Steinberg Cubase SX

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KruciaL
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Steinberg Cubase SX

Post by KruciaL »

Steinberg's Cubase is one of the best-known music production applications currently in use by professionals and enthusiasts worldwide. Originally released for the Atari platform back in 1989, and later adapted for Mac and Windows, as a MIDI sequencer Cubase has gone from strength to strength in the last 13 years. The biggest development during this period happened after Apple's introduction of the PowerPC processor to the Mac platform, making it possible for Steinberg to release the Mac version of Cubase VST in 1996. The idea of a MIDI + Audio sequencer was already fairly well established, but Steinberg's Virtual Studio Technology (VST) added real-time effects and EQ within the familiar sequencer environment using no additional DSP hardware. Image In recent years, Steinberg have turned their research and development effort towards Nuendo, a high-end application offering a competitive 'native' alternative to hardware-based workstations like Pro Tools. In fact, it could be argued that the last major update to Cubase was version 4 on the Mac in 1998, which was never released for the Windows platform. Version 5 eventually gave Windows users the same feature set in the summer of 2000 and, in addition, offered more plug-ins and a general 'spring clean'. But with the release of Logic 5 at the beginning of the year, Cubase was beginning to show a few grey hairs — rumour has it that lines of code from the original Atari version were still lurking in there somewhere.

Cubase SX is currently only available for the Windows platform and requires a pretty powerful computer running either Windows 2000 or XP (see What About The Mac? box for information about the Mac version of SX). While there were rumours of the SX alpha and beta versions running on earlier versions of Windows, I didn't try this personally and it must be stressed that Cubase SX is unsupported on, if not completely incompatible with, Windows 9x, ME and NT.

Some users will undoubtedly be annoyed at the prospect of having to upgrade Windows before they can get their hands on this new Cubase. However, if Steinberg can ultimately provide a better product by not supporting legacy versions of Windows and focusing on new technology to improve performance, this can only be a good thing for users in the long term

The minimum requirements are significantly higher than before (a 500MHz Pentium 3 with 256MB RAM) and Steinberg's recommended setup includes a 1GHz or faster Pentium 3 or Athlon with 512MB RAM. However, these specifications are fairly typical of most modern computers sold with Windows XP, so anyone with a reasonably recent machine should be able to run SX without too much trouble. It's also worth pointing out that a single display with a 1024x768 resolution should be considered the bare minimum, since certain windows need this much space just to be fully visible.

A final requirement, which has become commonplace in the last couple of years, is a free USB port to accommodate the new USB dongle, replacing the previous parallel-port device that caused a few headaches for users when Cubase VST 5 was first released. I had no compatibility problems with the new USB dongle and from a personal standpoint, if software has to be protected, give me a dongle every time! According to comments made in Frankfurt, moreover, the new dongle has the potential for Steinberg and other third parties to store additional product authorisation information. If this facility is utilised, the SX dongle could in theory provide copy protection for all the plug-in instruments and effects running within Cubase, much like Emagic's XSKey. And while the words 'eggs' and 'basket' spring to mind, any effort to ease the pain of copy protection is always welcome.


For those buyers who are swayed by large numbers, Cubase SX is unlikely to disappoint. Where audio is concerned, assuming your computer is powerful enough, each Project supports a maximum of 200 audio and 64 group tracks, with sampling rates and resolutions up to 96kHz and 32-bit. Although every audio file in a Project must use the same sample rate, it is possible to mix and match bit depths if you require, which can be especially useful if you want to bounce 16-bit audio tracks and keep the internal 32-bit resolution used by any insert effects, for example.

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A reason to love Windows XP: here's the Reason 2 playing the 'Realization' demo song, Rewired into Cubase SX with the Waves L2 plug-in working its magic on the master output. Notice that the full list of Reason MIDI inputs are available as outputs to the MIDI track in Cubase, and also the fact the computer is on the Internet, running Internet Explorer, Outlook, Instant Messenger and Word (to write this review). No glitches, no crashes, and it sounds pretty awesome too...
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