I’ve only had an hour to play, but here’s a quick first impression.

THE GOOD

I like the look of it. The waveform displays on the main Arrange Page are gorgeous - no big deal, but it’s all progress.

Drum editing was my priority…

Hit detection is enormously improved, which is good news for making use of phase-aligned drum editing. I’ve long been a user of the laborious old ‘Cubeat Detective’ method:hitpoints - markers – macro split – quantise – crossfade... yawn...

I ran a couple of tests of the new phase-aligned quantise feature with some groups of drums and it got me 80% of the way there. Sure there’ll be some manual tweaking required, but the 80% took me 2 minutes to achieve!

THE BAD & THE UGLY!

I’m fine with the mixer’s darker look overall, but we’ve lost the colour differentiation between channel types. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear (face-palm); who on earth thought THAT was a good idea?! I’ve seen ‘discussions’ about this ‘feature’ in Steinberg’s forums – I sincerely hope they take note and sort this one out ASAP!

Just thought I’d share!

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An Eagle for an Emperor, A Kestrel for a Knave.

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Samplecraze
Stretch That Note

That is a beautiful creature!

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An Eagle for an Emperor, A Kestrel for a Knave.

Thank you.
His name is Cedric.

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Samplecraze
Stretch That Note

Quote The Elf:

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I ran a couple of tests of the new phase-aligned quantise feature with some groups of drums and it got me 80% of the way there. Sure there’ll be some manual tweaking required, but the 80% took me 2 minutes to achieve!

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I should mention that this was using the raw kick/snare tracks as hit references. I'm expecting that I can significantly up that percentage by doing my usual trick of creating a 'sanitised' hit reference track.

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An Eagle for an Emperor, A Kestrel for a Knave.

Can you still use C5 after upgrading to C6 just incase it buggers stuff up?

Quote jaminem:

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Can you still use C5 after upgrading to C6 just incase it buggers stuff up?

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Yes. SX3, C4 and C5 all still work fine here.

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An Eagle for an Emperor, A Kestrel for a Knave.

how's the group editing stuff (the one that would be dead useful for editing multi-miked guitars etc.)? and the take system?

... i have a birthday in a fortnight and an album's worth of multi-miked guitars to edit down, so if i'm lucky (or beg the missus) i might be able to splash out on the upgrade...

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hourglass | random thoughts | doubledotdash!? collective

Well, the group edit thing has been there for a while (at least in C5), and C6 hasn't changed anything, so yep, it's fine. It certainly saves having to multi-select audio clips before you edit anything - it's set and forget now.

The difference that C6 makes is that you can flip a little switch on a Folder Track and everything in that Folder is grouped - that makes a lot of sense and keeps things nice and tidy. It certainly helps when you're dealing with multi drum mic's, or DI + amped guitars tracks and the like.

So far, other than the ludicrous decision (if such it is, and not an oversight) to set all channel types to the same colour, there's nothing to dislike so far. In fact I'm even considering breaking my rule and running live with C6 before the second fix release! Nah!

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An Eagle for an Emperor, A Kestrel for a Knave.

Hmmm... getting very erratic metronome behaviour. In C5.5. we did notice that during the first few bars of playback the 'nome would drop beats randomly, but then settle (this happens on three different PCs, both XP and Win7). Under C6 it now doesn't settle and there are beats missing all over.

Looks like I'm going to have to use a MIDI click.

It may be something peculiar to my system, so if anyone else out there is trying out C6 let me know. I've posted on Steiny's forum, so I'll report back if there's a fix.

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An Eagle for an Emperor, A Kestrel for a Knave.

Tks for your impressions!

In midi port setup the 'use system time stamp for windows midi inputs' option is set to the same (on / off) as your other Cubase versions?
That could be causing the erractic midi behaviour.

I'm away from the studio right now, but I'll look to see if that option is still there.

But there's no problem with MIDI timing - it simply appears to be an audio drop-out on the sound of the in-built metronome.

I think I'll see how replacing the generated beep with a sampled beep works. It's been suggested over on the Steiny forum and it was something I'd considered.

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An Eagle for an Emperor, A Kestrel for a Knave.

Quote The Elf:

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Well, the group edit thing has been there for a while (at least in C5), and C6 hasn't changed anything, so yep, it's fine. It certainly saves having to multi-select audio clips before you edit anything - it's set and forget now.

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I haven't looked into it yet, but does C6 give you a good way of comping multiple takes of a multitrack recording? Unless I'm missing something, in C5 you still have to separately group takes across the multiple tracks, which is v. tedious.

(In other words, say you have ten takes of a guitar part recorded with two mics onto two mono tracks, so that all the parts are stacked up as lanes on those tracks. Previously it didn't seem possible to automatically have take 1 on track 1 grouped with take 1 on track 2, and so on. Has that changed?)

Quote Sam Inglis:

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I haven't looked into it yet, but does C6 give you a good way of comping multiple takes of a multitrack recording?

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It's an odd thing, but I've never worked with 'Takes' in Cubase. I've got so used to simply (and rapidly) duplicating up tracks that I do all the work myself! It's really something I should bull up on, so here's my opportunity - I'll give it a go and report back.

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An Eagle for an Emperor, A Kestrel for a Knave.

Elfy - any chance of a screenshot to illustrate the lack of colour-co-ordination in the mixer?

I use take lanes in C4 all the time, but I'm not sure I get what you mean. If I'm recording in stereo, then it all goes onto one stereo track, rather than across two mono tracks. I can see where you'd have a problem if you were recording a multitracked instrument and wanted to synchronise the take changes.

Maybe you could use a 5.1 track and pan the channels into the front stereo field?

In C6 (which I haven't taken the plunge with yet) having them all in one folder and using the folder edit function might get you half way there.

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Composer;
www.ogonline.org

Here you go. The 'scribble strip' colouring is my own.
Channel 33 is an Audio Track
Channels 34-36 are Group Tracks
Channel 37 is an FX Track.

All darkly uniform...

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An Eagle for an Emperor, A Kestrel for a Knave.

Thanks for posting your first impressions.

That colour scheme looks quite a lot like Sonar 8 to me!

I like the way Cubase 5.x looks, it's something I've got very used to and prefer over earlier versions or any of the Sonar versions I've worked with.

This does look a bit clearer somehow, but you are right about losing the colour coding for groups/FX tracks. Big mistake.

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musics

Yeah, I was thinking it had the Sonar colours.

Can't you change that Elf in preferences?
I know the dark blue arrange page colours can't be altered but I would have assumed the mixer pages could be.

If it's a flaw and you report it to Ya,/Stein, could you ask them to finish the bug fixes for SX3 please? It's only been 5 years.

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Samplecraze
Stretch That Note

Quote Zukan:

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Can't you change that Elf in preferences?

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Not sure, but you’ve made me think. I’d assumed it would be an ‘all or nothing’ preference, but I’ll have to see if the colour options go down to track type level. I suspect not, but it’s worth a look. Ta Zuke!

Quote Zukan:

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If it's a flaw and you report it to Ya,/Stein, could you ask them to finish the bug fixes for SX3 please? It's only been 5 years.

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They did finish it – it was called Cubase 4! Snigger!

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An Eagle for an Emperor, A Kestrel for a Knave.

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Samplecraze
Stretch That Note

I still haven't had time to dig deeper into C6 as yet, but I've decided to commit a mix to C6 that I'll complete it this weekend. I did some of the prep last night and so far I've been very impressed. I hadn't realised how useful the 'folder grouping' feature would be - it's already becoming second nature and fits my working methods very well.

I'll only get to working with lanes when I undertake the next tracking session with C6 - I'll need to be very comfortable with C6 before I commit to that.

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An Eagle for an Emperor, A Kestrel for a Knave.

Elf, if you get the time m8 do a review as there seem to be a lot of Cubase owners here....

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Samplecraze
Stretch That Note

Quote The Elf:

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Quote Sam Inglis:

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I haven't looked into it yet, but does C6 give you a good way of comping multiple takes of a multitrack recording?

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It's an odd thing, but I've never worked with 'Takes' in Cubase. I've got so used to simply (and rapidly) duplicating up tracks that I do all the work myself! It's really something I should bull up on, so here's my opportunity - I'll give it a go and report back.

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The lanes thing in C5 is fab. Perfect vocal track? Put it on loop and sing the whole thing 3 times. Audition the final take, phrase by phrase. Which phrase isn't perfect? Snip the offending phrase and mute it, to hear the 2nd take phrase. Is that one ok? No? repeat above process. Simples.

If you can genuinely do that now, for say a whole drum kit's worth of mics, that would be pretty cool. Not something I desperately need personally though.

I have to say I'm not wild about the Lanes thing even for single tracks like vocals. Once you get beyond a few takes, each individual lane gets so small you can't see the waveform properly, and it makes it too easy to muck up the whole business of properly assembling a comp with crossfades and so on. I much prefer the Pro Tools approach with separate playlists -- which can be linked across tracks within an Edit Group.

With regard to lanes. I just highlight the takes - events to part - and then comp in the part.

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http://soundcloud.com/richie-royale
http://www.mixcrate.com/richieroyale

That's the way I've done it in the past.

Given the number of ways we all have of undertaking these tasks - and achieving the results - it says something for Cubase's flexibility, if nothing else!

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An Eagle for an Emperor, A Kestrel for a Knave.

I was slightly underwhelmed by the new features in C6 but it certainly does seem that a lot of bits just work better. I have a very poorly recorded song with lots of bleed, erratic timing, fluctuating levels, 2 tracks of drums, and guitar tracks that need to be replaced that I bring-out and re-mix as my first job with each new major Cubase update - and C6 has grown on me quite nicely. Personally I like the new look but was mortified to lose the track colour strip (until I realised that you can change colour by alt clicking to the left of the track list).

I had a chuckle at the new Group Edit which I actually rather like but which is functionally pretty similar to the old ctrl - G track grouping, and I'm certainly a fan of the new lanes implementation for comping.

The new tempo calculator is a great idea but on this particular track (pre-mixed drums with huge vocal bleed) it comes out consistently wrong - spot on on other clearer tracks though.

The new amp sim looks a lot better than the old, I'm going to try a couple of re-recorded tracks through it this weekend and see how it compares with Amplitube 3 (which in my opinion sets the bar pretty high).

What I would still like to see is the ability to see inserts, sends and eq for each track at the same time in the mixer (as against just the insert / send / band numbers) butt that just doesn't appear to be in the Cubase paradigm.

Most guttting is tha there isn't a paper manual which there was with the C5 update but overall I'm pleased, and BTW it's been absolutely rock steady with my RME FF400.

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Andi, www.thedustbowl.net Mixing, Mastering, Audio Editing at The Dustbowl Audio

Been playing today, seems very solid, and I usually suffer with my Liquid Mix, UAD-1, UAD-2 and Powercore combo.

Like the new look, folder tracks ok, but it did winge a bit stating it may mess up should I try to edit the folder track as the audio clips where different lengths or something.

Theres a nice new little feautre where you can see overlaps in your audio regions which is useful when crossfading.

All in all, pretty impressed, but I would be as long as it didn`t crash or screw up, which it hasn't except...

My MR816x had a bit of a wendy on after first install even though I had updated the drivers to 1.7. A reboot sorted it though.

Finally, although there is no paper manual, it comes in a rather nice little box...

Using it on a project recorded last weekend, biggest praise I can give it really.

I'm with you - the box is lovely, very nice texture and colour.

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Andi, www.thedustbowl.net Mixing, Mastering, Audio Editing at The Dustbowl Audio

Best box yet, the software is pretty good too.

Anybody running it with XP?

does anyone know what the cost of upgrading from 5 to 6 is?


(ohhh, and hi. Im new here )

Jude

Hi and welcome, Jude!

Well it was 126 UK Pounds to me, but you should to head over to www.steinberg.net and you'll get the definitive answer there.

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An Eagle for an Emperor, A Kestrel for a Knave.

Cheers, will have a look over there.
im liking this place already, so helpful!

Shucks! We try...

Be sure to come back and let us know how you're getting on with C6.

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An Eagle for an Emperor, A Kestrel for a Knave.

Quote steve355:

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Anybody running it with XP?

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Steve, if I can get my current workload out of the way I'm going to attempt an XP installation this week. As soon as I have I'll report back.

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An Eagle for an Emperor, A Kestrel for a Knave.

Quote Jude May:

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does anyone know what the cost of upgrading from 5 to 6 is?

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£113 from Digital Village:
http://www.dv247.com/computer-music-software/steinberg-cubase-6-update--82 34

They had sold out at my local store, but they offered to deliver it with free delivery.

Richard

Been having a lovely time with C6.

I decided to install the 64-bit version and jump in right there. I was previously using C5 32-bit.

I've found the VSTBridge to be the reported waste of time (and VST performance) with the 32-bit plugs I still need (PowerCore and Sonnox stuff), but jBridge has worked delightfully.

My Frontier Alphatrack is fine, and the Novation Automap software layer (which I find invaluable) is still functioning.

No irritating hiccups to report here (as yet).

I've not found any of my old plugs that don't work as yet. How do you 'use' JBridge?

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An Eagle for an Emperor, A Kestrel for a Knave.

Quote InactiveX:

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Been having a lovely time with C6.

I decided to install the 64-bit version and jump in right there. I was previously using C5 32-bit.

I've found the VSTBridge to be the reported waste of time (and VST performance) with the 32-bit plugs I still need (PowerCore and Sonnox stuff), but jBridge has worked delightfully.

My Frontier Alphatrack is fine, and the Novation Automap software layer (which I find invaluable) is still functioning.

No irritating hiccups to report here (as yet).

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Sorry for going Off Topic but are you using automap with jbridged plugins? If so which way round do you do it? jbridge first, automap second?

/e