Bongo Fiend
New member
I write progressive house music using Cubase. It's a very powerful program - I can load heaps and heaps of samples into it, play loads of channels at once, etc. ... but boy is it sluggish!
The screen update is really slow, even on my 300 MHz Pentium-II. It's not exactly doing any complex 3D rendering! My tracks generally have about 30 channels (some mono, some stereo) and last for about 10 minutes. I have enough RAM to easily store all the samples at once. Not exactly very demanding.
But when I view the whole track, the screen takes several seconds to update. Even when I switch off 'waveforms' it takes a whole second - it's only got to draw a few hundred rectangles for god's sake!!!
Similarly, if I multiple-select a few parts and press Delete, it sometimes takes as much as 10 seconds to delete them. If I'm playing the tune at the same time, there is typically a stutter/click in the playback (even though the bit I've deleted is nowhere near the bit I am listening to). What the hell is it doing?!!
Apart from the screen update, there are lots of aspects of the program which are very lazily implemented. E.g. only one level of undo. Some functions could be made much more intuitive and/or interactive. E.g. to zoom into a specific part of the tune, you could highlight the area with a zoom tool, as you do in most graphic design packages.
To its credit, it's great that you can do most operations while the track is playing. But this power is wasted with such poor performance. E.g. I think "hmm, I'll delete this part which is about to play" but by the time it's deleted, playback has already gone past that part.
Does anyone else agree with these criticisms? I think that for Steinberg, having an established product (and a status as one of the market leaders) has made them complacent about basic UI issues.
The screen update is really slow, even on my 300 MHz Pentium-II. It's not exactly doing any complex 3D rendering! My tracks generally have about 30 channels (some mono, some stereo) and last for about 10 minutes. I have enough RAM to easily store all the samples at once. Not exactly very demanding.
But when I view the whole track, the screen takes several seconds to update. Even when I switch off 'waveforms' it takes a whole second - it's only got to draw a few hundred rectangles for god's sake!!!
Similarly, if I multiple-select a few parts and press Delete, it sometimes takes as much as 10 seconds to delete them. If I'm playing the tune at the same time, there is typically a stutter/click in the playback (even though the bit I've deleted is nowhere near the bit I am listening to). What the hell is it doing?!!
Apart from the screen update, there are lots of aspects of the program which are very lazily implemented. E.g. only one level of undo. Some functions could be made much more intuitive and/or interactive. E.g. to zoom into a specific part of the tune, you could highlight the area with a zoom tool, as you do in most graphic design packages.
To its credit, it's great that you can do most operations while the track is playing. But this power is wasted with such poor performance. E.g. I think "hmm, I'll delete this part which is about to play" but by the time it's deleted, playback has already gone past that part.
Does anyone else agree with these criticisms? I think that for Steinberg, having an established product (and a status as one of the market leaders) has made them complacent about basic UI issues.