Taking a look at Cubase

[evon]

Well being a "quiet" "man" I took a "Leed" and began looking (actually listening) into cubase. I loved the sound, seemed more "jucier" than Live and more natural.

There is definately something more about this engine. Its like the difference between a finely tuned Benz and a finely tuned Corolla, both drive beautifully but you feel the difference immediately.

Then I got dissapointed with the workflow, then later into the night I found a lovely way to work with my ideas.
I then thought to myself, probably, there are just some elements that can not be sacrificed for workflow.

[Rave]

It doesn't hurt to use the complement of both daws. I am still learning but after a while (and some self discipline) I can see myself 'creating' in Live and 'mixing' in Cubase in the long term.

[HeadrickProductions]

It's like rats from a sinking ship....

Cubase is solid....give it a try, but reason 5 is on the horizon so you might want to consider waiting a little bit

[hps909]

new Cubase users instantly dislike the work flow yet they don't want to invest the time to learn it properly .. the beauty of cubase is that you can tailor it to how you work .. it's really one of those things that you have to set up properly by reading the manual .. setting up your work spaces, getting your macro commands sorted, learning /editing keyboard shortcuts, setting up the generic controller .. setting up a default project, setting general preferences .. it really is scary the amount of customization that is available with it ..

ableton is pretty much straight out of the box easier on the surface but really hasn't got anywhere near the same level of customization... i don't like lives arrangement work flow and i cant customize it much single window work flow isn't real good for fine editing I'm constantly resizing the panes and tracks to see different things because I'm bound by the one area .. hence i haven't written a full song in live since I've had it (v5) it is a start pad and a live instrument for me .. Cubase is my composing software because i can customize it to work they way i want it to

[leedsquietman]

I have always liked Cubase and have used it since the days of the Atari ST.

I do things differently though to the last poster in that I build all my arrangements in Live (usually in Session) and usually mix in Cubase. I prefer Cubase for automation and mixing, especially with dual monitors. I prefer Live for composing, much more inspirational than a blank Cubase arrange page ! Sometimes I bring mixes back into Live though for funky remixes etc. It works out really well to have both DAWS.

I wouldn't knock Live or Cubase. I love them both and appreciate them both for their own strengths.

I consider myself lucky enough to own both Live 7 Suite and Cubase 5.

I would say that most traditional DAWS (Cubase, Logic, Sonar, Reaper, DP, Protools, etc) have functionality which isn't easily achieved in Live and vice versa, so having a combination of a trad DAW with Live's cutting edge features is a really great combination which compliments each other.

[drako]

Well being a "quiet" "man" I took a "Leed" and began looking (actually listening) into cubase. I loved the sound, seemed more "jucier" than Live and more natural.

.

That's something i noticed too, maybe we are manipulated by the looks tho, i dunno, the techheads here might say there is no difference.

[leedsquietman]

I don't use Cubase because I believe it's sound engine is better than Live.

I don't believe it is, so long as warping is off in Live.

Whether or not you believe one thing to be better than the other, if you can't get a good mix in Live it is down to you and your recording/mixing skills, not the application.

[Tarekith]

I love the workflow in Cubase, especially the audio editing, best I've ever used. If it wasn't for that damn dongle....

[funky shit]

if you have bought it, just download a crack and work away dot com.

[leedsquietman]

Most cracks are flaky with Cubase, and every time they upgrade the program it takes the crackers 12-18 months to crack the new version. Many Cubase cracks also have nasty stuff and their dongle emulator stops the real synchrosoft dongle from working. I remember back in the day when the Cubase dongle was huge on the Atari, it also affected performance, so many legit users ran the cracked version as it worked better

I use Reaper for mobile recording rather than risk losing the Cubase dongle.

Many people think like Tarekith and I understand that - having broken a dongle before and had to go through a pain to get that fixed (new dongle and activation codes, and given I have Arturia, Korg and other syncrosoft protected software on the same key, it was a nightmare). Although I have grown to like Logic, as I used it at work for the past 7 years, I still prefer Cubase's workflow. Reaper though - is massively customizable - if you spend time setting that up to your taste, that is one powerful and ever improving program, it's MIDI is not far off Logic and Cubase now (apart from scoring). It has no fancy virtual instruments but is great value for money.

[drako]

I remember back in the day when the Cubase dongle was huge on the Atari, it also affected performance, so many legit users ran the cracked version as it worked better

Same here, steinberg actualy send me a dongle free version back then , i still have my atari somewhere, tight midi timing and a midex

[Tarekith]

if you have bought it, just download a crack and work away dot com.

That's actually what I was doing with SX3, I haven't seen (or looked) for cracks of their recent stuff.

[mholloway]

I loved the sound, seemed more "jucier" than Live and more natural.

There is definately something more about this engine.

No, there isn't.

I think Cubase is great and all (I own 5 and it's great but mostly collects dust thanks to Live), but it's kind of tiring to see again and again how people think their mix sounds "not good enough" in one DAW and so then decide they are attracted to a completley different DAW because "it just sounds better." No data, no backup, just "it definitely sounds better." But see, the thing is, your ears, and more importantly your perception, is totally subjective. Even just the "newness factor" of cubase could be coloring your perception. I'd say buy it and get it for specific features and functionality that you want. But to buy it because "the engine is clearly better" is really a load of wank. It's not going to make your songs just magically sound "better" because it's Cubase and not Live. You could have started with Cubase and come the other way....

do a search on DAW and Mix Bus Summing. Read the results -- people have tested this shit time and time again.

all my dumb opinions on that stuff aside, though, Cubase 5 is a really good DAW. the best parts of 5 imo are VariAudio in the sample editor and the new convultion reverb. frankly grooveagent and beatmash are just toys...the former having absolutely nothing on Live Racks (or battery for that matter). but man, talk about a NICE (let alone real) sample editor...!! plus the mixer window is great.

-M

[chelemasty]

I use both. For me, I can't really compare both, or prefer one on the other. Both of them are both beautiful beast. What I like about Cubase is that, when you map something on the quickcontrols, say the mod wheel, if you go to another track, you can still use the mod wheel again and map it on another parameter. Unlike in Live that once it's mapped you cant use it for other parameters anymore. But in Live, almost everything is mapable and in Cubase it's not. And, N + O = NO. Cubase doesn't sound better than Ableton, they both sound the same to me. It will sound different because the native plugins on each DAW are different. Record from Propellerheads sounds the same as them also, but what I like about it, is that the mixer, the EQs, compressor, and filters in there sounds really good, therefore you'll have more control, and it's easier to mix there(For me). But yeah, no midi-out yet. Will wait though. But I love the workflow there the most. I don't care about VSTs...LOL

But yeah, if you can have them both Cubase and Ableton, get it, you'll love it if you have both, there's no need to choose. I sometimes work on either of the three mentioned above, and loving it, coz sometimes staying on the same environment kinda bores me, or sometimes if my mind is stucked on the other say Ableton, it will function on the other one like Cubase or Record.

[funky shit]

They all sound the same.

In sane, sensible, real-world practice there is no measurable difference between them. If you rig a test specifically to wring out the differences between how tiny decimals are rounded or truncated then you might be able to get a miniscule detectible (but not audible) difference between say 32-bit fixed-point results and 64-bit floating point. You can check out Lynn Fuston's Awesome DAWsum CD to compare a bunch of different analog and digital summing, but I can save you the trouble and tell you that among the digital summing busses, there is no difference.

So... what's with all the people who swear that DAW X sounds better than Y? Some of this is plain old "placebo effect," and some of it is user error, and some of it is a third thing I'll get to in a sec. There are several "hidden" ways in which users can very easily and unknowingly make invalid comparisons of what they *think* should be a simple A/B test. One is having dither, or a different type of dither enabled or disabled on one DAW but not the other-- this can give one DAW smoother-sounding tails and greater low-level detail, or another a slightly "veiled" sound with less sense of audio "black space" between notes-- exactly the kind of slight, ephemeral "lower quality" that people often refer to with one vs another. Another far more dramatic, but also easy-to-misunderstand difference is pan law. If you move the exact same project files from one DAW to another, and one of them has a different default pan law, then the difference in size, loudness, apparent detail, stereo spread, and instrument clarity could be pretty dramatic, although still within the realm of stuff that could be mis-heard as "better quality." These kinds of mistakes are easy to make if you don't really know what you're doing.

The one area where there *might* be a real difference is plugin handling. Theoretically all this stuff has specs that the plugin developers and the DAW developers should be following, but most of us are aware that not all plugins get on equally with all hosts. This is technically a *bug* and not a difference in the audio engine, but it's there.

For the record, it is pretty easy to perform a null test (as long as you know exactly what you're doing) to compare DAWs, and they all null completely when used sensibly. If you really push the limits and try to force a project to reveal differences, then you might get microscopic variations down at like -132dB from a 32-bit fixed engine vs a 64-bit float engine, but nothing that is going to be audible in a real double-blind listening test. It's also worth mentioning that fixed-point engines are susceptible to intersample distortion if you were to run all your levels right up to 0dB, but again, in sensible real-world practice it's not going to make any difference, and cakewalk users have nothing to fear since they have 64-bit float, which is the best you can get anyway.

Digital audio engines are just performing mathematical operations, like a calculator. If you plug in 4+4 on your calculator and I plug in 4+4 on mine they should both always spit out 8, unless one is outright broken. The microscopic differences between fixed point and floating-point and 64-bit vs 32-bit are basically like calculators that have 80 decimal places instead of 60, or that chop off the decimals that won't fit vs rounding them. So for instance if you divide 2/3 in one, it might spit out 0.66666666666666666666666666667, and the other might spit out 0.666666666666666666666666666. Those are generally not meaningful audible differences, and they are certainly not the kind of across-the-board "better quality" that is implied in many debates.

These kinds of things come up often on internet message boards, and lots and lots of theories from the brilliant to the preposterous get tossed around, and lots of flames and accusations and ill-will often gets expended before anyone actually goes to the small trouble of posting a reproducable null test, and then it invariably turns out that they are the same.

Cheers.