Steinberg Cubase - Aaaarrrggghhh !!

[Ron Cooper]

Last year it took me a period of over three weeks and FIVE hours of my time, emailing local suppliers, Steinberg International, overseas phone calls, further long involved emails and incredible frustration to get a Zoom R16 mixer validated and finally activated with Cubase software. Zoom are NOT the suppliers of cubase software so this was another problem and Zoom were no help whatsoever as they said it was a Steinberg problem. (catch 22 ?)

It was eventually done over the phone with the most incredibly complicated delving into my computer unknowns by a very helpful guy from Yamaha Australia with his guidance and who had nothing to do with my original purchase as it was supplied as part of the Zoom.

NOW,,, - I have tried to use it again and Bingo ! It pops up with this ! :

" The license required for application 'Cubase LE 4' was deactivated, because it needs to be validated. Should the licenseserver validate the licenses now?

You can use the 'Validate License Usage Periods' wizard of the 'eLicenser Control Center' to validate this license later. "

To me this is utterly unbelievable. Who on earth puts up with this garbage. Why would anyone buy a Steinberg product ony to be sublected to all this diatribe ? To make matters worse though, - when I went to the web site it stated that my flash player was out of date and told me to go to Adobe. - Of course there was no such coutesy of a simple link, no, I had to do the spade work, but I did, & all was downloaded from Adobe & installed OK, BUT, did it make any difference, - NO. Same message from Steinberg Idiots to upgrade Flash Player, - more Aaaarrrggghhh ! So I still can't even try a new validation !

All I can say is there must be a lot of incredibly patient people out there to put up with companies like Steinberg. - Nearly every few weeks I have to activate various products from Sony etc. and it takes just a few seconds and is absolutely painless. My PC is a Win 7 64b with a 2.8g i7 & 12g RAM.

I just simply cannot go through all this again after what happened last year, any suggestions ?

RonC.

[Don Litten]

I'm not laughing at you, I'm crying with you!

I have two H4n's. When I bought the first one, I decided to install it just to have it. The next few hours involved the most childish series of super secret emails and code names and serial numbers that can't be found..etc.

I finally chucked the DVD in the trash.

When I bought the second H4N, I solved the problem quickly....I chucked it in the trash without further aggravation.

Cubase can do without my business and I can do without them.

[Ron Cooper]

Thanks Don, at least I am not alone.

RonC.

[Jim Andrada]

If, on the other hand, you are somehow able to persevere, Cubase is really quite a capable product. I suffered through a few hours of similar frustration and against all odds got it running on both a Mac and a PC. Even though they claimed utter disdain for XP64 it works just fine. I have the small Steinberg controller from Yamaha that only has one motorized slider - which controls whichever channel your mouse is over at the moment - I think it's pretty neat, And it frees up all the space I used to need on the desk for the old multi channel control surface.

Of course, the program is about as confusing to use as it is to install, but once you get the hang of it it works well.

On balance I'm irritated about the hassles, but reasonably satisfied with the results, and quite happy with the way the program works with the little controller.

[Chris Soucy]

To steal a well known phrase.

Glad you like it, Jim (or is that Spock?).

I spent 5 minutes looking at the screen, clicking options,eventually backing away thinking " I need a bigger boat" and consigned it to the deep, as totally unusable by mere mortals.

Designed by Klingons, for use by Vulcans.

Interesting to see their production lab, must be a scream, literally.


CS

[Jim Andrada]

Hi Chris

Beam me up!

I didn't say it was particularly easy to figure it out - in fact I think a lot of Yurrupian software is a bit hard to figure out - must be something in the water. Or more likely a different idea of how software ought to work. Particularly the GUI's. Something about a different paradigm. And I admit it - Steinberg is more different than most.

I just said that for some reason I was able to luck out and get it working before I went totally crazy - and discovered that the way it works with the Yamaha controller is pretty neat.

Anyhow, after all these years (52 at last count) in the computer biz, maybe I just expect things to be "idiosyncratic"

[Greg Miller]

Originally Posted by Jim Andrada

after all these years (52 at last count) in the computer biz

2011 - 52 = 1959. Well, yes, I did see a computer back in '59, it was a room full of vacuum tubes, programmed by a teletype keyboard, output was discrete neon lights, and its crowning achievement was that it could play Tic-Tac-Toe. So if you were in the computer biz 52 years ago, and you're still going strong, more power to ya!

[Jim Andrada]

Yup - 1959 it was!

I was majoring in Chemistry & Physics at Harvard and got a summer job with the Air Force Research Lab near Boston. They had a small relay based computer and none of the astronomers seemed interested in doing much with it so I took the manual home and read it and the next day I was the programmer for the group wiring plugboards for orbital calculations for satellite tracking. I also got to work on applying Doppler analysis to track Sputnik 2, which at the time was the only thing up there with a transmitter running. Great fun! I was hooked - Chemistry and Physics were forgotten and I got involved at school in attempts to translate Russian to English by computer. Wound up working at the Air Force lab several years, and then a couple of years at the Naval Weapons lab in Virginia before joining IBM in '64 to help design the OS for System 360.Retired after 31 years which included 6 years with IBM Japan, and started working as a consultant for one of the Japanese computer companies. I thought it might be part time for a year or two and so far it's been full time for 16 years and counting.

[Greg Miller]

That's quite the background. And now we know what it takes to figure out Cubase... :-)

[Jim Andrada]

Well, actually the only part that's necessary to figure out Cubase is the intense suspicion verging on paranoia that working with computers gives one. I KNOW they're out to get me!!!! I've heard them talking about it when they think I'm not listening!!! Maybe we'd better sacrifice another goat.

Come to think of it, maybe we should come up with a rating system based on the number of goats you have to sacrifice to the computer gods to stay on the good side of your application. Cubase would rank 10 goats at least. And maybe their authorization scheme would be a 20 goat-er.

Hard as it is to use, it's harder still to get it to install and run!

[Greg Miller]

Slightly OT but I'm up to about eight goats trying to set up a WiFi repeater ("range extender"). Trying to add one to a network with security already enabled, plus badly-written configuration scripts, accounts for at least five of the goats.

Relay logic was great in its day, but would be a bit clunky running the FFT needed for audio processing.

[Paul R Johnson]

Support for LE4 is very limited because it's a free bundled product, usually given away with interfaces and other add on gadgets. I got a couple of these as freebies, but as I've been a Cubase users for years and years, I'm running the full version (Cubase 5). I gave one of my LE4's to a friend and he had real issues getting it to function. The licensing centre software is usually the culprit - and sometimes downloading the latest version solves the problem - LE4 is a bit old now.

Cubase can be controlled by and/or control pretty well anything that can function via MIDI - but getting things to work is really tricky - and Steinberg usually can't help, because they don't know the other products. They can help with the Cubase part, but when they ask you what controller you are using and if it sends continuous controllers or programme changes it's pretty difficult if you don't know. I've got a Behringher external control surface and I've never got everything working, same as I have a remote transport panel and this communicates via midi - but took me ages to discover what driver it needed.

Sadly, this is very typical of audio software which has to be so versatile, the manufacturers often cannot help because the potential combinations the users ask for help on is mind boggling.

Internet forums, including the steinberg one are often the only solution.

[Jim Andrada]

Greg - in those long gone days IBM used to sell a hardware implementation of the Cooley-Tukey FFT algorithm. It was a sort of refrigerator-sized box that attached to a computer as if it were a tape drive, so the system could write to it and read results back. Not too dissimilar in approach to how the more or less classical (ie not a bunch of parallel processors) monolithic supercomputers work. I was on a project once where we cut an NEC supercomputer apart and grafted an IBM mainframe on the front in place of the NEC general purpose system that stuffed data into the back end number cruncher.

Paul - that's one reason I got the Yamaha 121 controller - it's sold as a Yamaha/Steinberg product so they have to make it work. Not surprising since Yamaha owns Steinberg.

I think of it as sort of a case of the worst of both worlds as I don't have much good to say about Japanese software either, having struggled with it when I worked there, and a lot of German (and French) software leaves me puzzled as well.Biggest issue I always had with J software was that they seemed to always make the good path work and they assumed the user would never deviate from how he was "supposed" to use it so typically the error handling was insufficient.

I will say that the version of Cubase that came with the controller seemed to work OK after sacrificing a few goats (8 seems about right) to the licensing gods.

[Colin McDonald]

I was a big fan of Cubase up to v5 (which I stiil use on an original iMac at work). I made the mistake of 'upgrading' to VST and eventually had to give up trying to keep that expensive upgrade working reliably. The Steinberg forums merely confirmed that people from all over the place were having the same negative experiences.

I dare say that if you can get it to work, Cubase is still very good. Not for me though.

[Jim Andrada]

Haven't tried the "latest and greatest" yet. Maybe I'll wait a while.