Cubase 5

[Mathieu Benoit]

My copy's been ordered, they expect 2-4 days delivery (straight from TO)... and now I play the waiting game.

Go ahead, ask me how excited I am!

[RoadDog]

ok... how excited are you?

[Mathieu Benoit]

...About this much!

I'll get into the details of why once I get it and start stress testing it. I just wanted to start up a thread in preparation.

[macrae11]

It is Steinberg though. So you'll be looking at at least 6-8 weeks of beta testing, before you actually get it operable. Then there will be regular bug fixes once every 3 months that will address one crippling bug each. After about 1.5 years of that... Cubase 6 comes out.

Seriously though. What features are so special with V5?

[Mathieu Benoit]

I don't knwo if this counts, but "it works" is a new feature that I'm fond of. They will actually also be supporting this release with updates, whihc used to be a C4 feature but no longer is.

Seriously... First off, it's not really that buggy right out of the gate. It's also been around since February, so they've already made the first update and fixed up a few little things. So that's a big selling point, the biggest problem with C4 is day by day you never knew which functions were going to work or not.

As far as actual features there 's a lot under the hood this time. First of which is a brand new VST3 Convolution reverb that I can't wait to try out. Secondly, Groove Agent ONE, and Loop Masher, together they give you lots of really easy beat creation options. Loop Masher kinda reminds me a lot of Fruity Loops, which is great for making drum beats. Groove Agent ONE is basically a drum sampler, and I think that you can import samples (but I'd have to double check)

New to Cubase, is a Melodyne style pitch corrector for monophonic sounds. The kicker is that it's built into the sample editor. So it's really accessable, and so far people are really loving it.

For me a BIG selling point is that it includes a 90-day free trial version of Halion Symphonic Orchestra (which usually retails around $800) with the option to get a direct upgrade to a full licence for only $99CAD!

The GUI is the same but now much more customizable, The Mediabay is fixed now and actually works.

It's just nice to be able to go on Cubase.net and not see a bunch of threads with people bitching about Steingberg and Cubase, there are a lot of happy thread on there lately, and that has been the case since Cubase 5 came out.

When I get my hands on it (likely tomorrow) I'll be able to give you a first hand opinion, but this is what I'm so far some the threads on Cuabse.net...

[macrae11]

Sounds cool.

I'd love to upgrade to PT 8, but I'll have to wait until it's worthwhile to upgrade my OS. A big job. Either that or get a new computer.

[Mathieu Benoit]

I just received the package. I'll be installing it this weekend. I'll keep you guys posted.

[Mathieu Benoit]

Alrighty....

Lots to talk about. I've had a couple of days to really play with it, and stress test it, so that I could really see what I got for my money. The short answer is a heck of a lot!

First off, contrary to Andrew's comment and my own experience with Cubase 4, Cubase 5 actually doesn't have that "beta test" feel. I've gone over just about every function I could think of (especially the functions that I knew to be buggy in C4) and everything works as it should. I've tried to make it crash by doing one thing then trying to perform several other functions at the same time and everything worked flawlessly. It's really stable, and everything works as expected. I know that may not seem like a big udgrade to some folks but if you ever worked with a tight deadline on the abortion that is C4, you would understand my excitement.

Of the features that should have worked in C4 but didn't, Mediabay works wonderfully in C5. Mediabay is a essentially a one-stop shop to search through all accessible loops, audio samples, and VST intrument sounds. The great thing is that all the media is organized by catagories and sub-catagories, so even if you don't know exactly what you're looking for you can find it by characteristic descriptions such as dark, mellow, bright, as well as general catagories like Brass, Drums, ect. Bottom line is that you can find whatever you may want to add to your music quickly before the idea escapes you. It seems like a simple thing but when it works right Mediabay is a very powerful tool. On a related note C5 came with a metric shit load of new audio samples and loops and a bunch of new sound presets in the VST instruments, all of which available very intuitively in Mediabay.

Still on the media side of things, a new feature to Cubase 5 is something of a VST instrument called LoopMash. It essentially can take any loop, or any rhythmic audio sample and import it, analyze it and allow you to manipulate it within the plug in. You can do up to 8 at a time. I had 3 going at once (Some horn section loops I had) I can tell you I had a lot of fun... You can even replace the audio in any of the notes of the syncopation, Combine that with the included Groove Agent ONE drum machine and you can get some pretty clever results.

Speaking of Groove Agent ONE. Finally Cubase has included a drum machine. Now, I haven't yet found any pre-programmed beats per se, so those looking for that feature may be disappointed. I don't care about such things though so it's of no concern to me. Groove Agent ONE will however let you import things that are avaible in Cubase (such as any thing you may have imported from your private collection into Mediabay.(As a side note this made me start to dice up the audio tracks that Andrew gave me from the Steve Zaat Sessions a while ago.)

Next big new feature is the REVerence plug-in. It's a Convolution reverb that quite frankly is the best sounding reverb I've ever had in the box even with just it's presets. But I can't wait to start using it to emulate actual rooms. Our live room upstairs comes to mind, as does the Imperial Theatre and Harbour Station. I can see myself running all over town collecting impulse responses now.

VariAudio, AudioWarp and Pitch Correct are all new to C5. I haven't used Pitch Correct but I can comment on the other two. VariAudio and AudioWarp both live within the sample editor. Essentially when you open the sample editor and click on either of these functions Cubase will begin to analyze the audio. VariAudio is essentially a basic version of Melodyne, and AudioWarp is the basic version of Beat Detective. They both work very well but I'd be more comfortable doing any reallheavy lifting in the original programs that they are trying to emulate. That being said, I may change my mind as I get more famioliar with them. I did stumble across something neat though, you can export the analyzed info as MIDi information. I found that option and I exported a vocal track that I had cleaned up the pitch on and when I exported it, it asked me if I wanted to put it on it's own track, do I did, then I started to try different things that one can normally do with a MIDi track (printed off score sheets, passed it through various VST intruments) pretty fun stuff. I'd use VariAUdio if there was just a few little things I wanted to nudge without opening ReWire, but if I had Melodyne plug-in version... I dunno. Hard to say if I'd use it much.

HALion Symphonic Orchestra was included as I mentioned earlier but I haven't gotten around to using it yet.

Because of the vast majority of work that I do directly to film, my favorite new feature by far is the ability to import any file format under the sun. C4 said that it had that "feature" but alas it didn't. I used to have to pay Roach in beer to convert file formats all the time. To test this out I downloaded a bunch of porno in various file formats and tried importing them into C5. WMV, MOV, AVI(DivX and Xvid) they all worked flawlessly with no glitches.

The export function has changed a lot. Way more flexible, with a lot of options to export tracks separately. My favorite thing actually is the new "channel batch export" function. This solves a problem that I had a few weeks ago where I was looking for an easy way to convert multiple files. What I did was start with an empty project, imported all the songs I wanted to import, then in the export dialog, I clicked "channel batch export" and exported each track individually in whatever file format I wanted, then when I click export it exports them all separately by their track names. Since during the import the track names where derived from the file name... Bada Bing Bada Boom! Batch file conversion made easy!

All in all I finally feel like I have a real professional platform to work with. I hope you've enjoyed my review. I'm certainly loving my upgrade. It's the best $286.48 I've ever spent. I haven't even gotten to the HALion Symphonic Orchestra yet.... *head explodes*

[Mathieu Benoit]

I'm uninstalling Cubase 4 tonight. I'm also upgrading the HALion Symphonic Orchestra license. All is well in my computer.