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Steinberg Cubasis
Cubasis in all its Cubase-inspired glory. Here you can see the Project View, along with the Tools panel and the Mixer.
In the dim and distant past, Cubasis used to be one of the names Steinberg reserved for junior versions of Cubase, but now they’ve resurrected the Cubasis name for a new app that brings Cubase-inspired functionality to your iPad. This isn’t the first time Steinberg have dabbled with mobile applications, of course. In addition to the Cubase iC controller app and LoopMash for iOS, Steinberg collaborated with Siemens, back in 2003, on Cubasis Mobile for the latter company’s M55 mobile phone. However, where Cubasis Mobile was little more than a novelty ringtone generator, Cubasis for iPad is a surprisingly-capable audio and MIDI sequencer.
Much of Cubasis’s look-and-feel has been borrowed from Cubase (including, surprisingly, the old, pre-Cubase 7 transport icons), but the interface has been designed very much with touch in mind. The main component of the interface is the Project View, which presents a Cubase-style arrange window, complete with the familiar Inspector. Complementing this View are a number of sub-views (for want of a better description) that slide in and out to provide access to a piano keyboard, drum pads, the mixer, various editors, and so on.
Projects can consist of either audio or MIDI tracks, and Steinberg claim you can create an unlimited number of tracks, depending on the capabilities of your iPad. Cubasis offers the ability to record on multiple tracks simultaneously, meaning that it’s possible to use the app as a multitrack recorder with hardware such as RME’s FireFace UCX. However, only 16-bit audio resolutions are currently supported, and you can only output a Project via a single stereo output.
To help you create your MIDI tracks, Steinberg supply a selection of over 70 virtual instruments based on Halion Sonic, and these can be selected from the MediaBay (where most aspects of Project management take place). A preview button is provided to audition each instrument, and you can double-tap to select it (or, if an audio track is selected, add a new track with that instrument). I would describe the quality of these instruments as no more than adequate, especially when compared with offerings from other apps.
In addition to triggering the built-in instruments, you can play other apps from Cubasis, as Steinberg have implemented full Core MIDI support. In the MIDI Connections Inspector Section, you can set a MIDI input and output port and channel, which will either be hardware sources and destinations (if you have any MIDI devices plugged into your iPad), a Core MIDI Network Session, or virtual alternatives. Cubasis itself creates a virtual port, and I found I had more success using this, and assigning other apps to use Cubasis as an input, than using another app’s virtual port from within Cubasis.
MIDI support in Cubasis is currently slightly lacking in one or two areas: you can’t send MIDI clock to other running apps, and there didn’t seem to be an elegant way to disable the virtual instruments on a MIDI track if I was using Core MIDI instead. My workaround was to turn the volume down to infinity on a given track, but even then I couldn’t be sure if Cubasis was still wasting unnecessary CPU cycles on these now-silent instruments.
The Cubasis keyboard with the Analog Bass instrument selected.
Editing functionality in Cubasis is provided via the Tools panel, which appears just below the main toolbar and includes the familiar Cubase tools, although these behave a little differently in Cubasis. For example, rather than selecting the Erase tool and tapping the Parts or Events you want to erase, you instead select the appropriate objects (using the select tool to rubber-band multiple objects) and then tap Erase to erase the selection. This works pretty well, although I missed GarageBand’s use of multi-touch to select multiple objects.
When you tap to select a Part or Event in the Project View, a number of handles become visible, just as in Cubase, allowing you to resize the object, or apply fade-ins and fade-outs and make overall volume adjustments. Double-tapping a Part or Event opens it in either the Key or Sample Editor, depending on the type of the object. The Sample Editor is pretty simple: you can set selection points, and then perform a few basic processes on the selected material, such as reverse, normalise, and fade in and out. The Key Editor is a little more sophisticated, although it seemed very sensitive to my touch and it often felt as though my fingers were having an argument with Cubasis.
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Fri 24 May 2013
Sound On Sound : Est. 1985