User manual STEINBERG CUBASE 4

[. . . ] Cubase 4 Review Guide September 2006 Review Guide Cubase 4 Designed for professional music production from the ground up, Cubase 4 comes with a brand-new VST3 plug-in set and four new integrated software instruments with more than 1000 sounds. The revolutionary SoundFrameTM is a powerful combination of Track Presets, Instrument Tracks, and MediaBay database, to help organize all your sounds from every instrument - both software VSTi and hardware. Cubase 4's mixer now offers a flexible Control Room section and up to four independent studio mixes. Composers and musicians benefit from a streamlined and enhanced score editor. [. . . ] Connections can be changed directly in this view. Cubase 4 ­ Review Guide 14 of 30 ©Steinberg Media technologies GmbH. All rights reserved. Enhanced Score Editor The Score Editor in Cubase 4 has received several major enhancements, including a new inspector-style Symbol Tabs that can be individually collapsed and expanded, a special userdefinable Favorites tab, and editing of multiple events using the info line. New configurable Symbol Tabs re-organize Cubase 4's symbol palettes and facilitate score editing and layout. The Score Menu and Score Settings Panel have been reorganized and consolidated. This dramatically simplifies and improves the workflow inside the score layout editor. Cubase 4 ­ Review Guide 15 of 30 ©Steinberg Media technologies GmbH. All rights reserved. The Staff Presets have been linked to Cubase 4's SoundFrameTM and its new Track Presets. Whenever a track preset is used that contains sound category information, a suitable staff preset is automatically assigned to that track. Vice-versa user defined MIDI or Instrument Track Presets can save custom staff settings together with the instrument and sound. Last but not least, two brand-new master-quality Score Fonts have been added: "Jazz" and "Classic". These are now available together with the original Cubase Score Font, which has been renamed to "Legacy". MediaBay Cubase 4 introduces a powerful media management system called MediaBay. MediaBay gives Cubase users total control over all of their instrument sounds, plug-in presets, audio loops and clips, MIDI Files, Track Presets and even video files or entire Cubase project TM files. It is the centerpiece of Steinberg's unique SoundFrame architecture. It also includes a smart file Browser with "Flat" and "Focus" modes, as well as user-definable presets for Search Locations. The powerful Filter section offers both a multi-level Detail Search mode and a convenient Category Search mode, which is perfect for browsing instrument presets or track presets. The Viewer area displays search results and can be quickly reorganized by sorting after category or type using its userdefinable column views and column order. Files can be imported into the current project either by context menu command or simple drag & drop. Even editing operations on the file system level such as Cut, Copy, Paste, Delete or Rename can be executed from the Viewer area of MediaBay. The Scope section of MediaBay gives a closer view at the selected media file. It features preview functions, including Auto Preview and Preview in Project Context to play loops in the project tempo. The Tag Editor is used to apply and edit standard and userdefinable Attributes to any media file that is supported in MediaBay. Using Attributes are the key to MediaBay's powerful search and filter functions. Cubase 4's included content such as track presets and instrument presets have pre-defined attribute information and can be used to demonstrate the speed and TM convenience of SoundFrame . Besides the standard MediaBay window, there are multiple adapted views of MediaBay available everywhere across Cubase 4. This includes a special SoundFrameTM Browser view for browsing sounds across all available internal and external instruments, a convenient Loop Browser, as well as any Load or Save dialogs for VST Presets and Track Presets. Cubase 4 ­ Review Guide 16 of 30 ©Steinberg Media technologies GmbH. [. . . ] As a result, multiple windows can fit on a single screen without overlapping each other. SDK and Plug-in Test host rd A new SDK will be available by the end of 2006 and allow 3 -party developers to produce updates and new plug-ins for the VST3 standard. In order to facilitate design and testing of VST3 plug-ins, Steinberg has developed a VST3 test host application, which offers audio and MIDI playback to test any VST3 plug-in in a simple host environment. One special feature of this test host is a "unit testing" section. [. . . ]