should be a huuuge timesaver for me as I appear to be addicted to huge track counts when it comes to backing vocals in particular. Editing to picture improvements should be widely welcomed, as will Latency Monitor (would have saved my bacon last month as it took ages to track an issue down without it). One mini-punch-the-air for me - Cubase Elements now has side chaining. YAY.

EDIT - oh, the side chaining on Cubase Elements confirmed as a typo on the feature list, and self-confessed Fake News. Sheesh. They giveth, they instantly taketh away.

[Tanuj Tiku]

Having seen some of the videos, I think it is a worthy update. I look forward to getting it.

I have stayed well clear of disabled tracks over all. Only once did I have to use this feature because the session was massive. I have always seen on forums that this does not always work well.

One thing I would like to see from Cubase is some kind of a self-diagnostic tool. I have to kill Cubase every time I exit a session. As most people know this is an age old problem with Cubase. I have seen it come and go in various versions, starting with 4.

Having said that, I am pretty sure it is some kind of problem with one of the plugins where it is unable to dump RAM properly etc. Ultimately, Cubase gets stuck. If Cubase could generate a crash report, it should also be able to simply tell what is causing a problem. Support for software is over all poor. We keep second guessing and one needs to spend hours or weeks testing and finding out the culprit.

If we could just get some kind of analytics about what might be causing a problem, it will make our lives much better and consequently it will be much better for their support team.

It seems that some developers do not 'agree' with each other and there have been previously cold wars between VSL/EW/Steinberg etc. for example. If the platform as a whole got a little smarter, it would help.

I also really want to see an auto-render function - Just dump relevant files in Folders and execute a command that says render everything as per each folder.

Meanwhile, I sip on my coffee or go out for a meal.

MEAP has shows ways of doing things and I think Steinberg should be able to implement this. Complicated routings, STEMMING or dumping on Pro Tools rigs (expensive and uneccessary in this day an age apart from industry delivery standards) is not something that works for all.

[Jaap]

Whats the issue with disabled tracks then? Using enable/disable instruments tracks extensively here and not faced a problem. I have on my big template everything with disabled tracks and enabling them on the fly when I need them.

And Tanuj, I saw one person on VI reporting that closing down Cubase sessions is now working normally for him and not needed to do it via the Taskmanager anymore. I have this problem in odd intervals, it can go alright for weeks and then all of the sudden I have to kill it via the Taskmanager for a few times. I did not happen for me though since the last maintenance update and so far version 10 is behaving nicely as well.

Happy with the AAF import/export, the adjust audio/midi to video looks good as well (not tested it yet). I love the new GUI updates and am very very happy with snapshots for the mixer page and the easier to configure channelstrip.
The MPE function works very nicely and much easier to fiddle with now.
For me personally they could have left out all the loops and stuff, but I guess some will like it (disliking the quality tbh). All in all things are on some fronts easier now though I would love to see those things you mentioned Tanuj regarding the exporting. I have not tried MEAP yet, but I wonder if it will be in trouble now that the export setup is also changed.

[Mikeybabes]

It's been mentioned on a thread in 'the other place' that Cubase is no longer having to be forced to close with large templates....

[ZeeCount]

I've found the whole "having to force close cubase on exit" thing to be completely random for me. Some days a project will exit cleanly, the next day I have to kill it via task manager.

[Killiard]

Whats the issue with disabled tracks then? Using enable/disable instruments tracks extensively here and not faced a problem. I have on my big template everything with disabled tracks and enabling them on the fly when I need them.

Me too. I’ve been on a fully enable/disable track template for a year or two (maybe three?) now and it’s been brilliant. The only problems I had in the first year or so, was it forgetting the midi input for some instruments, and output bus paths. I had to rebuild my entire template last year in V9 to solve that one.

[Guy Rowland]

Whats the issue with disabled tracks then? Using enable/disable instruments tracks extensively here and not faced a problem. I have on my big template everything with disabled tracks and enabling them on the fly when I need them.

The issue comes with multi-out disabled tracks (monotimbral is fine). The audio tracks tend to get duplicated, scrambled, phantom tracks etc. Very similar to the issues with Track Archives, and indeed as I found last week even basic Track Import can stuff things up. The whole issue of recalling multiple tracks from other places or states feels terribly flaky.

The logged issue is here - https://www.steinberg.net/forums/viewto ... 3&t=123873

I must be lucky with the force-close on exit, that's not happened to me for a long time (unless it was a 9.5 thing, I skipped that version).

[Jaap]

Ah ok, that is indeed an annoying problem. I hardly use tracks that way so have not run into that, but a shame they have not adressed it yet as it seems it is confirmed by many others.

[KyleJudkins]

well, im still incredibly happy with reaper - but out of all that, the thing that actually seemed cool was the mix snapshots.

I wonder if anyone has made that for reaper *thinking*

[Guy Rowland]

well, im still incredibly happy with reaper - but out of all that, the thing that actually seemed cool was the mix snapshots.

I wonder if anyone has made that for reaper *thinking*

Actually the mixer snapshots are a bust. Reason - they do not work with automation. So essentially useless. Irritates me that so much developer time and resources goes into features that can't really be used.

There are real plusses though, the VariAudio 3 and Auto Align for me are well worth the price of admission.

[KyleJudkins]

yeah it seemed useful for sure, if you actually record stuff on the regular.

[Guy Rowland]

Well my weekend plans for Cubase testing have been rather thrown a spanner. I can't make a single project created in Cubase 9.0 load. They crash before the project screen, and do not even create crash dump files to send to support. In fact, my slim bare-bones basic template I use for everything does not load either.

So, for now, that's a pretty rapid Game Over for Cubase 10 until they fix that.

It has been confirmed that the Track Archives / Disabled Multichannel Track bugs have not been fixed, btw. A glimmber of light from Steinberg's Matthias in the relevant Issues thread:

Gentlemen,
this is Steinberg speaking. No excuses: this needed to be fixed a long time ago. I'll talk to the team how this could be solved.

Best
Matthias

[Jaap]

Damn Guy, thats a pitty man that this is happening...

Thats a good response thought from Steinberg and I hope they get it solved soon then.

Here it works stable in the way I use it. At the moment working on a trailer track for a publisher, quite a lot going on with 420 active tracks, but it just works normally like it always does. CPU seems normal, as it was with 9.5, no big improvement, but for sure no fallback. As I work with a lot of sidechaining on this track, I very much welcome the new setup. Easier now and works fine.
Bummer is that the mix snapshots don't recall automation. For general settings I like it, easy to set up a few different ideas regarding the mix and fx and easily swapped between them.

[Guy Rowland]

I've sent a support request re the crashing existing projects, I doubt I'll touch Cubase 10 again til that is fixed as I really can't do a single thing. It really is falling at the first hurdle.

The other bugs, yes Matthias said absolutely the right thing. But having just released 10, just my own experience shows how snowed under they will be. I suspect it will months until a) I can open anything at all and then b) working with modular templates is possible.

I'm 90% sure I'll be skipping mix snapshots because of the automation thing, I just can't see any point in it. The big attraction for me is variaudio and time aligning.

[Guy Rowland]

Good news - thought I'd try some fault finding, and tracked it down to v 1.0.0 of the good ol' Clariphonic. Updated it to 1.1.1 and projects now loading.

Right, to the rest of it....

[IFM]

Make sure you set the color preferences as there is a published bug/workaround. At some point I’ll update as I like to keep all my DAWs current.

[Guy Rowland]

Make sure you set the color preferences as there is a published bug/workaround. At some point I’ll update as I like to keep all my DAWs current.

Yes, had already tried that and the auto-colour is set to off as it should be.

Well, spent a while trying bits and pieces. VariAudio improvements are very nice indeed, as is auto-align - it prompts to bounce audio if there are any effects or vari-audio already applied first on the guide track, but that seems painless.

It does feel pretty v0. Little but important things, such as the metronome is missing from the Transport Bar. I don't really like the new look much, but maybe just an adjustment period. The VST images and drag and drop from the media tab... the jury is still out for me. I was set to write off the pictures - they take up a lot of space and are really just a gimmick, but I do sometimes get my numbers and models jumbled up, its quite nice to have a visual confirmation. That said, with a conventional new track window you can set up your routing, so its more practical. Quite cute how you can drop an effect to a send and it sets up both the send and the effect chain in one hit though, I could get used to that.... keep more out of the core template and drag and drop as I need. Still annoyances such as its very poor with dealing with long plugin names.

Performance does seem to cope a little better with everything blasting at full tilt - the meter still is pretty much maxed out but the audio continues unblemished. In my case this could be to do with it now being able to use all 8 cores, I was limited to 7 before on the previous version, so that's a theoretical 12% performance boost I'll gladly devour.

As much discussed, the Track Archive / Disabled Multichannel bug is very much alive and vicious.

I thiiink I'll carry on using it for the time being and see how it performs in the real world. I've got quite a bit of vocal work coming up, which is an area where C10 particularly shines. Can well understand people wanting to wait for at least the first maintenance release though.

[FriFlo]

I think the upgrade looks good and has many things to offer, that may be of great value to a lot of people. Sadly, the things that I would consider really useful, come short (or rather not at all)!
First, the problems with disabled tracks should be fixed now since a long time. I am actually mad at them, because in my mind it is absolutely not ok to advertise features and keep them half working for several iterations. A feature should work in its entirety at least within the timeframe of that version as a non-paid upgrade. I guess, most people will have given up on that, although it is certainly unnecessary to defend that demand.
Less known may be the issue of disabled midi tracks also not being recalled correctly. They do not recall their midi send settings. If you ask yourself why someone would want to disable midi tracks, it is with large track counts within a template: when you have hundreds or thousands of midi tracks prepared and labeled correctly (for use with VEpro - only loading those, you need), you get problems with real-time performance, at least with CC data in the beginning of each track to recall the instruments parameters via midi. The same problem exists with track presets. Therefor, if you want to have all possible libraries prepared to load them into your template, you have to either disable the unused midi tracks or load from track presets - even with midi tracks. They have recently promised to repair that with 10.5.3, but still haven’t!
Expression maps are also in great need of a makeover. So is the generic remote, which carries countless broken features and problems and has not been touch for more than 5 years.
Finally, Cubase needs a modern approach to remote control, something like OSC or at least a thorough generic remote update. It is so frustrating to try to program Lemur or other modern controllers for Cubase! Look at the patchboard app for example: the developer had to reverse engineer the EUCON protocol in oder to get feedback from Cubase, what tracks are enabled at the moment (including names). Logic DP and others do that out of the box. The advantage of that feature for a template should be obvious, if you watch the Patchboard App videos ... and it would be very easy to implement vs. complex algorithms like Vari Audio 3. No rocket science.
For me, it gets harder and harder to keep committed to Cubase and update once more. I would be willing to pay the annual fee, which is making Cubase way more expensive than competitors. But I have problems as they seem to always forget about composers and I don't see a reason any to keep up with their demands, if they keep broken features unfixed and don't do much for Midi-focused people.
These midi improvements do not demand as much programming work as all the major things they do. They could serve these on top of their "sales" features.

[Guy Rowland]

Spent more time this afternoon, focusing on Groove Agent 5 SE. It's massively improved from 4, most of the features are borderline logical now. There are still curiosities - I spent 20 minutes looking in vain for a "save kit" option before I eventually realised it doesn't have one, and you need to use the generic VST preset system instead. Also - and this really is cheap - one feature in the video that looked pure magic in their video is Export Mixer and FX to Cubase, seen here:



...turns out that of the hundreds of kits in GA5 SE this is literally the only one where this feature is available. Nice, eh?

I don't think it will replace Battery - the overall quality and range of sounds is not as good to my ears - and certainly not Superior Drummer for me, but its a good alternate source of beats, and I got something nice going that led me off down an actual track. Nice that you can import the drum map from the plugin.

[heisenberg]

Sorry to hear there are a lot of bugs in the new full release version of Cubase 10. Guy, I have been following your brief journey so far on ViC and now here. To me as a Nuendo user and having been through a few full releases of Steinberg DAWs this release is in fact a VERY ambitious, despite the comments to the contrary and unfortunately in the process have introduced some significant bugs.

I have been watching some of the Cubase 10 tutorials and walkthroughs in the past hour or so and the one below from the vantage point of a Nuendo user shows how much feature and workflow value that Cubase has acquired in this release. It is stunning how much is included here that is new. They have to stomp out the bugs but really I am not feeling the heartache that so many have been bemoaning the past few days. After a couple of rounds of bugfixes this will be a big release.

[kony]

Sorry to hear there are a lot of bugs in the new full release version of Cubase 10. Guy, I have been following your brief journey so far on ViC and now here. To me as a Nuendo user and having been through a few full releases of Steinberg DAWs this release is in fact a VERY ambitious, despite the comments to the contrary and unfortunately in the process have introduced some significant bugs.

I have been watching some of the Cubase 10 tutorials and walkthroughs in the past hour or so and the one below from the vantage point of a Nuendo user shows how much feature and workflow value that Cubase has acquired in this release. It is stunning how much is included here that is new. They have to stomp out the bugs but really I am not feeling the heartache that so many have been bemoaning the past few days. After a couple of rounds of bugfixes this will be a big release.

That sounds promising and thanks for your insight - much appreciated! I may hold off for a while until the bugs are fixed. I may even wait until Guy says he is thoroughly happy with it ... oh wait!

[heisenberg]

Well a lot of things Guy wanted and others was not properly addressed in this release. Fortunately, some of the obvious ommissions have been admitted to by Steinberg personel and should be addressed. At least, with this release some stalwart individuals have jumped on it, like Guy, and have pointed out the obvious errors and ommissions, so many won't jump into this release right away.

Something, I observed over the past year is that the Nuendo division of Steinberg has gone through a bit of conversion therapy. They are listening and responding like never before. We received a MASSIVE update including immersive audio tools like a rather robust Dolby Atmos toolset along with a good array of immersive audio tools that were well formed for an initial release and it was a dot release that was free of charge. Cubase in this release was a beneficiary of this work on Nuendo in the version 10 release as shown in the above video I posted above. Those tools cost thousands of dollars a few months ago in other apps and for the most part they are not as good as Steinberg's implementation.

[kony]

I think 9 was a big update too though (I'm on the first iteration of 9.5) - I think the bulk of their work went into the dedicated video engine which works well for me at least.

So happy to hear all these positives though, and I'll most likely update with 11 assuming they introduce CC Bezier curves by then

[Guy Rowland]

I agree Heisenberg that its a pretty substantial release feature-wise. As always, the devil is in the details, and there's still a lot of details to iron out.... Hopefully 10.0.20 will be killer.

I was hoping in C10 that we'd get the ability to convert mono tracks to stereo, but it doesn't look like this is possible despite the video Kony linked teasing us that we might. You can convert 2 mono tracks to stereo, but not a straight single one, which for me is by far the most common scenario. I guess the fastest workaround is to duplicate your mono track, and then convert both to stereo (just tried this, and despite an apparently erroneous warning telling me that the tracks had automation data that was different, it seemed to work well). Seeing multiple tracks with reduced opacity when editing is slick, and happy to see this works in the standalone window as well as the Lower Zone demonstrated there which I never use.

Having skipped 9.5 I'm totally new to Direct Offline Processing, and it seems they've fixed the most obvious problems with it. It looks like a very powerful tool. You can't appear to save a chain from the process window which is a shame, but you can set it up in the mixer, save as an FX chain there, and that's accessible from the DOP window. A perfect solution for noise reduction like De-Plosive, and also very CPU-hungry effects like Adaptiverb which is all but impossible to use in real time for me. I guess the best workflow there is to duplicate the track, and then DOP the effect on the new track set 100% wet, so it becomes like a send. Unlike with a clumsy render, you can tweak to your hearts content.

The only thing I've found there is that reverb tails are an issue. If you go beyond the bounds of the original recording, it doesn't seem to work. I tried duplicating and muting a file that I appended and then glued, but the tail still chopped off at the end of the original file - I had to render in place, creating another new track, to do that cleanly. Pro Tools has an option to deal with this problem in Audio Suite, and while Cubase's DOP has an Extend Process Range control, this doesn't seem to work past the end of a recording. Overall, still a very useful feature, but still some refinement needed to make it truly usable in all scenarios.

[Guy Rowland]

For anyone with a vested interest in the soap opera that is CAN 13042 - the bug with disabled multichannel tracks and track archives - I've produced a little test zip for C10 users to hopefully pass along to Steinberg to help them track it down. Details here on the relevant Steinberg Issues thread - https://www.steinberg.net/forums/viewto ... 61#p794661