Steinberg just acquired Spectralayers. No other major top DAW has a comprehensive spectral editor as part of their family.

Look at this product line up.

Cubase
Nuendo (integration with Wwise and very VR/ambisonic capable)
Wavelab
Spectralayers
Dorico (the best of Sibelius pre-digidesign acquirement + some, now easily the best scoring program imo)
VariAudio (near Melodyne equivalent)
Audio Alignment (needing some refining)
ARA2
Groove Agent 5
Halion
Yamaha Nuage consoles
relationship with Rupert Neve Designs
AXR4 AD/DA with DSP effect and RND Silk

That's a serious fVkn product line. WhoTF is competing with this?

Steinberg, you're on a ball

I have been using Cubase for about 5 years, kicked it of my computer because of its limitations, bad vsti handling and lots of other things. I tried Wavelab for mastering and audio editing/restoration... All these special non-standard terms, and that thing wasn't even able to address my standard cd drive! Installation, updates, e-licenser... I sold Wavelab some months ago.

I am sure I will not buy any Steinberg product anymore. For me it is underground, not top!

I think you're underground. What you just joined to disagree?


I smell bs.

wtf does bad VSTi handling even mean? Steinberg invented VSTi.

bro, CD drives aren't even sold with computers anymore

And Hans Zimmer disagrees with you so come back after you've composed 1000 movie scores

That’s really strange. I have Logic, ProTools, and Cubase and I got to tell you, Cubase fits my needs a lot more than the other 2. As far as stability and bad VST hosting, I’m baffled at that statement.
To each their own..

That was their first post... Something tells me they are a bitter competitor employee or fanboy.

I’ve used Cubase, FL Studio, and Live. My current and probably final DAW is Bitwig Studio. Friggin awesome! Doesn’t come with so much fancy contents (I use 3rd party plugins) but the unified modulation system makes up for that IMO.

Cubase's handling of VST2 is notoriously supbar, missing support for stuff like MIDI assign and FXP/FXB presets (and some of Steinberg's own VST3 plugins miss stuff like program changes)

EDIT: Also, WaveLab is a mastering tool, many mastering engineers still need (or at least want) CD drives in their computers to deal with CD masters.

Dorico is pretty good - it's like Sibelius if it was designed by normal humans.

What kind of integration with video? Maybe Nuendo handles that?
Audition has been doing Spectral editing for years. Just an FYI on that.

Personally I think their could be more hardware from Yamaha but at least they did come out with the AXR4.

Even Reaper has spectral editing, it's not the latest editing game in town that it might have been some years ago

I'm not sure what you mean by "comprehensive" but Reaper has spectral editing built right into the DAW. And it's powerful enough for the vast majority of users.

I do tend to agree that Steinberg has been doing many great things in the last few years. Really from Cubase 9 when the sampler was added, Cubase really stands out amongst the DAW crowd for me (I own many, Ableton Live, Logic and have demoed Studio One in the past too). While I hvaen't used Dorico, I'm so glad Steinberg snapped up the Sibelius team and I hope they absolutely destroy Avid for what they did there.

But in the interest of being fair, Cubase has been pretty damn unstable on macOS for me and is one of the reasons I switched back to Windows. Out of Logic, Live and Cubase, I would have to say that Cubase was by far the least stable on macOS for me. The DAW is the most "sensitive" it seems, and is very picky with plugins. I recommend that all macOS people stay on El Capitain if stability is important to you, or just switch to Windows

Another gripe is that their upgrade pricing went up significantly when Cubase 10 got released, the price literally doubled if I recall correctly.

Steinberg support is also really terrible and they don't really even support the retailers here in Australia which is why places typically are more on-board with DAWs like Ableton Live which show them the proper love.

Generally, I'm a fan of Steinberg and have been working on Cubase since SL3. I'm currently on 9.5 and will likely wait until 10.5 before my next upgrade.

Steinberg are not without their faults though, and competition is good to keep them on their toes!

alright fine.. of the TOP 3 or 4 DAWs

I agree and I criticize Steinberg hard and give them sh!t all the time on their forums.

Steinberg is surely the king of dongles

....and Wavelab 7 was memorable, for all the wrong reasons

Many people have been active and dedicated on the steinberg forums to pushing them into the right direction for Cubase... and they are listening... I really think 10.5 is going to be toight like a tiger

The only feature missing for me is instrument stacking and macro controls. If that’s in 10.5, I’ll definitely be upgrading!

How do you mean instrument stacking?

Something similar to Racks in Ableton Live, Track Stacks in Logic and Combinator in Reason. These allow you to trigger multiple instruments from one channel but also create macro controls that control one or more parameters in each instrument. The closest in Cubase is multiple instrument tracks and MIDI sends but there’s no equivalent of macros.

The ability to save a stacked instrument as a preset is also important.

There is a way to do this in Cubase I'm pretty sure, I'm about to figure it out for myself here in the next few days.

I honestly don’t think there’s a way but I’d love to be proven wrong

I think I found it... I found this a long time ago, and then forgot how I did it because I never had time to utilize it for the type of projects I was doing and it's been bugging me for a long time. It's definitely not as intuitive as most programs just being able to right click and assign anything to anything sort of deal.


There's actually a few ways of doing I this I think, or maybe just two.

The most basic and a thing to remember, is that any quick control on any track, can be routed anywhere in the program that normally has a parameter to control including other Quick Controls I believe.

Shift+Click on Quick Controls, and it gives you an "route anywhere you want" alternative menu. Ofcoarse there is a limit of 8 controls, but I think there is a way to get around this two. You can just create a dummy audio track and alt-route all 8 Quick Controls to wherever you want. You could of coarse automate 5 different audio tracks, each with 8 different quick controls or whatever you want.


If you want to deal with MIDI, well, easiest way is to get a controller, I have a Novation 25SL MKII which offers 8 endless rotaries, 8 faders, 8 panners. Just assign the same controller input to all instruments, select all instrument tracks, activate the monitoring, and all will respond to the same controller.

If you don't have a controller, you can use an virtual internal MIDI router software for your computer. I use LOOPBE30.

There's another way to do this pending the specifications of what you are trying to control.

This will only work for plugins that have MIDI support

If say you wanted one controller knob on your keyboard to control multiple parameters on multiple plugins on one audio track AND other plugins parameters on other audio (or group or FX, etc) tracks, you can do this:


say there are 8 parameters total you want to control. 4 parameters are on 3 different plugins one ONE track - Audio Track 1.

Audio Track 1
--Ins1 - FilterPluginA
----Frequency Cutoff
----Resonance
--Ins2 - ChorusPluginA
----Depth
--Ins3 - DelayPluginA
----Feedback

FX Track 1
--parameter
FX Track 2
--parameter
Fx Track 3
--parameter
FX Track 4
--parameter


That's what we're dealing with here. Remember, this is only for VST or VSTi plugins that support MIDI (mostly, it's only VSTis that support MIDI).
Create 8 MIDI tracks and set all their inputs to the same controller, the controller that has the one knob or fader you will be using. Set the outputs to the specific parameters listed above so that each MIDI track is Outputting to one parameter.

Select all the MIDI tracks and arm/monitor them and voila. it's that simple. Too bad more VST developers don't support MIDI... there should be a marketing to developers to push them to support MIDI in all their plugins.

Regarding Dorico, which I have no knowledge of, but if it is in fact like Sibelius, then I have to vehemently disagree that it is a great score program. It is only great in some ways, but there's one way in which it cannot be used - which in the case of many of us, and especially the idea of integrating into a DAW, will soon reveal the frustration and cursing.

Sibelius cannot take a recorded MIDI song that you recorded in real time, and then work with it. Hold on and allow me to explain:

Real time recording will not be perfectly on the beat and so when you open the score program, the notes will be all over the place, before and after the measure divisions. The way almost all Score programs have been developed EXCEPT FINALE', force all the notes in a measure to add up to 1 whole beat.

So when you attempt to edit the notes in each measure, Sibelius and most others will arbitrarily change the values of the notes before and after the one your attempting to edit, BECAUSE the program absolutely will not allow a measure to have less than a total of beats adding up to 1. And the notes that were fine as 1/4 notes, will become 1/8 notes, or vice versa. This is forced and you cannot get around it.

Finale' gives you the option of moving notes like as in a word processor, so you can edit without affecting surrounding notes and measures. It works the way a Score program should work.

What I just wrote only applies to trying to edit a MIDI song you have personally recorded in real time. Aside from that the other programs are just fine, i.e. writing music from scratch using the controls and interface of their designs, like Mozart would have done.

So if Dorico is like Sibelius, and it's being put into the Cubase DAW, which means that a large number of users will think that their keyboard recordings in real time will be able to become professional looking manuscript score, they will be sadly mistaken.

I haven't used it in a bit

I'm pretty sure the keyboard MIDI input support is meant for note input isn't it? I thought there was a way around this but maybe I'm mistaken.

EItherway, I think it's for note input, not performance input... Which I mean, is just one way to work which is how composers have worked for some time. Play then write, or think/imagine and write.

It's maybe not a great performance recorder, or as explained above, not really meant to be a performance recorder. I bet you could record in Cubase MIDI and then quantize and then export to Dorico.

I'm hoping we see Dorico and Cubase integration, this would maybe solve your problem as Dorico would just update the notes according to what you quantize.

Thanks! I'll try your ideas out. I prefer not to deal with MID and CCs on this if posible (which is how the other DAWs that support this do this).

more clear step by step of the Quick Control method

Create 9 new audio tracks.

go to the 9th tracks quick controls and shift+click in parameter selector space.

go to VST Mixer

here you will find the 8 other audio tracks and all their parameters.

On Audio Track 9, assign QC1 to Audio 1 Fader. QC2 Audio 2 Fader, etc, etc.

You can now control all 8 faders from one audio tracks quick controls.


Now, if you wanted to control all 8 Quick Controls from one knob on your keyboard controller, you can go to your 'studio setup' Window and in the Track Quick Controls section, you can create Quick Control CC assignment templates, of which I've created 10 or so (left on my desktop in a folder) and you could create a template where all 8 Track Controls are assigned to the same MIDI CC.


You should be able to do this with any Quick Control on any track type to any other

I've not used Dorico loads - I downloaded the demo for a project that involved poly-meters. I couldn't do this in Sibelius, well I could, but only by 'cheating' and essentially hiding barlines and manually editing the time signature markers. Dorico just lets you have bars of whatever length you want.

I spend half the time on Sibelius googling how to do stuff, Dorico is a lot more intuitive and obvious.

Now if only there was a notation package that allowed poly-meter and poly-tempo at the same time I'd be very happy. Cos constantly skipping back between two different tempo'd documents is a nightmare.

EDIT: I use these for songwriting so I don't really mind if the actual scores look rubbish.

Spectralayers trial is available for anyone interested.

https://www.steinberg.net/forums/vie...f=294&t=164176