Ok, so I haven't really seriously given any thought to stalwart sequencer Cubase since my Mac was black and white (and believe me, it was a
sequencer back then,
not a "DAW"). But I got a demo today, and as my hatred of Garageba-Logic 8 steadily increases, Cubase sure looks, well, likable. Here's some of the neato stuff in Cubey-Five-0:
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Vari-Audio: Anybody out there use Melodyne? I do, and I love love love it. But I gotta admit, I often scratch my head and say, "why doesn't someone just build this functionality right into the DAW, so you could double-click a vocal and start tuning, just like Melodyne?" Steinberg did it, and it kicks ass.
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Loopmash: this is a little hard to describe without seeing it in action, so I'll do my best, but Loopmash lets you drag and drop drum loops into a window where they continuously playback. The top one is the master, so all the loops beneath automatically sync and quantize to the feel of the master. But what's super cool is that each loop has a horizontal slider next to it that acts as a "how much" control... i.e. it doesn't adjust volume per se, but instead how many elements of the slave loops play- it starts with kicks and snares and adds more as you crank the sliders. It's super cool, and a very musical way to make a zillion variations all quick-like. Oh yeah, and the rep told me that "Timbaland flipped when he saw it".
(I think this was supposed to impress me... now, for the record, my appearance is that of the fictional sixth member of The Cars circa 1979. "Uh, yeah, uh, Timbaland... er... that's def, yo." Whatever, but Loopmash IS cool.)
There's also an Akai MPC-style drum plug-in, because apparently they wouldn't let a manufacturer hit the NAMM show floor unless they had some kind of MPC-ish functionality in your hardware or software. Did I tell you about the marching-band bugle I saw with a built in MPC emulator?
Price should be unchanged (around $599 retail, actual price less) and it ships in February.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010 at 10:16AM 
