Steinberg’s music production suite has been given a major revamp in Cubase 4 and its cut-down Studio edition, which offers a large subset of the features at less than half the price.

A new-look interface helps minimise the screen clutter inevitable with software that requires you to monitor many features at once. You can easily choose which controls and information appear in the Track Inspector and Channel panels. But the changes are not so much as to confuse users familiar with older versions.

There are, however, a lot of new features to get to grips with. They include a new Instrument track that provides a short-cut to setting up a virtual instrument, though it is limited to one midi input and a stereo output.

You can set up and save track presets that store configurations of audio, Midi or Instrument tracks. These can be categorised to assist searching and reuse.

They are part of a new set of asset management facilities, designed for professional musicians and studios, in two complementary modules: MediaBay helps you to organise and preview audio, Midi, video and project files as well as presets; SoundFrame helps you manage sounds from any source, and search for them using a variety of criteria.

SoundFrame starts you off with more than 1,000 fully indexed sounds of its own. Cubase 4 (but not Studio 4) also has a separate tag editor, allowing you to view and amend attributes to facilitate searches.

Also available only in the larger package is Control Room, which is identical to a module of the same name in Steinberg’s Nuendo 2 product. It provides a soft console for controlling outputs to studio monitors and headphones, and inputs from the likes of tape decks and CDs.

Cubase 4 also introduces VST3, the latest version of Steinberg’s open Virtual Studio Technology standard for plug-in modules. VST3 is backwards compatible with earlier standards but easier on the CPU, as audio is processed only when a signal is present.

VST3’s main party trick is support for multiple buses. A VST3 plug-in will detect whether a channel is mono, stereo, or 5.1 surround sound and adjust its operation accordingly. Incidently the suite can import and export the new MP3 Surround format.

Cubase 4 comes with 33 VST3 plug-ins (21 in Studio 4) and four new virtual instruments: Halion One, Prologue, and (not Studio 4) Spector and Mystic. A downside, which has irritated some Cubase users, is that the new version does not support Direct X plug-ins.

Other new features include AudioWarp time stretching and pitch changing, and improved scoring facilities, though we did not get time to try these out. This in itself speaks volumes about Cubase 4: there are too many new features to be taken in without extended use.

Cubase 4 users get a comprehensive printed manual, which is a great help even if the printed screenshots do not always correspond with what you see on screen. Sadly the book is a luxury Studio 4 users have to do without, though a useful printed tutorial comes with both versions.

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Sony Acid XMC 6 music creation software
Although Acid XMC is a no-frills product, it is still capable of producing good-quality recordings

O-Generator music software
A great package that could help improve existing musical ability

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