Mixin’ it up
Mobile music apps may still be a fair way
off replicating a desktop setup, but the gap is much smaller than it was just a
year ago. Steinberg has toyed with iOS development before now, but Cubasis
represents its first fully fledged mobile DAW, and it comes hot on the heels of
the latest major release of Cubase, version 7. You might have noticed the price
and balked slightly, but that’s not necessarily a fair reaction, as it’s a very
capable app and a lot more than ju7st a musical notepad. Further, its price is
comparable with that of some other higher-end iOS music apps, developed by
companies that don’t have Apple’s vast resources or the cash mountain that
allows it to sell Garage Band for a couple of quid.
Cubasis runs on an iPad 2 or later,
including the iPad mini, and has polyphony (the number of voices that can sound
simultaneously) of 48 voices for the iPAd 2 and mini, and 64 voices for the
iPad 3 and 4. If you experience glitches in the sound, it’s possible to
manually switch this down to prioritize audio recording over virtual
instruments say.
Cubasic
For iPad - Mobile Digital Audio Workstation
Cubasis is unusual in that it offers
unlimited audio and MIDI tracks, or at least you can keep adding them until
your particular model runs out of storage space or processing power. Most
mobile DAWs impose a limit of eight tracks, although certainly in Apple’s case
this is to ensure a consistent user experience even if it means placing limits on
tweak ability. In our tests, we were able to push Cuabsis pretty hard and
didn’t notice be imported from your Music app via file sharing from iTunes, and
there’s even a Wi-Fi server to drag and drop wirelessly from your Mac. The
bundled loops and instruments sound good and will provide backing for most
kinds of music.
You can record audio in CD quality through
the built-in mic, or through one of the many audio interface peripherals or USB
mics of the market – there’s a list on Steinberg’s website. The same goes for
MIDI and here there’s a rather nifty pop-up keyboard that can be scaled and has
preset buttons that store chords, so it’s simple to sound like a more
proficient player than you really are. You can switch the keyboard to pads to
better play beats, and these can hold configurable chord setups, too, which is
ideal for one-finger playback.
Free
sample: Record CD-quality audio and edit it using the built-in Sample editor
Once you’ve recorded or imported material,
you can edit it. In the case of audio, there’s a decent Sample editor that pops
up when you tap on a clip, and has tools like fades, reverse, normalize and
crop, but no stretching. The MIDI Key editor looks remarkably like that in
Cubase, and is beautifully designed, letting you drag, lengthen, transpose and
otherwise manipulate MIDI parts. A toolbar provides a good set of tools,
including transpose, quantize, select, glue and draw, that make working with
MIDI a breeze. You can also take snapshots of projects, so if anything goes
wrong, you can go back to a saved state.
There’s a mixer that pops up to let you
balance your tracks and has a range of features, but no automation. You can
assign MIDI tracks in Cubasis to control music apps outside of Cubasis itself,
as long as they’re running, by assigning them from a pop-up menu. This was a
bit glitch in our tests, but controlling desktop VSTs wirelessly from Cubasis’
keyboard worked well.
Overall, the look and feel of Cubasis is
very slick indeed, carefully thought out and easy to get to grips with. The
core features are mostly here, certainly for recording, editing and adding some
effects, and it all feels user friendly without being toy like. Pinch-to-zoom,
in particular, is brilliantly incorporated into the interface. When it comes to
mix down, you can export projects as audio, to Dropbox, Sound Cloud and to the
Audio Copy system to be pasted into another iOS app.
Into
overdrive: send effects to any track from the 11 provided
Cubasis is powerful enough to be a serious
mobile music-making tool, but well-designed enough not to scare off
less-advanced users. It gives you more control and more tracks than Garage Band
for iPad, although something along the lines of the latter’s auto-chord guitars
and keyboards wouldn’t go amiss here. Unlike Garage Band, Cubasis can see
outside needs a little refining, and Garage Band’s mixer and effect controls
are also less advanced. Cubasis manages to pull off the trick of feeling much
more professional while not being overly complicated, which is tough to do.
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Cubasis
specs
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Mobile digital audio workstation for iPad
·
From: App Store
·
Info: Steinberg.net
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Needs: iPad 2 or higher including iPad mini
iOS 6.0.1
·
Pro: Beautifully designed, as many tracks as
your iPad will run. Great MIDI editor, good effects, solid online, integration,
export projects back to Cubase on your Mac, virtual MIDI
·
Con: NO automation, no track freeze, no audio
time-stretching
·
Price: $53
·
Verdict: 4/5
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