AudioMedia - March 2009 - (Page 32) STEINBERG CUBASE 5 Groove Agent – pads with sounds on. It looks like a toy, but try working as fast in any other virtual sampler. LoopMash – we're not absolutely certain what’s happening here, but that might be a good thing. Beat It with the new BeatDesigner drum pattern editor – one of the best of its kind in any sequencer. squeaky voices into low and sexy breathy ones. Sibilants are processed separately – or more accurately, they’re not processed at all – and with a ± semitone transposition range it’s easy to morph sung vocals into monstrous deep breathing – expect to hear this effect in a cinema near you soon. I found pitch correction less transparent. You can snap the pitch to major or minor scales, or play them in over MIDI in real time, but I needed to dial up the speed and dial down the tolerance, where it's easy get an instant but slightly harsh-sounding robo-Cher effect. Aside from the new rhythm plug-ins, the only major new effects addition is the REVerence sampling reverb. With a glossy panel that not only includes a sample plot but also location shots of the sources, this is a versatile and nice sounding effect. Steinberg isn’t saying if the technology is based on Yamaha’s hardware reverbs, but the sound is smooth, with the usual sampled advantage that rooms and halls sound like real rooms and real halls, and not poor imitations. The parameter set isn’t huge, but then you don’t necessarily want it to be – reverbs with tens of parameters can easily turn into time vampires. In REVerence, time scaling, size, and ER mix cover all of the basics, and there’s also a three band EQ. Nuendo users will be pleased to see that Cubase has been given a version of Nuendo’s latest automation set. At the time of the review an exotic bug that caused ‘fill to end’ to fail came to light, but this will be fixed in an imminent update. A new panel offers quick access to the most commonly accessed parameters, and there are also new Suspend features that turn off reading and writing if you want quick manual control. In the ‘and the rest’ section, though still significant, there’s a DVD’s-worth of free samples and instruments, and a -bit version of Steinberg’s Halion Orchestra collection. These work to best effect with the new articulation and expression Work-M ate features. If you’re those who can write orchestral scores successfully using a score editor, the articulation options will make your life very much more productive and pleasant. But expression can also be added using the piano roll and drum editors – you can mark a note bar with a tremolo marking and it will auto-repeat for you. This is clever technology, but it takes some practice and imagination to get the most from it. It’s not reserved for orchestral writing – the free instruments are designed with these expression features in mind, and you can add the effect to basses, guitars, brass, and strings, which are available. Elsewhere there’s some minor technical tidying up of OS support. Under Vista you can use an entire terabyte of memory, if you happen to have it to hand. It’s more likely that your PC will max out at GB, which is still ample for a handful of big sample libraries, and more plug-ins than you can shake a cliché at. Vista users can also use WASAPI drivers for lower latency. Mac users have been de-Carbonised and are now Cocoa-ised. In English this means support for older versions of Mac OS X is dead – not that you’re likely to be using them. According to Steinberg, rebuilding the graphics in the Mac version using Apple's Cocaa framework is an important step toward supporting a future version of -bit OS X, but Cubase will require further development to reach full compatibility with -bit OS X. Perhaps most useful of all is the new batch export feature. This can split a project for archiving or transfer to another DAW, saving individual tracks to separate files. It also works as a multi-tracked bounce down and freeze. You can archive an entire pool, as before, but this freeze option includes effects and track settings, making it closer to a generic file-based mastertape in an accessible format which should be easy to transfer to a different DAW. Deciding what should or shouldn’t be frozen is always a challenge – usually, you’ll want both raw audio, and audio with effects for maximum remix potential later, but there’s no quick way to save both at once, and some manual setting up is required first. But it’s better than ‘mixing down’ each track one by one, which used to be the only option. Previous first releases of Cubase have been criticised for poor reliability. Cubase is much more robust than Cubase was, but even so, a built-in rescue feature traps crashes. Instead of falling over and dying, Cubase prints an error message and suggests you save your work and restart. You can often carry on with a session regardless, but when you can’t, a saved backup means you’re unlikely to lose work. There’s also auto-backup, which saves a working copy in the background. Ergonomically, a few quirks remain. I still couldn't, for example, swap out a VSTi on a MIDI track and replace it with another – I had to reassign both. Window management has been a bigger issue in the past, and thought has gone into it for this update; there’s a ‘stay on top’ feature for plug-ins, and mixer channel views no longer proliferate automatically unless you ‘Alt’-click them. You can design your own workspaces and switch between them, but plug-in sprawl can still be a problem. A clever switching system, perhaps with a grouped window bar or icons along the bottom of the working area, would be a leap foward. Cubase has some great new features and it continues to be, in my opinion, the best of all of the PC sequencer/workstations – arguably, away from the Digi/Avid stable. On the Mac, the competition is powerful and offers impressive value, so the choice is less straightforward. Even so, this update has plenty to interest existing owners of Cubase and Nuendo – there’s more of a gap than ever between the two, but smaller studios and one-man bands can easily do basic spotting and sound design in Cubase. And for newcomers, Cubase remains a desirable choice. ∫ Conclusion I N F O R MAT I O N £ Cubase 5 GB£499.00 (inc.VAT) Cubase 5 Upgrade GB£166.00 (inc.VAT) Cubase 5 Studio GB£332.00 (inc.VAT) Cubase 5 Studio Upgrade GB£107.00 (inc.VAT) A Steinberg Media Technologies, Neuer Hoeltigbaum 22-32, 22143 Hamburg, Germany A cubase screen exposé. Reverence MIX. T +49 (0) 40 210 350 W www.steinberg.net 32 AUDIO MEDIA MARCH 2009 http://www.steinberg.net
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