Steinberg Cubasis VST

With support for both MIDI and Audio tracks, along with real‑time EQ, effect plug‑ins, and VST Instruments, Cubasis VST is probably the most comprehensive package available at such a low price.

The most affordable of Steinberg's MIDI + Audio sequencing packages has just received a thorough overhaul, to the point where it now incorporates some features not yet found in the full PC version of Cubase. Martin Walker tries out the new Cubasis VST.

All the major sequencer companies offer cut‑down versions of their flagship packages in order to tempt new users to their range. For some time, Steinberg's entry‑level sequencer has been Cubasis AV: however, with only eight audio tracks and no support for plug‑ins, this was looking distinctly underpowered compared with competition such as Cakewalk's Home Studio and Emagic's MicroLogic AV. For the time being at least, Cubasis AV will retain its place at the base of Steinberg's Mac range. On the PC, however, its replacement by Cubasis VST changes the situation considerably. The new package offers up to 32 audio channels and 64 MIDI tracks, hosts real‑time VST and DirectX effects, as well as MIDI and Audio Mixers, the latter with automation. Owners of the full Cubase VST package could be forgiven for feeling envious of some of its features, such as three built‑in VST Instruments, mastering and CD burning. Also available soon is the Cubasis VST Project Pack, consisting of the software plus Steinberg's Project Audio Card, featuring stereo analogue I/O with a "high‑quality" mic input, low latency, and a 20‑bit S/PDIF digital output.

As you might expect, there are a number of areas in which Cubasis VST lags behind the full Cubase package. But at under a third of its price, many musicians may be considering the new Cubasis VST as a low‑cost alternative, and be wondering just what sacrifices they have to make.

Getting Started

Master Unit is a stand‑alone bundled utility that lets you assemble your final Cubasis mixes into a complete album, and then burn them direct to CD‑R.

Steinberg recommend your PC has a Pentium II 300MHz processor or faster, along with 64Mb of RAM, which seems a good starting point. The CD‑ROM contains three separate applications: most users will not only choose to install Cubasis VST itself, but also the bundled Wavelab Lite audio editor, and the stand‑alone Master Unit utility for CD mastering and burning. Including the Demo song, this full install still only takes up about 70Mb on your hard drive, but the CD‑ROM also includes a further 332Mb of Cubasis Song Templates. These cover eight musical styles — Ambient, Electro, Electronica, Hip‑Hop, House, R&B, Techno, and Trip‑Hop — along with four further selections of drum patterns in the VSTBeats folders. They provide a good introduction to the audio features of Cubasis, but don't use MIDI or VST Instruments at all.

Arranging And Editing

The Cubase Arrange page is the original on which most other designs are based, and the one provided in Cubasis VST retains a good subset of its features. Each horizontal Track can contain any number of coloured Parts, and these in turn contain either Audio or MIDI data. If they contain audio then the waveforms are displayed inside the Parts, but unfortunately there is no option to display note event information in the MIDI parts.

The Inspector panel appears as a vertical strip down the left‑hand side of the Arrange page, and allows you to alter parameters for a selected part or an entire track. For audio tracks you can change Delay to shift the relative timing, while for MIDI tracks you can enter program and bank changes, change overall volume, transpose, or alter velocity values. Unlike the full versions of Cubase, you can't shift relative timing of MIDI parts and tracks, or change the length of MIDI notes, compress their velocity values, or alter pan settings.

Cut‑and‑paste editing in the Arrange page is extremely easy using the selection of six graphic tools. You use the pointer tool to select parts, the eraser to delete them, the magnifying glass to audition a single part, the pencil to change its size or create new parts, scissors to cut them into several pieces, and the glue tool to join them back together. The only tools missing from the full version are Mute and Match Quantise, neither of which are likely to be essential to most entry‑level musicians. Sadly you also lose the global cut, split, and insert facilities that make it simpler to shuffle the overall verse and chorus structure of your song, although with care you can still achieve the same results without them.

MIDI editing is fairly well catered for, since the Key Editor contains most of the features of the full Cubase version, such as the split screen displaying note data at the top and MIDI controller data beneath, along with arrow tool for selection, pencil for entering notes, brush for continuous 'painting' of notes, eraser for deleting them, line tool for drawing in controller information, and magnifying glass to hear individual notes. Only six controllers are available for editing in the bottom window, although these are probably the most useful, comprising Pitch‑bend, Aftertouch, Velocity, Modulation, Main Volume, and Pan.

The List Editor is also comprehensive, allowing you to work directly on any MIDI data, and both Key and List editors also let you enter data in step mode, which will appeal to those without keyboard controllers. A Score Editor is also available, which has a good range of basic facilities, while the Mastertrack list editor lets you change tempo and time signature during the course of a song.

Quantising is fairly basic, with only one option available — Over Quantise. This is the most 'musical' form of quantisation since it detects and keeps notes in chords together, and leaves notes alone that are consistently ahead or behind the beat, only pulling into line those that are regarded as badly timed. Of the other quantise types available in the full version of Cubase, I suspect that the one most musicians will be disappointed to lose is Groove quantise, which lets you match your playing to a predefined groove template, or even match the feel to an audio track.

For audio tracks, you can import files from Recycle and Mixman as well as WAV files, but Cubasis VST has no built‑in wave editing facilities. Instead, Wavelab Lite is bundled for this purpose, providing comprehensive cut‑and‑paste editing down to sample accuracy, along with a small collection of processing tools including Normalise, Change Gain, Fade In and Out, Crossfade, Dynamics, and EQ. It has no Master Section like the full version of Wavelab, and therefore no access to VST or DirectX effect plug‑ins. However, this is no great drawback, since these facilities are already available inside Cubasis VST.

Mixing & Effects

The Audio Mixer has largely the same facilities as its more upmarket brothers, with channel fader, peak‑reading meter, pan control, mute and solo buttons, along with FX/EQ and Insert buttons for adding real‑time effects. The main differences are that the Channel and Master mixers are combined into one unit, and there are no group channels or global Master effects available, although the Master channel retains the Export Audio button to mix down your songs to a single stereo pair for later mastering.

The real‑time effect options are significantly reduced from those of Cubase VST, with only a single Insert Effect slot provided for each playback channel rather than four, and with only two bands in the EQ rather than four. However, the biggest limitation is that there are only two Send Effect slots, compared with the eight available in Cubase. This is quite limiting — most people will want to dedicate one to global reverb, leaving only one other global effect available, and forcing reliance on the channel Inserts to add effects to individual tracks. Four plug‑ins are supplied — Autopan, Choirus2, StereoEcho, and Wunderverb3 — but of course compatibility with both DirectX and VST plug‑ins means that you can add a host of other freeware, shareware, and commercial ones to taste.

The MIDI mixer lets you set volume, pan, reverb and chorus levels for each MIDI track, as well as alter master volume. If you have a GM‑compatible synth you can select its patches by name, and if you have one with GS or XG compatibility you can also use Mute/Solo buttons, choose reverb and chorus algorithms, and set reverb time. This mixer is an updated version of the Cubase GM/GS/XG Editor, and although its facilities are largely the same, the graphics certainly look a lot smarter.

Special Features

Up to four VST Instruments can be activated per song, and three are bundled with the package. The Neon polyphonic synth and the VB1 physically modelled bass guitar are identical to those provided with Cubase, while the LM9 is a cut‑down version of the LM4 drum module. It only has nine drum pads to the LM4's 18, no individual drum tuning, and of course no 24‑bit capability, but having a built‑in drum synth in an entry‑level program is still a wonderful thing. Acoustic and Beat Box kits are supplied, and you can create kits with your own samples using a suitable shareware or text‑based editor.

The mastering and CD burning facilities are provided by a separate stand‑alone application named Master Unit. This is a cut‑down version of Clean!, which I reviewed in SOS July '99. You can import WAV files or audio tracks from CD, or even use MP3 files (which first get converted back to WAV format, so that you can import them as normal tracks). Once you have imported a collection of tracks you can sort them into a suitable order, normalise them, add a fade in or out to each track, and change the gap times between tracks. You can audition the tracks individually, and even more usefully, listen to the transitions between tracks to help you adjust your fade‑outs and gap lengths.

The DeClicker, DeCrackler, and DeNoiser options from Clean! have been removed, but then Master Unit is not intended for restoration purposes. If you've been careful with your own recorded levels you shouldn't have any unwanted noise to deal with anyway. However, the Bass Boost, Brilliance, and Stereo Spread controls of Clean! have been retained, and these do help tweak individual tracks to create a more cohesive sound for your album.

In Use

Using Cubasis VST is far more like using Cubase than its AV predecessor. The audio engine seems to be the latest one used by the full Cubase VST, as its version number appears as 3.7r1, so you should expect good stability from the program as well. I tried out a variety of full Cubase song files along with plenty of third‑party plug‑ins during the course of the review, and experienced no compatibility problems at all. If you do get any audio glitching during recording or playback there are a few options to try out in the Audio System Setup, but not as many as in Cubase.

I personally preferred the combined Channel/Master mixer to the separate windows of the full version, since it meant one less window to move around, and found the effect arrangements perfectly adequate. Some users may miss being able to chain Insert effects, and not being able to have more than two Send effects, but this seems a reasonable compromise considering the price.

Recording and playing back VST Instruments also proved quite easy, and I successfully installed and ran Steinberg's Model E as well as the three bundled Instruments. Cubasis VST has the huge advantage of supporting ASIO as well as MME and DirectSound drivers, and if you have a soundcard with ASIO drivers you can manage good low latency values. I had no problems running the latest version 5.02 drivers for my Echo Gina card, giving me 7mS latency.

The other two bundled applications worked fine. Wavelab Lite is straightforward to use, and perfectly adequate for basic audio editing, while Master Unit really adds the icing to the cake, by letting you gather together your Cubase songs and burn them direct to CD‑R.

My one reservation about Cubasis VST is the lack of any display of MIDI information in the Arrange window. I know that audio is the primary feature in most modern MIDI + Audio sequencers, but VST Instruments also use MIDI data, and this means that you end up flying blind when playing back both MIDI synths and VST Instruments, since you cannot see any note data at all.

Final Thoughts

Cubasis VST is a vast improvement on its predecessor, providing a huge range of audio and MIDI features, some of which (like VST Instruments) have only recently become available in the more upmarket versions. Soundblaster Live! Platinum owners already get a bundled version, but I am told this only supports half as many audio channels, and includes no VST Instruments as standard.

I suspect that many musicians (not just beginners) will be more than happy with the facilities provided in Cubasis VST, especially since they can add shareware plug‑ins and VST Instruments for no extra cost. Most of Steinberg's efforts have gone into these real‑time audio aspects, and this is obviously where most musicians' interests lie. I don't think this package will suit those looking for a cut‑down version of Cubase for mainly MIDI use, but then this isn't really what Steinberg had in mind.

Overall, this is one of the most comprehensive packages I've seen for such a low price. The first version of Cubase I bought cost double this, and had no audio facilities at all. At £99, Cubasis VST has to be an absolute bargain.