Cubase Audio DAE (Dec 1994)

[supernova777]

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/1994_articles/dec94/cubasedae.html

Steinberg's Cubase is perhaps the best-known and most widely used music sequencer program in Europe. Cubase Audio DAE for the Mac (the designation DAE signifies that the program now uses Digidesign's Digital Audio Engine software) adds a versatile digital audio recorder/editor to this popular sequencer -- as long as you have the appropriate Digidesign hardware.

Existing users will be wondering what this latest version has to offer, while potential new users will be wondering whether to go for Cubase Audio or for one of its competitors in the 'sequencing-with-audio' stakes, so I'll be talking about some of the features and issues that may affect this decision, as well as addressing the question of what hardware is needed to set up an effective system.

The only difference between Cubase the MIDI sequencer and Cubase Audio is the addition of the audio features -- and you can run the program simply as a MIDI sequencer if you don't have a Digidesign audio card currently installed in your Mac. So what audio features do you get?

You can designate any track as an audio track, and record audio into it, or load in an existing audio file from hard disk in Sound Designer II format. Once you have audio in a track, you can edit this audio much as you can MIDI data, cutting up parts in the overview editor with the scissors tool, and cutting and pasting sections to rearrange your music. A useful selection of more detailed editing features is also included. For instance, you can strip out the 'silence' between the hits on an acoustic percussion (or other) instrument which you have recorded, then quantise the resulting series of small audio regions, each containing one percussion hit. If you try this with a series of guitar notes which are much less 'cleanly' played than, say, a clave or snare drum, the beginning of each audio region may not be where the full 'weight' of the note falls, so you can set a Q-point some way into the audio region -- and this Q-point will be where the region is quantised to. This is a very useful feature which is not available in Digital Performer or Studio Vision as yet!

[Protools5LEGuy]

HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS

To make use of the audio features of Cubase Audio you will need either an AudioMedia NuBus card, a Sound Tools system, or a Pro Tools system. The Sound Tools and Pro Tools systems both feature a NuBus card and a 19-inch rackmounted audio interface. The audio interface is common to both systems and has four XLR inputs and four XLR outputs for analogue audio, plus a pair of phono sockets for S/P DIF digital audio input and output, and a pair of XLR sockets for AES/EBU digital audio input and output. A pair of BNC sockets are also provided, to accept a digital sync signal, and to allow a 'through' connection for the sync signal to other Pro Tools interfaces with 8-, 12-, or 16-channel Pro Tools systems. With the Sound Tools and AudioMedia systems, and with the basic 4-channel Pro Tools system, you can use four separate channels of audio. In the AudioMedia card, these are mixed internally to come out of the card as a stereo pair, whereas with the audio interface, you get four separate audio outputs. You can expand the Pro Tools hardware up to 16 channels by adding extra cards and interface units, but you also have to add a Digidesign System Accelerator card. With larger Pro Tools systems, and depending on how many NuBus slots you have in your Mac, and on what other cards (such as SampleCell or video monitor cards) you're using, you may well need to use a Nubus Expansion Chassis to accommodate all the cards. Digidesign make a 12-slot chassis, and a company called Second Wave make 4- and 8-slot chassis.

To synchronise to SMPTE, you'll need an interface such as the Video Slave Driver, or the SMPTE Slave Driver from Digidesign, or an Opcode or MOTU interface such as the MIDI Time Piece or Studio 4/5. Another, more expensive, option is the Timeline MicroLynx, available from Stirling Audio. This offers the added benefit of machine control for professional audio or video tape machines, which you will need for correct sync with tape-based systems. A machine synchroniser 'looks at' the SMPTE coming off tape, and if the speed of this SMPTE has varied due to tape-stretching or transport anomalies, it sends 'tach' pulses to the motors in the tape machines to speed them up or slow them down, compensating for these variations.

As far as the computer is concerned, you should use the fastest Mac you can get, such as a Quadra 800 or 950. Cubase Audio DAE needs a minimum of 3.5Mb of RAM, and the Digidesign Audio Engine (DAE) software needs a minimum of 4.5Mb of RAM. You'll need around 3Mb of RAM for your system software, and maybe a few Mb more for a SampleCell editor, or a patch librarian/editor, such as Galaxy. For best results, you should increase the RAM allocation of Cubase to something like 8Mb, and you may wish to increase the RAM allocations of the other software as well. As you can see from all this, the minimum recommended amount of RAM would be about 16Mb, and you could probably use 24Mb without going completely over the top!

[supernova777]

notice the remark re: recycle compatibility

Integrates nicely with ReCycle for sample loop manipulation.

was this the first version to support Recycle loops directly in cubase?