Recording - June 2020 - 8

R&R

REVIEWED &
REVISITED

Steinberg Cubase Pro 10.5

Creativity is the name of the game in the latest update of this popular DAW
REVIEW BY PAUL VNUK JR.

t's our annual DAW issue-and time for remarks on the latest Cubase
Pro update! I've been a faithful Cubase user for 19 years, and I've been
tracking its growth in our magazine since 2009 with the release of
Cubase 5. For the past eleven years, Steinberg has adhered to a release
cycle of alternating updates one year with incremental .5 updates the next.
Last year we looked at Cubase 10 for the company's 30th Anniversary,
and now here we have 10.5.
Cubase 10 was built around an updated 32-bit integer, 64-bit audio
engine. It added improved support for VR mixing, MPE (MIDI Polyphonic
Expression), and ARA (Audio Random Access) support. Further new features included redesigns to its channel strips, MixConsole Snapshots, Audio Alignment, channel-by-channel Latency Monitoring, a complete vocal
tuning redesign with VariAudio 3, the new Distroyer overdrive plugin,
and more. For a full rundown, seek out my review in the June 2019 issue.

Cubase at ten and a half

Cubase 10.5 comes in three retail flavors: Pro, Artist, and Elements. Lighter AI
and LE versions bundle with Steinberg/
Yamaha and third-party interfaces,
respectively-comprehensive comparison
charts are posted at the Steinberg website. For this review, we'll be focusing on
the Pro version.
Cubase now supports only 64-bit
operating systems, specifically, macOS
Mojave and Catalina, and Windows
10 versions 1809 and 1903. Steinberg
recommends Intel i5 and up for faster
processing, and 16 gigs of RAM. You'll
need 30 gigs of free hard drive space,
and a USB eLicenser (this is required for
the Artist edition as well).
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RECORDING June 2020

Cubase-Creative

While the Cubase 10 upgrade focused on new features and workflow
enhancements, the new update weighs
heavily in the direction of enhanced creativity. That said, as of 10.5.12, more
than 35 bugs have been addressed.

New workflow enhancements

Work more colorfully. New in Cubase
10.5 is (finally!) the ability to colorize the fader channels in the mixer window, just as you
would colorize tracks in the project window,
and not just the label, but the whole track.

Edit faster. A simple but effective addition is the Combine Selection Tools feature.
When enabled, both the Range Selection Tool (upper) and Object Selection
Tool (lower) are always available based
on where you hover inside of an audio
clip/track. This feature is similar to the
zone-based tool selection introduced in
VariAudio 3. It's simple and handy for
speeding up workflow, although I'm having
to retrain my brain after almost 20 years of
jumping around the selection tools.
Import even more tracks from projects.
It's been possible for a while now to import audio and MIDI tracks and performances from other songs and sessions.
Now, the track types that you can grab
from other sessions are expanded to include effects, folder, and group tracks,
along with options for choosing which
elements or attributes of each track that
you want to include. For example, instead of just grabbing a vocal, guitar, or
drum performance from a previous session, you can now grab the vocal compression, EQ, and effects routing from an
earlier project, or a favorite effects chain,
or even a full drum folder, right down to
its individual channel settings. While you
could do something similar with channel/
mixer presets or even session templates,
in many ways this is less restrictive and a
faster way of working; it's more organic,
and you don't need the forethought to
save templates and presets.

Recording - June 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - June 2020