switching from PT to Cubase

[DAW-Support]

I use Pro Tools on Mac a lot but as I have a few more customers on PC lately I mixed a few projects in Windows 10 to see how DTouch (and Windows in general) behaves there.

Some things I noticed:
General:
+ build-in touchscreen support of Windows obviously gives you a better user experince system wide
+/- window-handling reacts different, sometimes Pro Tools gets confused (for example Video-Output stuck in fullscreen etc.)
- some plugins (ALL WAVES plugins) don't react to touch at all. (In Cubase / Studio One they do, in Pro Tools definetly not)
E.g. Positiv Grid Bias also doesn't react to touch.
(see this thread: viewtopic.php?f=10&t=150 )
- with LOTS of Busses, sometimes Pro Tools doesn't show the "scroll down" arrow

Dtouch related:
- banking is slower (fast banking mode sometimes gets stuck in bigger sessions, so I disabled that)
- Solo buttons in Dtouch seems to be only available via Touch (in OSX you can also control them via mouse)
(maybe that's also true for the rest of the DTouch mixer? Can't remember right now)
- resync is a bit more picky about open elements on the screen (like a floating fader)

Best wishes from Hamburg,
Mathias
www.daw-support.de

[DT_bettinzana]

Another big disadvantage is the track-name length limited to 4 HUI chs on Windows.

I didn't notice that yet. Does that mean that DTouch can only display 4 characters per track or what's the deal?

No, it shows the names exactly as in the PT mixer, but in the DTouch database we have only access to the 4 chs name, so you couldn't perform some macro actions related to the tracks name.
There also are some other huge limitations writing Macros to manage "groups", etc ...

Test it with your workflow; maybe that these things doesn't negatively affect you.

[DT_bettinzana]

- banking is slower (fast banking mode sometimes gets stuck in bigger sessions, so I disabled that)

Mmm ... probably this issue could be corrected.

- Solo buttons in Dtouch seems to be only available via Touch (in OSX you can also control them via mouse)
(maybe that's also true for the rest of the DTouch mixer? Can't remember right now)

Yes, this is true, but we are introducing a new coding feature which will correct this. Unfortunately, it will only work on Win8 and Win10. We are updating DTouch for Cubendo at the moment.
That said, I start to advertise Win10 as the best choice for DTouch (Vs Win7) ... more infos in 1-2 weeks.

[~ufo~]

Ok I'm coming across some limitations of DTouch for PT on Windows now.

One is that DTouch seems to insist on having the tracklist so narrow that I can hardly read a thing.
I think I remember the mac version does that better (I'll check).

Also, ironically touch on Mac seems to work better. windows suffers from that 'wobble' in the beginning (I guess that's that windows waiting on whether something is a gesture thing Silvano talked about before).

I think I should see if I can turn off the "tap and hold for right click" function.
(apologies if that's in the manual, I'm more in the installation and initial testing phase than in depth).

Also, of course now that I've made the plunge and put effort into installing windows on a dedicated partition, I'm running into major stability issues with both windows and pre tools... (PT freezes windows, PT freeze function issues, PT offline bounce issues, windows installers take very, long to open, windwos updater not working, issue with waves access, issues with corrupt files, etc)
When will it stop? I consider myself to be a very patient man, but this is getting ridiculously frustrating.

[DT_bettinzana]

Ok I'm coming across some limitations of DTouch for PT on Windows now.

One is that DTouch seems to insist on having the tracklist so narrow that I can hardly read a thing.
I think I remember the mac version does that better (I'll check).

This is strange, because the PT graphics on Windows and on the Mac should be the same. Maybe some pixels lost on the borders, but I don't remember. You can contact us with a screenshot.

Also, ironically touch on Mac seems to work better. windows suffers from that 'wobble' in the beginning (I guess that's that windows waiting on whether something is a gesture thing Silvano talked about before).

Yes! The fact is that, on the Mac, DTouch is almost directly interfaced to the touchscreen and can manage the touch messages better than Windows ... do you remember my comments about the "gestures" on Windows? Trust me, I am not crazy: if I told you that managing a gestures-enabled system on Windows is not a good idea, I have some good points. If Slate tells that they are working on supporting the gestures on Windows, ... eh, if you want to trust him, have a good luck!

[clonewar]

@ufo.. I'm bumping this to see where you've landed. Are you staying with PT in Windows? I'm curious about what you think about DTouch and the overall touch interface for PT vs Cubase. Ironically, I might move in the other direction (Cubendo to PT).. At least now I can rent PT vanilla for a couple of months first to make sure it'll work for me.

[clonewar]

Yes! The fact is that, on the Mac, DTouch is almost directly interfaced to the touchscreen and can manage the touch messages better than Windows ... do you remember my comments about the "gestures" on Windows? Trust me, I am not crazy: if I told you that managing a gestures-enabled system on Windows is not a good idea, I have some good points. If Slate tells that they are working on supporting the gestures on Windows, ... eh, if you want to trust him, have a good luck!

You're completely right about gestures Silvano! I've found just going between Win 7 and Win 10 to be very frustrating, there's much more touch lag in Win 10, especially when you're touching and dragging something like a plugin knob. Touch input on the Mac is much faster and smoother, and I'm sure that enabling gestures creates the same lag and hesitation that we get in Windows.

[DT_bettinzana]

@ufo.. I'm bumping this to see where you've landed. Are you staying with PT in Windows? I'm curious about what you think about DTouch and the overall touch interface for PT vs Cubase. Ironically, I might move in the other direction (Cubendo to PT).. At least now I can rent PT vanilla for a couple of months first to make sure it'll work for me.

Hello Michael,
as a DAW user, I am personally interested in your reasons for potentially moving from Cubendo to PT.

[~ufo~]

@ufo.. I'm bumping this to see where you've landed. Are you staying with PT in Windows? I'm curious about what you think about DTouch and the overall touch interface for PT vs Cubase. Ironically, I might move in the other direction (Cubendo to PT).. At least now I can rent PT vanilla for a couple of months first to make sure it'll work for me.

I missed this, so sorry for the late reply.

Here's where I'm at:

I'm currently working on my system dual boot.
It defaults to Windows 8.1, in which I start new sessions, and copy older sessions to in which I need to do additional recording.
If I need to work on older sessions, without doing audio recording, I boot into Sierra and work from there.
This also allows me to keep monitoring the state of Pro Tools on Mac after either of them are updated.

Pro Tools in Windows is more stable for me at the moment, no doubt. If you work at higher buffers, you might not notice a significant difference.
I agree with Silvano that the Mac version of DTouch for Pro Tools is superior to the Windows version.
That's a little ironic since it is windows that natively supports multi touch.
On 8.1 at least, that feels a little 'slapped on'.
However, the Windows version of DTouch is certainly workable, and the gains I get with running PT on windows outweigh the losses I get by running DT on windows. The main thing that's slowing me down on DTouch on windows at the moment is horizontal scrolling in the edit window. It is unusable and since windows doesn't seem to allow my magic trackpad to do any scrolling, I'm left with a frustrating experience.
(I may be overlooking a solution there)

Regarding DT PT vs. Cubase, I prefer the PT version although I appreciate the Cubase version is going to be much more powerful.
(There will be almost certainly functions in the Cubase version that I would like to see in the PT version.)

Some reasons why I prefer the PT version:
-It's laid out more ergonomically, with the DT buttons laid out horizontally at the bottom of screen.
-I do relatively simple things in DTouch, the elaborate stuff is taken care of by PT itself, with Cubase's I'd have to try and get DTouch to do some of that elaborate stuff and I'm not sure how far I could get with that. I didn't invest the time to try.
-I like PT more than I like Cubase (you can write that off as unfair bias). Both the PT and Cubase versions 'get out of the way' of the DAW quite effectively, but I feel like it's more elegant in Pro Tools, maybe because PT has a simpler GUI. I'm not sure that's fair.

Regarding touch on windows, I'm not sure DTouch for Cubase performs better than PT (I have a feeling it did, but it could be nonsense).
Even with tap and hold (for right click) disabled (WHY IS THAT THE ONLY OPTION MICROSOFT????? ) on windows, the response from the faders are significantly jumpier than it is on Mac. I may have to tweak some more settings (I'm not sure if I ploughed through the whole manual, come to think of it). Or it may be that this is just what the touch support of Windows 8.1 is and the DTouch driver on Mac is just much, much better.

All in all, at the moment I'm just working, because that's what I need to do. No more time for testing etc.
I will keep an eye on Cubase, Studio One and Bitwig (I still have to demo that one) as potential platforms to compose in.

Hope this helps, let me know if you have more questions or feel free to PM me. We can always do a little Skype chat to discuss specifics.

[clonewar]

Hello Michael,
as a DAW user, I am personally interested in your reasons for potentially moving from Cubendo to PT.

Hi Silvano,

First off, I'm only thinking about moving to PT for mixing, I'd still use Cubase or Logic for midi composing work. I like the composing/editing process to be separate from mixing, so my workflow is that I'll tweak the sounds a little while I'm working with midi, but I always print everything to audio for the mixing stage.

Honestly, I've never really liked the look and feel of Cubendo's user interface, and IMO it got worse with Cubase 7. I think PT's interface has many advantages, especially in the Edit/Project window.. I've always wanted to be able to view all of the track inserts and sends right in the Edit window. And even in Nuendo 8 there's still no Smart tool for selecting/editing, like almost every other DAW has.

There's no denying Cubendo's midi capabilities though, and of course they have deepest third party control surface support. Using my SmartAV Tango is really what brought me to Cubase in the first place, it's so deeply integrated that you don't ever need to look at the Cubendo mixer, and you can do most of what you need to do in the Project window right from the control surface. But, with SmartAV stopping production and support, some things that broke starting with Cubase 8 will never get fixed. If I want to continue using the Tango I'll be forced to stay on an older version of Nuendo. And then there's the size of a larger control surface. As I've brought more analog outboard gear into my studio I've wanted the control surface to take up less space. DTouch brought a different Cubase experience with touch screens, but with a touch screen I'm more directly in contact with the interface, and I think I'd be happier with my hands on the PT interface.

My feelings could definitely change once I've worked with PT for a little while, but at least I can rent PT for a month or two to try it out. I'll probably ask you for another DTouch for PT trial license at that point. I'll also be able to do more mixed mode touchscreen testing on the Mac with my PQ Labs and Acer touchscreens if you're still interested in that. I was able to do some basic testing, but without a PT license I couldn't actually test the full application.