Greetings.
my 2ยข I have been a long time user of Steinberg products. I am a self declared Cubase fanatic, and a well versed user. The Music store at which I used to run the Recording department, stills Cubase incarnations at a rate of 2 to 1 all other DAWs combined. This was due largely to in depth demonstrations (I always demonstrated Cubase last).
Early this year I grew very frustrated with Steinberg. They dropped, as you know DX support. But, they did so without prior notice to their loyal user-base. Many of my friends were left high and dry with a nasty ultimatum: roll back to SX3.1 and chalk the upgrade price up to a loss, or replace, upgrade or lose their DX plugins for which they paid a good deal of coin.
Cubase 4 was released and it was unusable. There were so many show stopping bugs that it was ridiculous. C4.01 was released very shortly afterwards and thus many folks could at least get it running. C4 was a mine field to navigate for the next 2 or 3 months while we eagerly awaited an update 4.02 was released and may folks were feeling a little better. Then, Steinberg announced that they were canceling the long awaited, in fact, promised final update to SX3 -SX3.2. The clamor of disapproval was intense over at cubase.net (search the forums and see). The din grew louder with the announcement of the end of support for midex8 hardware. It felt as though Steinberg was out of control and sabotaging their own existence. C4.03 - a hot fix was released, which quelled the discontent to some extent.
In January I began to look for another DAW as some form of personal protest. I found Reaper. I told myself that I would try and use it exclusively until Cubase 4.1 was released, at which time I would reevaluate the situation... this is what I have found:
Reaper is very stable. I have yet to experience a crash, regardless of what I throw at it. It handles all
my VST, and DX plugins without issue, and I am suprisingly pleased with the quality of the bundled FX. CPU load is down and its behaviour in this department is very customizable. Reaper's user options are very deep - it opens the hood for you to tweak till your heart's content, if you like. Reaper presents a oddly different paradigm in terms of workflow, which, for some, is very difficult to adjust too. I was one of those. The toolless interface feels, at first a little thin and inhibiting; that changes with a little time and with an understanding of key-binding edit commands and user-macros. I am very fast now... faster that I have ever been on any platform.
Cubase is beautiful. Hands down it is the more handsome application. It is also more mature and its extremely rich feature-set, benefits from years of development and refinement. That said, you can expect more, presently from Cubase in terms of Midi. Its midi is fantastic. Simple, powerful and close to if not complete. Reaper on the other hand lags well behind here. There are many reaper users, myself included, that work extensively with midi, but C4 is considerable ahead.. That said, I have failed in my attempts to use Reaper exclusively until C4.1 is released. On a handful of collisions, I have had to fire up C4 in order to make use of its groove quantize features. In Reaper it is impossible to steal the groove from one item - midi or audio - and use that as a template for quantizing other items. Thus, Reaper lacks: Groove Quantize, Input Quantize, Shuffle, and several other quantize options available in Cubase. Nevertheless, I am easily able to complete 95% of all my midi creation and editing tasks within Reaper.
Where Reaper bounds ahead of Cubase (and any other DAW IMHO) is in terms of Routing capabilities, and the handling of Audio. In fact, Reaper is so far ahead of Cubase in this department that it feels an unfair comparison. Any track can handle up to 64 audio channels. There is only one type of a track. This singular track can contain midi items, audio items, or both - you can even crossfade between midi and audio! Tracks can be folders containing child tracks, they can be aux tracks... to put it briefly they'll do whatever you need then to, and in terms of routing if you can imagine it you can route it. You can even do feedback routing; Side chaining is native and built-in both of which are yet to be well implemented in Cubendo. For years Steinberg has been saying that freely movable/routable groups would be here soon. Hopefully that will be one of the selling points for C4.1.
Cubase has a very well designed and implemented
Takes system that displays takes in lanes and makes for speedy and easy comping of performances. When i first began my trial of Reaper, this was a feature that I missed dearly - I often used Cubase's takes-in-lanes system as a writing tool. I hit up the Feature Request forum over at
REAPER | About. Before I knew it I was engaged in a Persona Message conversation with Justin Frankel - the creater of the fricking application. He was trying to discern the nature of my request and investigating if Reapers current method would suffice my needs. Reaper could easily do takes, and if you wanted to see them in lanes for comping, you could
explode the takes across tracks. I had been doing this, but found it cumbersome. I made a little video and posted it on Youtube, to illustrate why I was hung up on Cubase's method. He watched it and replied, saying that he would make me a video to show how I could accomplish the same thing, quicker and with less
clicks using Reaper's current feature set. I replied saying don't bother with the video I'll take you word for it and figure this out. He replied again saying, "Hang on, int the time that it would take to make the video, I may be able to add something you'd like..." and hour later I got another PM, this time with an attchment: ReaperLanes.exe. In an hour's time he had coded the foundation for Reaper's current Takes-in-lanes featureset. I made a few more suggestions and within three hours of our conversation's start, Reaper's current
takes-in-lanes featureset was developed, coded and refined. I was blown away by this experience. Try and get an answer from Steinberg, let alone a developer there! In fact, try and get some
official support from them. You will, however notice that any mention of warez is quickly dealt with by their moderators. Back on topic: While the takes-in-lanes abilities of Cubase are more mature and flexible, that found in Reaper is easily workable. And it underscores how the Cockos value and consider the input and opinion of their userbase.
It would take too long to do a complete Cubase / Reaper feature comparison. That can be done easily by comparing the lists published by Steinberg and Cockos. What you will find is that the discrepancies are few when put side by side with their common ground.
If your work revolves around the most complete and efficient midi featureset, then Cubase is, currently the better choice. If you deal equally with midi and audio, the lines are blured, as Reaper is ahead in the audio department. If the treatment you receive from the producer holds weight as a concern, the Reaper is the hands down winner.
What you should do, is download Reaper, and take it around the block - it is free and un-crippled for 30 days (after which it remains un-crippled). It you find that it suffices, your wallet will thank you!
I am still curious as to what surprises C4.1 will hold when it drops. But I doubt if I will switch back.
All of this is but my opinion and my experience.
best regards,
Tallis