The Sound Board

scherzo wrote: ↑Nov 03, 2023 2:20 pm I'm intrigued. What does 'more or less' correctly mean?

Still not a 100% reliable then, I take it?

The quirk I've found is that it always seems to add an extra channel 1. On investigation it sorta splits them midi and audio, like it doesn't do with regular single output VSTs. It doesn't double the audio or anything, and thus far that's been it save some minor colour things when disabled. So it is a bit odd but as long as nothing else weird happens, I can live with it.

I'm about to try it on the mac now...

EDIT - behaves identically on the Mac. Nothing weird. I even renamed the additional outputs and it has stuck. The revolution has arrived (possibly).

Guy - correct me if I'm wrong, but you can see multiple tracks worth of clips, but you can't select which clip within the group of clips you want to edit in 12.5, can you? That's been my experience at least. So - I too use a 2nd monitor for key editor, but going back and forth between the main window and the key editor to select clips has been annoying.

13 seems to be able to, in the left (not the far left channel window, afaik) window, select which track you want to edit specifically within the group of clips you have selected, to make other tracks visible within the same selection, and generally to select, edit, and view what you want within the key editor without having to go from screen to screen to do it. As far as I can tell, you should be able to actually do it all within the key editor on that second screen by opening a mini-range window so that you can see in the upper window of the key editor where things are on the timeline, so that you might be able to do even less switching there as well.

Especially in Orchestral writing, I find my biggest annoyance in 12.5 is the clicking, dragging, selecting, switching, etc. that needs to be done to make basic changes like adding a crescendo in each of the strings. If 13 simplifies even some of those tasks with the more powerful key editor, I'm definitely interested.

I think that's all a fair hope, bbunker. I've never found it too much of a chore to select-deselect on one monitor and edit on the other, but I can see how it might help. I always find the devil is in the details, how well the track visibility agent copes with a 1,800 track template etc.

I'm aware I'm pretty low tech when it comes to it, I bet Cubase already had a ton of features that would make my life easier if I knew about them or persevered with them. But often when I go to explore those I know about I find some issue or other that stops that feature being quite as great as I hoped and I've forgotten it all by tea time.

Good example of that today - auto-increment of new midi tracks has temporarily gone away in C13, but it's back in the next maintenance update. As a workround, the Steinberg guy said you can double click in the empty area under your midi track and it creates a new auto-incremented track. "How very cool" I thought when I discovered this worked, "Why didn't I know about it?" Well, of course in practice I don't have a blank area when adding new tracks. And the naming is crude, not like using the new midi track dialog. So what seemed slick and cool is actually slightly worse than the way I currently do it.

Anyway, I think the new key editor will be really helpful for a ton of people - not yet sure if I'll be one of them, but here's hoping.

I've gotten distracted from doing anything like actual music-making as I've been running away with the thought that multi-out disabled tracks are now reliable (no laughing at the back).

I've remade the main non-orchestral template, which had 2 Omni and 2 Kontakt instances in it as rack instruments. Switched these to disabled track instruments. Also disabling lots more channels and effects - near-instant to enable - and have added lots of other disabled synths that I under-use, hoping it may encourage me to speculatively try them rather than just go for the familiar. As a result, it has all reduced the launch time of my template from circa 45s to 8s which excites me no end. If all goes well over the coming days I'll make these changes to the orchestral template too, which takes well over a minute to load in Cubase (lightning fast in VE Pro though).

These are the things that make a big big workflow difference to me - nothing more than a bug fix that means I can use existing features properly. Who cares about the new stuff?

Guy-wouldn’t this make disabled tracks in Cubase usable without VEP?

Also, have you tried the Vocoder?

Lawrence wrote: ↑Nov 05, 2023 10:45 am Guy-wouldn’t this make disabled tracks in Cubase usable without VEP?

Also, have you tried the Vocoder?

It would, but there are other problems I found with using too many within Cubase - the file sizes become very big for one, and autosaves / backups / versions mean it can all get quite unwieldy. But if (big if) the disabled tracks stay reliable, it is much more viable than it was though, no doubt. Because my setup works so well with VE Pro I won't change, but for people coming to it fresh it's an option.

Keep forgetting to try the Vocoder, did mean to. Tomorrow tomorrow...

Raises the question that you probably can't answer - as you don't use this method - but it begs asking anyway, just in case:

One way around the bloated file sizes has been to use a master disabled track source, then make a new track from a template that just includes the expression maps (so that those will populate correctly when you import) and then to import the tracks you'll be using from the master source. That way there's just one 'mega-size' file to deal with, and they import in less than a second if they're all disabled on the source project.

The issue has been that routing doesn't carry over in the imported tracks particularly well. Audio tracks recorded on the same device will import with 'no bus' as an input, and imported instrument tracks won't be attached to the busses that they're assigned to. Most of the time, anyway - I haven't figured out any magic configurations that would bring over everything successfully. Have they cleaned that side up in 13?

I'll say this, Larry - I haven't used VEP for about 2 years after starting to use disabled tracks. It's not perfect - there are some libraries, like Action Strikes, that add to the Cubase file size by orders of magnitude more than anything else, so I find just leaving those out, or putting them in another template to import from as an option. You could of course just use visibility settings to remove things you don't need from a mega-template, but importing them from the template (once the file is loaded) takes less than a second, so having separation of purposes works pretty well.

bbunker - yes, that sounds like a world of pain to me for the reasons you raised - routing isn't reliably carried over, VI plugins aren't either. Also I'd imagine navigating that vast template to import the track would be much slower in practice than navigating within the project.

Pro Tools' track presets are absolutely magnificent, so wish Cubase had something this good. You can load anything from just the inserts of one track to an entire project effortlessly, and everything always works. I did try an experiment yesterday on C13 on the Mac, saving a track preset multi, but no matter what I did I couldn't even find it again when trying to import it into another project. I could see it on disk where it should be, but seemingly Cubase couldn't.

Stuff like that makes me so weary. So many Cubase features don't work properly. I remember getting very excited when they released auto-align, but after a few weeks of attempts where something would always go wrong, I never bother even trying it now. Same with Direct Offline Processing. Their codebase always brings to mind a mental image of a chaotic poor town with no planning laws where buildings have 15 extensions all on top of each other and their neighbours, everything ready to collapse or burst into flames at any moment.

People always say "fix the bugs" when asked what they want in a new version. It's never more true than in Cubase. If it did everything it claimed rock solid, with performance to match, it would beat every other DAW hands down. But I suppose it does mean I get these bursts of joy when something major is finally fixed, and it essentially unlocks a whole part of the app that I didn't use.

bbunker wrote: ↑Nov 06, 2023 12:03 am

I'll say this, Larry - I haven't used VEP for about 2 years after starting to use disabled tracks. It's not perfect - there are some libraries, like Action Strikes, that add to the Cubase file size by orders of magnitude more than anything else, so I find just leaving those out, or putting them in another template to import from as an option. You could of course just use visibility settings to remove things you don't need from a mega-template, but importing them from the template (once the file is loaded) takes less than a second, so having separation of purposes works pretty well.

Interesting, bb.

When I got VEP 6 and Cubase 10.5, having read from Guy that disabling Cubase tracks often led to Cubase forgetting proper routing, I formed a master template in VEP. I also left a few things in Cubase.

Because I’d just gotten an iMac with 128 GB of RAM, I just decided to be wasteful and use it all with no disabled tracks. However, I’ve now gone past 128 and get some Cubase/VEP crashes here and there. Perfection is that thing that’s always just over the next hill, eh?

Actually, Guy, navigating a track importing list is super-easy, barely an inconvenience. There's a file-structure list organized in folders on the left side, so at the start of a project I open the 'Winds' folder, click on the folder for each winds library I want for the project, click it closed again, click open the 'Brass' folder, and so-on. Usually takes seconds, and then the actual import takes less than a second and you're off.

From what I understand, if a routed track is imported AFTER the routing destination is already in the receiving file's architecture, then it will assign itself correctly. So - in theory, you could import (or have prebaked in a template) the routing destinations, and then the imported tracks should even route themselves properly, in the same way that if the expression maps are already loaded into your receiving file, then the expression maps will assign themselves properly. I haven't really tested this, because it's just a step or two beyond the level of annoyance for me to do so - but the expression mapping definitely works this way.

Makes me think that maybe the VEP-disabling issue is that if the routing destination and the track are undisabling at the same time, then the destination won't be found because it needs to 'pre-exist' the track that's being undisabled in order for it to find its routing. A solution might be to undisable the destination group, then undisable the track(s).

I do wonder, Guy - I don't have any issues with VI's not remembering their state when undisabling within the plugin. For example, I have a script on the CSS, CSW etc tracks to adjust for timing, and it populates without exception within Kontakt. Vienna Synchron Player works reliably as well. Did you mean other synths, or Vienna's "VI" Vienna Instrument plugin has issues?

Ah yes, I just checked - if the group is in place that seems to work. Previously this hasn't worked for me, so glad it got addressed at some point. And the layout of the tracks is nicely done with colours too. By default they were all expanded for me, which would slow me down with 1,800 tracks, not as fast as seeing collapsed tracks with the full screen real estate. But it is very clear to read, and I can see you'd navigate round it pretty quick.

It was easy to import the tracks I'd tried saving as a track preset that yesterday I couldn't recall at all. All round it feels like Import from Project has had a lot of necessary love in C13 - last time I tried with C12 a lot didn't work and that's where I was getting VI issues not coming across right - whereas Track Presets are still languishing, which is helpful to know. If you focus on this method in general I guess you'd put Import From Project on a simple hotkey, and as you say if you have the skeleton in place with your groups and effects, it's a viable way to go now. Good good!

Lawrence wrote: ↑Nov 05, 2023 10:45 am Also, have you tried the Vocoder?

Finally remembered to try it today. Pretty good actually, intelligibility is decent, the presets provide quick and solid starting points and it's easy to tweak.

bbunker wrote: ↑Nov 06, 2023 9:12 am Actually, Guy, navigating a track importing list is super-easy, barely an inconvenience. There's a file-structure list organized in folders on the left side, so at the start of a project I open the 'Winds' folder, click on the folder for each winds library I want for the project, click it closed again, click open the 'Brass' folder, and so-on. Usually takes seconds, and then the actual import takes less than a second and you're off.

I've just done an import from my master 1,800 track template. I think it took circa 20-30s to open the project to the point where I can select, so I don't think it's viable in my experience for huge templates. But what I am doing is getting a few of the libraries that have had a lot of setting up work done into a new master project, so if I want to use LASS, HOOPUS or Sable in my non-VEP full template, that should be quick and easy to do.

Guy Rowland wrote: ↑Nov 10, 2023 11:18 am

Lawrence wrote: ↑Nov 05, 2023 10:45 am Also, have you tried the Vocoder?

Finally remembered to try it today. Pretty good actually, intelligibility is decent, the presets provide quick and solid starting points and it's easy to tweak.

Cool, thanks!

For the Nuendo users amongst us like me, Nuendo 13 also dropped today

https://www.steinberg.net/nuendo/new-features/

Mostly based around the new mpeg-h and dailogue options and of course all the goodies (or not so goodies) that came with Cubase 13. I just saw also that you can tap to tempo?? That is really nice, didn't see that before, but a thing I always wanted for a long time.
But in general I am not sure if I need the update straight away. Very happy with how things are working here in Nuendo 12

The 60 day trial is now available:
https://www.steinberg.net/cubase/trial/

13.0.20 is now available. Huge list of fixes here, including better visibility of highlighted tracks (GOOD)
https://www.steinberg.net/cubase/release-notes/13/

It is annoying that the graphics problems have not yet been fixed. The workaround seems to be helping, but I can't say if the problems are completely gone. The flashing screen came as quite a surprise after Steinberg said they had used the delay to iron out bugs.

Just a heads up for Cubase 13 users - projects are getting corrupted with the latest version if they exceed 2gb. I'm a zillion miles from this but just doing a PSA. Here's the full info from Steinberg:

https://forums.steinberg.net/t/a-critic ... ted/895880