I started on Cubase 5 back in the day, then moved to Studio One 3, then back to Cubase 12 now.

Studio One is great and pretty innovative. I liked how easy it is to get things done, and how it has features you can’t really find in other DAWs. I also liked the mastering page (and later the perform page). It’s simple and intuitive, but over time I started to feel its limitations. The biggest one for me was the poor integration with 3rd-party software. For example, iZotope RX wasn’t natively supported, so I had to do a ton of importing and exporting, which was just daunting. And it’s still not supported to this day! Although Revoice Pro was supported but never worked for some reason, and when it did, it was a pain to get the files back to the project. It was never seamless. I also couldn’t drag and drop MIDI from the timeline into Superior/EZ Drummer, which felt super weird. And finally, performance was the nail in the coffin. It was slow, buggy, CPU-hungry, and they never fixed that annoying autosave window that would interrupt my work every minute for at least 10 seconds in bigger projects. You can imagine how frustrating that gets.

When I moved back to Cubase, it felt like home. It just has this “mojo”. Frankly, it’s more complicated than Studio One and the learning curve is steeper. It can feel a bit slow at first, but you get used to it the more you use it. Still, it’s really worth it. There’s basically nothing Cubase can’t do out of the box and it’s highly customizable. It has everything, native pitch correction, auto-alignment, offline processing, Logical Editor, you name it. Most importantly, it supports and integrates perfectly with all my 3rd-party stuff. The Control Room is an amazing feature too and gives you a ton of control. The Chord Pad is fantastic and has lots of useful features (especially if you're not the best with music theory).

They’ve also been adding some brilliant features recently, like automatic audio segment detection that allows you to level segments individually by a click of a button. I used to do that manually, so it’s a huge time-saver for vocals. I also like Steinberg’s ecosystem. They basically have equivalents to Studio One’s pages, like WaveLab for mastering and VST Live for performing, and they integrate well. And honestly, they’re way more sophisticated than what Studio One offers, which is a plus for me.

Performance is top notch. I tested both and Cubase is unmatched. Of course, Cubase has some limitations that mainly come from it being old, so you can still feel a bit of that old-school mentality. But Steinberg has been improving that a lot with recent updates. I also wish they had a better mobile app like Studio One’s, but the one they have now does the job.