Cubase Beta Testing Begins!
After a critical system meltdown (laptop), my new Lenovo W500 arrived for the second time working as it should! This means I’m now able to start beta testing release candidates for Cubase 5! I’ve got myself a fancy 6 month license, and it’s now installed and running pretty smoothly on the laptop. Obviously there’s lots to go through with all the new features and tools, so I don’t have much to report yet, but my initial thoughts are …wow! It seems to be efficient – load times and responsiveness appear to be improved over Cubase 4.5. The shiny new effects and instruments are likewise well-executed. Specifically, the Beat Arranger midi plug-in is a really simple, but quite fun step sequencer for drums. The coolest thing is that each “lane” gets its own slider for nudging that lane forward or backward, which can give you some nice “pocket”-ish results quickly. Steinberg’s answer to Melodyne, VariAudio, performed surprisingly well on my initial test. I have rarely used Melodyne, so I don’t have much to compare it with though. The Auto Tune tool also appears to be quite capable. The included drum sampler, GrooveAgentOne looks fun, though I haven’t gotten deep into it yet. The ability to drag and drop samples across it’s pads is cool though…
I’m going to have to start cranking out the tunes to put this and Propellerhead’s Record through their paces. Will definitely post back after some more testing is done…
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