SongCraft
One first look it does appear that Steinberg has a very impressive list of greatly enhanced features ((Enhancements on existing features)) in Cubase 6 such as....
. Enhanced workflows such as; group editing, note (midi events) controllers editing and easier assigned midi controllers, these alone are very impressive.
. Additional enhancements to audio quantize, and with beat detection. And what they claim; with no comb-filtering artifacts.
. Enhanced editing; when slicing for example there's an option for 'Auto
Crossfade
and Fill' to remove gaps/glitches.
. Enhanced envelopes with new ways to make it much easier to edit, and according to Steiny; the new standard in Amp sims.
Don't all of these sound like what we've been asking Cakewalk to do for the longest time? No more plugins, better stability and better core functionality, right? Well, apparently others get it, except for them. They always sugar-coat each version with "doo dahs" and new plugins, which usually end up not working properly. And when you think about core functionality, it's hardly revolutionary. When was the last time Cakewalk did something revolutionary? Perhaps when they went 64 bit in 2005? I'd hardly call the Edit Filter or the Smart Tool revolutionary (they're more like evolutionary). Not to completely discredit Cakewalk, cause some things they do are very good, but they rarely deliver a complete feature. Their feature set is usually half-baked and takes them a few versions to get to a decent state, if that (i.e. the Audio Engine, which it's still not gapless; Audio Snap, not working properly; ACT, whatever happened to that; The Matrix View still missing key features, like volume and pan on each cell; V-Vocal, no updates since 2007; etc). Now we have a half-baked GUI (I wonder how long will it take them to get it to 100%).
All Cakewalk really needed to do was improve the existing features in SONAR 8.5 and I bet you that everyone would've been MUCH happier with that than a new GUI. The new GUI looks nice, but it's another feature that will take them a few versions to get correctly and that's the point I'm making here. It takes Cakewalk too much time to properly deliver a complete feature that others seem to do in a single version. Why is this? How can they fix this? Well, for starters, they need a 2 year cycle cause apparently even the 15 month one they took this time wasn't enough. Cakewalk needs to do what Ableton did and concentrate exclusively on bug fixing for a few versions. Even then, they'll still be behind the competition, but at least we'll get a solid product instead of what we have now.
Questions remain:
. Rock solid stability?
. The dongle, annoying iKey activation?
. Price, value wise compared to other DAW's?
Each person is gonna have a different experience, but I have friends who've used Cubase for 15 hours straight, working on tons of tracks (50+), a ton of audio plugins and VSTi's (including 15+ instances of Omnisphere) on a 2 hour long project
without a single hitch. I'm talking about dropping plugins and changing effects on the fly while the engine is playing at 256 samples. That's something we can only dream off doing in SONAR (which drops out by simply changing loop points or simply looping).
The dongle comment is always funny to me because it's a non-issue these days. I don't even have to think about mine unless I'm adding a license to it or registering a product (which is a one time only process, even if you format and reformat your system 100x). The only people who would have problems with a dongle are those who use laptops or the people who keep moving it from place to place. Those are likely to lose or even break the key, and that's a problem of course. But, otherwise, if you're using it on a tower and you never move it around (or simple take care of it!), then you won't have any issues with a USB key. Plus, you're missing out on a great deal of quality products.
The price/value aspect of anything is based on what you believe is worth your money. I personally rather pay more for SONAR to have less bugs and more stability than to pay what we're paying now and have what we have today. That's just me.
Other questions remain;
. Will X1b completely fix various issues such as; Audio Snap?
. Will there be further enhancements such as; CV (narrow view)?
I hope X1b get's it right or else there will be a lot of very disappointed customers.
Those are good questions and only time will tell. The real question is, how much time? AND, will it be worth the wait?
post edited by Jose7822 - 2011/01/14 09:22:58