Nuendo

Nuendo arrived in 2000, when Pro Tools already owned the film studios and Steinberg wanted a foothold. It was built for the things that separate post from music: sync to picture and timecode, surround mixing, dialogue editing, ADR and enormous libraries of sound-effect files. Over time the engine has converged with Cubase, so the same project can in principle open in either, while Nuendo gets the features only a sound editor would miss.

An unusual niche is game audio: Nuendo connects directly to middleware such as Wwise, so effects can be pushed from the timeline into the game engine. Dolby Atmos support followed once streaming services started demanding object-based mixes. It isn't the best-known program in its category, but for a long time it has been the only serious alternative in it.