Hi all, so I periodically have to edit classical music in Nuendo, as it was the legacy DAW when I got to my job, and projects still get recorded in it that I have to then edit.

I will lead by saying that I find this program enendingly aggravating for this use case, just so different than any other DAW I’ve used, and I am posting here to ask of anyone has advice or tips that I may have overlooked or be missing.

My biggest issues are in terms of “object” management, how they group, how fades are applied and batch edited, and how cut and pasted tracks sit on top of each other (and the resultant behavior).

For instance, it’s not at all uncommon that in my attempt to fine tune one fade I find that I’ve inadvertently grabbed and adjusted an adjacent (or sometimes and entire tracks worth of) crossfades. Or while attempting to move an edit point, a similar behavior. I also find it incredibly annoying that objects sit on top of other objects without breaking them, meaning I have to like slice a piece out to put in a new edit, instead of just pasting over the top of another object and then having the adjacent broken object be able to move independently of its other half. And this is all ignoring the frustrating factor that in order to group edit objects I have to use a folder instead of there being an object grouping mode, because there’s no way to apply the ever important crossfades on the folder tracks.

I feel like I must be missing something here. Is there a behavior or tool or global setting I have wrong? Is there a tutorial about how to approach this very common type of editing in Nuendo (or cubase?) How can this software be so backwards? It’s been 5 years of sadness, I’ve even learned Pyramix and Wavelab in less time, and yet Nuendo continues to be a thorn in my side.

Anyways, any advice would be so appreciated. I just dread every assignment I get upon finding out that it was tracked in Nuendo and that I’ll need to edit in it, and doubly so if clients will be present.

Yours,
Kevin

cannot relate but then, i've been using nuendo since version 1.6.1 iirc - anyway, there's the cubase/nuendo forum...

...but if you dislike the program so much, why not import the tracks into the program of your choice, with which you have experience and can work more productively?

Youve been using Nuendo that long but dont have any advice for the specific problems ive asked about? Your only recommendations are to go to another audio forum or to not use the program?

I have 2 main reasons for not importing to another DAW. 1) i work in a collaborative workplace with other engineers and this is a software we all use, so staying in it is often important if i need to edit someone else’s recording or vice versa, and 2) id just like to achieve as much fluency as possible, and figure out how to make it work optimally.

Hence my questions here….

sorry but i'm neither into repeating what's in the tutorials nor can i know/relate to features and workflow you have come to like when working with other workstations: i've long ditched fairlight, sadie, sequoia, pyramix, cool edit, illogic, profools etc. ('cause i hated them so much - for various reasons though) so i don't have much of a clue how they 'feel' these days and even less how a specific task could get emulated in another environment.

anyway, for everything i might suggest, you'll find a better answer in the nuendo forum (also here on gs) - good luck!

Ive looked on both forums, but the specific usecase and program specific terminology make it difficult to find exactly what im looking for. Thats why im asking here, in a forum of specifically engineers who do this kind of work and might be able to expound on a better workflow, or offer some tips or breadcrumbs about what specifically one might look into to make using Nuendo easier for classical editing.

If anyone else has any helpful advice im all ears! Thank you!

You don't have to use a folder. You can select as many object as you want in various ways and edit them at once. No need for a folder.
Holding the left mouse button, or click with ctrl or ctrl+A works all as expected.

I learned on Cubase/Nuendo more than 20 years ago (with a very short time with Cakewalk preceding it), so I can't really compare it to other DAWs, but I never felt, that it Nuendo is slowing down my editing.

There are a lot of great tutorial videos on youtube. Sometimes they explain this stuff more clearly than the Steinberg manuals.

Ive used cubase for years. My classical recordings are generally single take of live performance for archival purposes.

I prefer editing audio in wavelab over the built in editor in cubase. Cubase lets you pick wavelab as the editor it opens when clicking on audio files to edit. This is a no brainer.

I do almost all editing in wavelab

I originally bought cubase for my own studio work, which was initially midi based.



Tom

Kevin,

You should just use Sequoia and move forward. There is no reason to use anything else for classical music production. The people you work with all should get Sequoia so everybody can be "compatible" with each other.


Da-Hong

I never worked with Sequoia. Could you explain why you think, Sequoia is better suited for classical recording/editing?

Classical music production is all about cut and paste like we did with tape. Sequoia has this 4-point-cut feature that mimics the tape cutting process extremely well and it is very fast because it is all in virtual environment.

we've had those discussions before...

...and i find them to be largely useless - imo the 'best' editor is the one you are most familiar with and hence up to speed, the one that let's you do midi and music to picture or the one that is 'common ground', with which the majority of your clients are working with, can easily get installed on both platforms, runs stable, is small enough to run on wimpy laptops or is large but comes with sample libraries etc.

of course they all have their benefits and quirks - pic your poison!

I am not going to change my workflow for the worse, so I am not going to change my DAW. I am just interested in the differences in workflow, so I can wonder if I did a horrible mistake 25 years ago.

lol - i guess you didn't (make a horrible mistake 25 years ago) or else you wouldn't have gotten this far - or at least i hope you would have looked for alternatives?!



[as long as i had been running studios, i had run different programs to suit different preferences of guest engineers - these days, i'm still occasionally forced to use the different broadcaster's favourite programs but i mostly get to use what i want - or then i have an assistant to deal with it!

for me, the standardization was a great relief and i am happy to no longer have to spend so much time dealing with devices and programs that i don't like, although i admit that habit was a powerful influencing factor when deciding on a system... (not only in terms of the daw but also the desk)]

DDY, if you dont have any constructive advice for how to compile a multitrack edit in Nuendo, would you kindly refrain from posting here? In the past you were frustrated with others for doing the same to your threads, id ask the same courtesy here.

I know that i dont HAVE to use folders but it is significantly faster than repeatedly having to click and drag to select a block of tracks on which to perform an edit or a fade, which is not only tedious and time consuming, but also prone to error. This is why most daws (Protools, Logic, Seq/Samp, Pyramix, etc) feature a grouping or linking function (and why Nuendo has folders, though they are significantly less flexible in this task, especially as they dont offer a bulk fade application/edit and they seem to act [if im wrong about this please tell me, its one of my major sticking points and things id like to figure out] as layers on top of each other, rather than as pieces of audio in a line, like a tape edit as Da Hong said.

My major preference is for Sequoia, but being a millennial who entered the workplace in the last 15 years i dont really have the privilege of being able to only use my DAW of preference. Most of my McGill friends and their teachers and mentors use Pyramix, so i had to learn that to work with them. Most studios use protools or logic and many are setup in such a way that bringing my own rig is overly time consuming (and money consuming) to my not-label-money clients, so i had to learn to use whats installed there.

And at work, Nuendo has been used here for more than a decade and is installed on every daw. We do have Pyramix on a few machines but its harder for our many part timers to learn than Nuendo, and at this point its just not realistic to expect that we switch to an entirely new daw on every computer, considering that Nuendo does a fine job of making a multitrack backup of live-mixed events (99 percent of our work) that rarely get edited or remixed. But for the times that they do, im just trying to increase my fluency and learn a few pointers so that i dont have to turn into a frustrated wreck or waste time importing tracks and markers into another daw just to drop in a few wrong notes.

For those that dont use anything but Cubase for this kind of work…. Download a demo of Sequoia or even Samplitude and play around for an hour or two with a multitrack. Unless im just very bCkwards and remedial in my understanding of how to perform such edits in Nuendo, i dont see how switching couldnt improve your editing speed five to tenfold.

no worries - but not before i repeat (what others have also said) that i think you're in the wrong forum here...

...and what you find incomprehensible or cumbersone is exactly what other people want: it's a question of habit and preference.

Since I am very satisfied with my workflow, I won't spend an hour or two doing so.

With Cubase/Nuendo, there is always the possibility, to customise shortcuts for almost everything, that can be done with a few clicks. And for all the rest, you can program macros.

These tools might come in handy:
Select everything until playback positon
Select everything from playback position to end
Just program your shortcuts to this.

You don't have to put events on top of another, you can always shorten or cut and delete them.

I am very used to this program, so I don't see the problem. I always found a way, to get things done and also to get things done faster, if I wanted to. But I see your point. I really don't like being forced to use tools I didn't choose. For a specific project, I was forced to use Ableton and I hated it. I just couldn't wrap my head around the workflow of this program and also wasn't eager doing so. In the end I didn't get better, so I hated this part of the job as I did on day one. I wasted more hours, worrying about Ableton and why it wasn't the right tool for the job, than it would have taken me, just to learn the few things I needed to learn and enjoy the work.

But the subject is primarily about classical recording/editing. In other words Editing as most DAWS can record well (trivial).

Editing (not trivial) is only done well with a few DAW's and the list is dwindling fast. Really only Sequoia and Pyramix are still left.

Not used Nuendo for a while but wouldn't the EDL & OMF type stuff not be useful for a kind of source destination classical editing?

We used to edit them in .txt

Maybe but I wouldn't want to edit the music by editing text EDL files.

Having proper SD lanes and being able to edit a 32 channel recording with one crossfade tool is a great thing. Pyramix, the one I know, is fantastic at this task. I am sure Sequoia is too.

Classical editing is a little different to the Jacob Collier Logic sessions on YT.

Greetings Kevin,

I feel your pain. There are many hours spent doing one thing in one particular DAW that take a fraction of the time more elegantly in another.

I’ve worked with people who use Nuendo rapidly and effectively, so it may be possible to achieve what you need. But how to find them?

The best users I’ve worked with are in the LA scene, indies working with film and soundscape and soundstage. I’m wondering if looking over there might yield some fruit?

Good luck!

Haigbabe

PS SADiE not dead yet. It’s a very, very fine editor. Sure, it may be Hector in Breaking Bad but he still packs a punch 😎 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwBOCLWnzZc

Hi Haig, indeed, but which of the big three still have active dev teams. Pyramix, Sequoia and Sadie. With the updates to Pyramix slowing to a crawl I suspect the dev team is being used elsewhere. Same with Sadie.

Four point editing might soon be a thing of the past, replaced by some AI?

Don't stick with an editor not made for classical music.

Nuendo is unsuitable. Dump it.

Acquire SEQUIOA V.17 today. Rent it for $450 a year, buy it for $1500.

Here I also use SADiE V. 6.
However, sadly, Audio Squadron / Traktion is not longer developing SADiE so I switched to SEQUOIA in 2018.

SEQUOIA is KING.

LOL cant wait to see how AI gets on with some of the more "precious" members of the Classical community.

Sadly though, that will happen and probably quite quickly.

Just remember the AI can't yet climb the ladder and wire up the Decca tree (that will come soon too, so don't worry.)

also if you have a business, that is something you can claim back as an expense too, unlike being just a hobbyist, I'd really like to try sequioa, is it possible to demo it before trying?

At the risk of irritating Kevin further (since this is yet another non-Nuendo-centric reply)...I'll simply add a solitary hand-wave for an additional dedicated (and open-source) 3 and 4 point Source/Destination classical music editor, via its user manual:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ch...cal-Manual.pdf ...which may interest some fence-sitters ?

Yes, you can get a 14 day non-crippled demo of SEQUOIA.
It took me 2 years to learn SEQUOIA but it was well worth the effort.

Thank you to those who’ve given tips on Nuendo editing! These are quite helpful, and have also given some insight into the necessary vocabulary and workflow ideology of Nuendo to be able to search further. It is much much appreciated, and anyone else with advice please dont hesitate to share your thoughts!

Again, this is intended as a thread asking for tips on using Nuendo, not on alternatives for it. I know and own Sequoia, I know and own Pyramix, but sometimes I have to work in Nuendo and am just looking for pointers about how to be as quick and efficient in it as possible. Please resist the urge to post if you dont have any constructive advice about Nuendo workflows.

I apologize for adding non Nuendo posts. But I cannot see how one would or could edit multichannel classical without source destination software.

As you were.

Is this helpful?:
4-point editing/Source-Destination Editing - Nuendo - Steinberg Forums

https://forums.steinberg.net/t/4-poi...ng/640642/1000
https://forums.steinberg.net/t/4-poi...editing/640642

i simply do not believe in any gear being particularly suitable for a specific genre: all my gear is agnostic of genre and application...

i'm involved in cross-genre projects which are far from being trivial (not only in terms of editing) as they include midi, samples, tricky time templates/dynamic click, sync to picture, collaboration with remote contributors, stereo, surround and immersive formats etc. (besides pt which i try to avoid as much as i can) nuendo has been the only platform that does it all*- is there something else? maybe but why bother if i can reach my goals more or less efficiently using a familiar platform?



* not really: i wish nuendo and wavelab would get merged into a über-editor - pretty sure though this is not gonna happen but maybe source/destinstion will become a thing in another 10 years?! meanwhile, i just keep working... ;-)



[p.s. i still have sequoia and pyramix installed on dedicated machines but i just don't like using them much - got nothing to do with genre or alleged suitability, it's either a lack of features or then simply a matter of experience, habit and preference!]