N10 suggestions for improvement

Overall, a very nice upgrade I’ve found. Notwithstanding the various minor bug reports, N10 is markedly smoother and positive all round. I use it a lot with film and many VIs (Absolute 4, NI Komplete, AIR Music Tech, Spectrasonics).

I don’t have HiDPI enabled, the two Displays stay constant as 3440 X 1440 & 2560x1440. Factory settings are used for ASIO guard, 64bit, Steinberg power plan, 1024 buffer for mixing. Video runs brilliantly (h264 or DNxHD), ditto MIDI. Have latest GPU drivers (Nvidia Studio Drivers, not Gaming), energy saver, sleep, hibernate, SpeedStep & C-States all off.

A few annoying things I’ve noticed:

Control Room
I have the Control Room maxed with external IPs, Cues, Headphones, 2 x stereo monitors, 5.1 monitors. I also have enabled allow duplicate outputs and so can have different Monitor configs using some of the same OPs (eg, Quad or 5.1, various plug-in instantiations for metering and Sonarworks Reference 4 on different Control Room outputs - ).

This does not always behave correctly, sometimes loses output(s), needs to be re-started and/or may relate to particular Projects and Groups routing (odd, I believe Control Room saves only as global prefs). Suggestion: add the ability save and load Control Room presets (if its there, have not been able to find).

Studio output settings for Stereo, Quad and 5.1 are all set to ‘not connected’. This is still needs to be set like this and seems oddly long-winded. Why the need to have to create null outputs, I’d just do away with it, unless I’m missing something … (Nuage?)

Mixer
Add the ability to drag channel strips around vs. having to always go back to the edit page (& like other DAW conventions).

The small Mixer which opens in the lower pane of the Project window is still problematic. Although we have the ability to sync the Project windows with up to four main Mixer windows, this never works correctly with the Project window Mixer pane (nor always the Project window Inspector panel for that matter). The small lower Mixer seems to have a mind of its own in terms of trying to sync output & input channel visibility.

Screen updates
I have this issue following a clean install & setup. Screen updates will pause every minute or so, seems quite regular. Audio & video keeps playing fine but I am locked out of making any mouse or control surface adjustments anywhere for a few seconds.

This tends to be a regular ‘pulse’: ie: 60secs, fine, lock for 3 secs, then another short lock before returning to normal. All the other apps are fine, its just Nuendo. Win is pretty much locked down to do little in the background, Nuendo has already done its Media Bay indexing.

In the past, this usually seems to go away after a month or so of constant use. Am really hoping this goes away in N10 but would like to know what it is exactly and how to fix. Obviously, something is regularly polling for something …

Update: have been working with N10 solidly, old projects etc, very nice indeed.

  • Workspaces, seems to be a bug. Global works fine, but Project-level workspaces are not able to assign a key command beyond three workspaces. They are also not visible in the drop down menu.

Finally, looking forward to maybe Cloud for e-Licencer.

Well, I’m neither Charlie nor Steinberg, but my limited intellect tells me that somehow the two parts of Nuendo might be somewhat “protected” from each other. I’ve always viewed the Control Room as a bit of a separate entity that can ‘tap’ the mixer at various locations in the signal flow. A ‘tap’ is always just a “copy” of a signal, and since the two don’t really interact it’s a very safe way of going about things. Nothing I change in CR will ever change anything in the mixer, ever.

That might sound like an odd point to make, but imagine that you have set up a bunch of sources that feed CR, but that they have the potential to act more like solos instead. If they did, like in many mixers, then you’d actually “break” other signal flows by choosing specific sources. In a way it’d be like hitting solo on an output in the mixer and the entire path that flows into that output keeps playing but everything else gets muted. It’s the muting that’s the problem.

So by simply treating the CR sources a ‘taps’, or maybe ‘sends’, the actual mixer is “protected”.

To me this is actually a great feature, because it allows me to set up my mixer for all desired routing and no matter what I do regarding monitoring all mixes and stems will print according to plan.

But I get why it’s confusing many and seems unnecessary to some. Just wanted to offer my view on it.

I hardly dare to ask - but could it be that you experience that “lock-up” during auto-save?

Thanks, appreciated. Yes, I ‘get’ this, CR is a fantastic feature. My main point was ‘why the necessity to artificially create null outputs’ in the Outputs section Studio Connections. Odd, seems dated.

Many thanks: I really wish it were that, but alas, no. FYI, this particular issue seems to have come up in recent years in both the Cubase and Nuendo fora. There have been a number of suggested ‘fixes’ but I can’t say any of those have solved this issue as yet:
Check ‘auto save’ settings
Turn off auto hit-point detection
Video card drivers / try disabling HiDPI mode
Older projects (?)

The other odd thing is that eventually, it seems to go away all by itself. Most recently, this is a clean install of Win10Pro 1903 & including fresh Nuendo prefs etc. In all, the PC is running very snappy and positive, but the screen lags persist for now. Am also aware that this doesn’t seem to effect many users, or very often. Who knows, maybe its a Win thing …

I get the “lock” too, it’s one of the weirdest bugs/things I’ve seen in a software. Because it just disappears when it feels like…

BTW, “Add the ability to drag channel strips around vs. having to always go back to the edit page (& like other DAW conventions).” This would be great.

In the VST Connections Windows, in the Control Room tab, you can save and load your control Room presets.

Regards
Yannick

Well, the logic they used when designing this seems to still be valid. I can see two reasons for why it is the way it is (still);

a) Not everyone will use Control Room, and if one doesn’t, then one needs to use the “regular” output tab to route sound out of the app.

b) Some will want to route out other signals at the same time as using CR, but out of different outputs. So either that option is there or not.

Take my case, for instance. I use RME Madi I/O with 64 discrete ins and outs. I will never use the CR function in the same way that someone mixing fully within Nuendo would. In post settings there may be many Nuendo users with similar set ups.

Just one instance of what you are mentioning above.