Product Reviews

With nearly two decades on the desktop music production scene, Steinberg's Cubase remains popular because it's so intuitive. The latest upgrade, Cubase SX 3, touts more than 70 new features with the emphasis on creative tools. You install it from a DVD, and it uses a USB dongle for copy protection. Apart from a Getting Started manual, the in-depth documentation appears on PDF files.

The main Project (arrange) page includes a few additions to the icon menu bar. Automation Return Time sets a crossfade period between altered and previous automation states, and the Colour Tool enables you to colour tracks and events for easy identification. Tracks are shown to the left of the Project window, with the recorded sequences in the centre, where they can be manipulated, copied or deleted. The Inspector pane toggles to show or hide track parameters, including effects options, a channel fader for the selected track, and the new Freeze icon and User Panel section.

The revised Midi Device Manager now supports old Cubase VST Mixermaps. It provides interactive graphics of various Midi gear functions that can be custom made and enhanced with bitmap graphics. Distinct sections of those Midi Device panels, such as filtering, can be accessed as graphic controls from a track's User Panel, with parameter changes recordable on separate, editable automation tracks.

The Edit In-Place function only works on Midi tracks. Midi parts in the track expand to show the piano-roll-style Key Editor within the Project window. Edit In-Place works across all the parts within a track, enabling you to continuously edit a sequence, including the drawing of data (such as Volume curves) across the separate sections.

However,

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Cubase SX 3's new killer feature is Audio Warp. As with Ableton's Live and Apple's GarageBand, it performs real-time tempo changes on audio tracks without affecting the pitch. It can also instantly change the key of selected parts. To enable tempo changes, if the audio file's tempo is known, then select it in the Audio Pool, click the Musical checkbox and enter the BPM. If the tempo is unknown, use the Sample Editor and click on the Audio Tempo Definition tool. This creates numerous Hitpoints that detect the beats.

Aided by improved Hitpoint detection and audio Scrub functions, Audio Warp offers different approaches that provide excellent results with no obvious unwanted artefacts. Furthermore, SX 3 supports ACID .wav files and AIFF loops, such as GarageBand's sound library. The real-time pitch changing is much simpler. Just select parts on the Project page and on the main menubar's Transpose field, and type in the number of semitones by which you want to adjust the pitch.

Audio Pre-Record, hidden under Expert mode within the VST Audiobay configuration, records up to 10 minutes of audio from any armed track. So even though you're not 'officially' recording, Cubase will record practice performances in the background and you can retrieve them as takes. Retrospective Record does the same for Midi tracks.

The Play Order Track provides a sequence-based approached to assembling an arrangement by drawing blocks across specific areas, such as verse and chorus. These sections can be played, repeated and rearranged from the Play Order List.

The graphics problem that dogs Cubase SX, though, has reappeared. This time, video clips don't show properly in the thumbnail track, if at all. Moreover, the video playback window frequently appears blank, yet we found that simply clicking Apply in the Video settings brought the screen to life every time.

Surprisingly, Cubase SX 3 has no new effects or VST Instruments, and there's still no support for Audio Units, the plug-in architecture built into Mac OS X. No doubt Steinberg believes the innovations in Cubase SX 3 are sufficient - and with good reason. It's still the easiest sequencer to use on the market and, with features like Audio Warp and Play Order Track, serious music making just got a whole lot easier.