[Vulconizer]

I get to use Cubase 4 at the studio. I have Cubase SE 3 at home to mess around with, but the difference between the two makes me not even want to use the SE 3 anymore.

The sheer difference in the EQ, the versatility, the added number of inserts and sends just blows SE 3 away. It has all the routing that I would expect to ever need for anything. Many user-definable options for the workspace make it easy for me to know what I have going on ( almost ) all of the time. ( If I ever know what's going on 100% of time, the whole world is in trouble. )

Some of the annoyances in SE 3 are gone. The only thing I wish they had done in 4 was allow for dragging a send from one spot in the chain to any other like you can do with the inserts.

It's also cool in that it just " looks " more professional than SE3. I know that's nothing to really base a judgment upon, but it makes me feel like I am working on something worth working on.

The Halion instruments that come with it are awesome, to say the least. We have yet to even start tweaking the various synths, but for someone who is really big into MIDI, I think this would be heaven. We have spent quite a few hours just laughing and being amazed by the sounds the synths alone can produce.

I give it a 10 in quality for the above listed reasons.

I'll give it a 9.5 for reliability because we've so far had no major issues. 6 months or so and loving it more and more.

An occasional little quirk here and there that seems to have something to do with us running up against the CPU limits when we have a few big VST instruments going at once. It just asks you to save what you're working on and that it needs to close down. We shut it down, reboot the computer and we're back in business in the time it takes to smoke a cigarette. May not even be a Cubase problem at all, but something running in the background. Still working on figuring it out. Maybe human error as well. It doesn't happen all the time, either.

All in all, I'd highly recommend this software to anyone who is serious about making their music and having all the flexibility they should ever want.