Steinberg Cubase 4 Studio Reviews

[brandondrury]

Steinberg Cubase 4 Studio @ Musiciansfriend



Steinberg Cubase 4 Studio @ Zzounds


Steinberg Cubase 4 Studio Description
Designed from the ground up for professional music production, Cubase 4 set a new standard for integrated music production software by combining powerful audio and MIDI recording, synthesis, editing, mixing and effects. This streamlined Cubase 4 Studio package has 46 plug-ins to give you the power to create, record, and mix. SoundFrame universal sound integration manages any sound from any source hardware or software while the MediaBay provides an ideal way to organize media files. Cubase 4 software also features Steinberg's unique Play Order Track, for composing and arranging patterns and AudioWarp for real-time time stretching and pitch shifting of audio. Harness all this production power with a user interface redesigned to speed-up your workflow and boost your creativity.

[uab9253]

I should have this by next week. As soon as I get it up and running, I'll review my first impression and then again in 30 days. So far I have been tickled with LE.

[uab9253]

Ok. my first impression. Steinberg makes the installation a pain in the ass. The dongle or the dingle - the USB license key - is another pain in the ass. Getting Halion One to make an appearance in Cubase 4 studio was an excruciating pain in the ass.

Now that it is up and running. It obviously can do a lot more than LE could. I can now happily drop drum loops in directly from EZ Drummer and build drum tracks on the fly. The track EQ is much bigger and better and easy to use. It even has cool and usable presets - I just know how this crowd loves those of use who use presets!!! Many more VST plugins but I haven't tried any yet. I've literally only had this thing up and running for an hour or so. It looks much much more high end than LE. I LOVE the Notepad feature for each track. Now I can make notes right here in the application. Appears to be way more CPU and RAM hungry than LE, but duh.
More to come later.

[uab9253]

Quality: 10
So far so good. The built in VST's are pretty usable, although nothing earth shattering. So far it seems to be a little more CPU hungry than LE, but that is to be expected. It has a very well thought out and full feature set - almost every control is customizable. The included Halion One synth is great, particularly when coming from only having a Roland XP-10 and an old Casio CZ101. The eq is very intuitive and there are enough inserts and sends to keep most happy. I would imagine you would tax the CPU long before you ran out of slots.

Reliability: 8
So far, it has not crashed, but I have not asked it to do backflips yet, nor explored all of the functionality. I do get some irritating crackle when I open menus and a track is playing back, but the CPU looks ok. I have not mixed and mastered a full project yet. So far so good.

Overall Rating: 9
So far, I am really impressed. This thing does everything I could ever imagine needing to do and then some. So far fairly easy to use, as I am a newb to PC recording.