digi001 and cubase vst?

[mkap]

Help, oh legion of digitechies......

I just bought a digi001 when I found out that my previous soundcard won't be working on my new G4 any time soon. My question is, is there any way to make this otherwise very nice interface talk to my cubase vst software? I've been using cubase just long enough to want to stay with it.

I get conflicting answers from customer support at both companies: first, they say no, but one guy at steinberg mentioned something about DAE 5.0 being able to mediate between the two programs. The problem is, cubase usually requires an ASIO driver to communicate with a sound card.

Anyway, I'd really appreciate it if anyone has any insight into this problem......or barring that, maybe someone can convince me that protools LE is good enough that I should divorce Cubase.

Thanks,
mk

[lwilliam]

Someone, either Digi or Steinberg, would have to develop an ASIO engine for the 001. MAYBE DAE 5.0 will support ASIO. No idea, there.

I'm a long-time Cubase user (since the Atari days). It was quite a leap switching to PT5LE, and I'm still learning. However, I find that there is very little, if anything, I miss from Cubase (other than my Waves Plugins). It's certainly easier to use on the midi side of things than PT, but I've had various and sundry audio problems with Cubase: like your audio files not showing up the 2nd time you load the song (after telling Cubase where to find them AGAIN, it's ok); system crashes while loop recording; punch-ins not clean (almost always a click on the old track). Maybe some of these problems have been fixed in 4.1, but I recently upgraded from 3.52 - which had those problems.

I find that I'm concentrating on how the music "feels" in PT, whereas in Cubase I always was trying to "pump life into it" and work around the "idiosyncracies". Maybe this is because Cubase is first and foremost a sequencer, whereas PT is first and foremost an audio editor.

An example from last night: I was editing an audio drum loop and needed to nudge one hi-hat a few milliseconds later in time - within the loop. Piece of cake in PT, but you can't just "nudge" a piece of audio in Cubase, you have to either manually enter the new start time, or slide the segment with the mouse. In PT, you just tell it every nudge is X number of milliseconds (your choice of 1, 3, 5, 10 or whatever), and nudge it until it feels right.

There is also no sample-level editing in Cubase. Try to draw out a click in Cubase - you can't do it. The level of detail easily available to edit in PT FAR exceeds Cubase. You want to see if a stereo track is in phase? No problem in PT - you can't get that level of detail in Cubase. The Cubase Wave editor just doesn't get that granular - AND you can only see one file at a time (you can't look at stereo files at a very fine level of detail in Cubase.

Doing crossfades between segments in Cubase takes about 4-5 keystrokes. In PT, it's ONE mouse click. Quick, easy, and perfect every time (so far). I've found crossfades in Cubase have a certain amount of delay and are therefore not precisely where you lay them. I've had to go back and redo crossfades a LOT of times in Cubase because of this.

My first PT5LE project is more professional-sounding than my best efforts over many years in Cubase. I did three CDs in Cubase (for clients), but I'm not a full-time Pro, but PT takes my projects to a new level of professionalism. If all you want to do is play with midi sequences, then Cubase is fine (demos, songwriting, and playing with plugins). Personally, I've wanted to get the excuses for not sounding "quite" professional out of the way on my music. PT5LE is helping me accomplish that. Dozens of available plug-ins are nice (VST), but they don't make the music groove.

I've already imported some SMFs into PT5LE. Although they weren't from Cubase, there's no reason you couldn't do heavy sequencer-oriented stuff in Cubase, export to SMF, then use ProTools to polish it up.



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Larry W.

[mkap]

Thanks, Larry.....

Someone at Steinberg told me that DAE 5.0 was supposedly able to support ASIO, and I dutifully downloaded it, but can't quite figure out what to do with it.....I tried putting in the ASIO folder, but that obviously wasn't right. Any ideas?
Thanks also for your cubase/PT comparison. Maybe I better play with PT a bit more before I take it back and get a cubase-compatible card. I haven't been using cubase for very long, but find the audio functions very, very friendly. Is PT really just as easy? And yes, the many plug ins are an enticement, especially the software drum machine they just came out with, and the software minimoog. Does PT have anything comparable, in terms of "virtual instruments"?

One more question- can PT scan an audio track and find the beat so you can synchronize midi tracks to preexisting audio, complete with tempo changes?

Thanks again for your help,
mike kaplan

[lwilliam]

That would be the best of both worlds. I do like the 001 interface. No worries about level matching between the mic pre and the A/D converters. It sounds pretty smooth to me (not harsh like many low-end converters). My ADAT blackface is notoriously harsh-sounding, for instance, and my 1212 card just sounds 2-dimensional, like a game card. I'm sure the 001 could be improved with a Millenia or Great River preamp and an Apogee A/D converter. I just don't want to sink $3-4000 into a $1000 system to improve the front-end - this year.

Your other question: There is a feature in PT5LE called "Align to beat" or something similar, where you can highlight a region of audio, tell it how many bars/beats it is, and PT will calculate the tempo while entering a tempo marker. You could do this per bar, for 8 bars, or whatever you need.

As far as learning curve, that might vary from person to person. I've had a hard time of it because I've had the track-segment-event-file order burned into my brain from Cubase over the years. PT uses a different scheme: track-playlist-region-file. Similar, but different. I've never been able to use the "Audio Pool" features very well, nor REALLY understand the difference between an event and a segment in Cubase.

There seems to be more keyboard shortcuts to learn for audio editing in PT, but you don't have to learn five different toolsets (a slightly different set of tools for each editing window, i.e., Drum Edit, Logical Edit, Event List, Piano-roll Edit, etc. PT only has two main windows.

I think the bottom line would be whether you're going to do heavy sequencing - or heavy audio editing. PT will improve its midi editing and Cubase will improve its audio editing - so choose your weapon...



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Larry W.

[lwilliam]

re the DAE 5.0. I'm no Mac expert, but I THINK you put it in the Digidesign (or DAE) folder that's inside your system folder. Try doing a find on DAE to locate where your current version resides.




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Larry W.

[mkap]

Hello, it's me again.
I just got off the phone with a guy at Steinberg who assured me that they are well into testing the beta version of a new ASIO driver which will let the digi001 and cubase make beautiful music together. Well, depending on who's using them, of course. Anyway, they assure me that the driver will be available in a matter of weeks. Then again, they wouldn't say exactly how many weeks. So, patience, patience.....

mk

[CCash]

Hi fellas,

Just wanted to plug ProTools a little, after having a brief and (for me) unintuitive stint with Cubase. Since I didn't stick with Cubase for very long I never got "trained" by it, and when I checked out ProTools it just seemed so intuitive. A few years later now, I'm seriously addicted. I've been waiting for a better sequencer (but mainly only for automation of a ProMix--not too intensive). Anyway, I'm not using PT5 (yet) but I'd imagine these INVALUABLE shotcuts are the same: uh oh, I'm on a PC right now and not at my project studio, but it should be the COMMAND key I'll be referring to (beside the spacebar)...use these often...

*With the trim tool, Shift-Tab to highlight from your curser location to the end of the region.
*Use Option-Shift-Tab to highlight to the beginning.
*Command-C:copy (duh)
*Command-V:Paste ("")
*Command-D uplicates highlighted(nice!)
*Command-F:Fade (between two regions, or at the beginning or end of a region.
*Command-E:separate region, then you name the separation.

These are real basic, but they're the ones to know to get you flying around in no time.

*Bars/Beats is awesome if you either know your tempo or recorded to the midi click (you need a tone generator). You can enter a tempo in the MIDI? dialog (whether or not you have midi to module for click) and the Bars/Beats will be setup for that tempo.

The Find Tempo Data or Beat or something like that works sorta like what the one that Cubase has, but I don't think it "time stretches" like I think Cubase can. Highlight a region and use this command. The more you highlight, the more it has to go on and interpolates the beat more precisely over the long-run of the song. But you might still have to nudge some stuff afterwards. I switch to Samples sometimes and look to see exactly how large a region is, and work in there.

If you get a beat/time to feel real good for one loop iteration, and you're in bars/beats -Grid Mode!!!!, you can feel confident about duplicating the region and always having it "in". Grid Mode forces the curser to the note value you have selected in Nudge/Grid (1/4, 1/8, etc.).

If you have clicks in-between the regions just select all the regions and do a fade on the whole thing. I go with the default 10ms and it works like a charm. PT5 might have an auto fade anyway, though.

Check out the different modes. Shuffle mode fills in gaps made by edits, keeping your regions one after the other, and regions down the line stay in their new but relative positions. If you drag a region next to another, it snaps the end of it.

One last tip. Name tracks and regions ASAP and then you can find Regions (and their varations) quickly and alphabetically in the regions list.

see ya



[This message has been edited by CCash (edited 12-22-99).]

[Marlowe]

Just a note ,..The digi 001 works perfectly with the direct I/O asio driver ,...35ms latency,..Cheers,..

[lwilliam]

Where does one get this ASIO Direct I/O driver? Does one have to have a TDM system to get it? Is it on the Digi site?

Please...I'd love to try this.




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Larry W.

[Kevan Staples]

mkap

Steinberg will be releasing the new Direct I/O ASIO Driver v5.0 quite soon. It along with DAE/DSI 5.0 allows Cubase VST to use the 001. Just to clear up your confusion on what goes where. When the new ASIO driver is released it will go in your ASIO driver folder within your Cubase VST folder. DAE is installed into it's own folder within your System folder and the DSI is installed in your Extensions folder of your System folder. The DAE/DSI installer will do all this for you. In fact PTLE's installer will do all this as well. (I'm looking at the installer as I write this)

Unfortunately the new ASIO driver doesn't allow for direct monitoring with VST which is a shame. I have no idea why this feature hasn't been implememented. It was in fact working long ago with the Audiomedia card. My understanding is that it has been removed from the code for some unknown reason. There are plenty of other audio cards that implement this feature within VST. Direct monitoring means zero latency for input monitoring which is great if you don't want to use a mixer for monitoring. It basically allows monitoring of the output of your audio card bypassing VST.

As to any discussion of VST versus PTLE I can only say that from my perspective we're talking about two completley different programs. Unless you can work with the rudimentary midi implementation in PTLE then I think you will soon discover the weakness of PTLE. I think it would be fine for very simple midi tracks only. On the other hand editing audio in Protools is light years ahead of any of the sequencers (again in my opinion). I work daily using both programs. I do all my composing for film and television in Cubase and all my editing and compiling of cues in Protools. I would never use either of them to do what the other does so much better. This is all predicated on using Cubase VST 4.1 which is substantially better than any previous version....trust me!

Short note to lwilliam regarding shifting of audio. You can use the track delay function on audio tracks to "nudge" forward or backward. Depending on how you have Cubase setup this can be very accurate as Cubase now uses a ppq of 15360. This means that one tick at 120BPM equals .03ms which is damn close to sample accurate. (1.3 samples = .03ms at 44100)

As I said before there is no comparison between Cubase and PT when it comes to editing audio. PT wins hands down. So does using any dedicated audio editor (Peak etc). I'm sure you will find many Logic users that will say that Logic is as good as PT and that opens up the discussion further. We've all heard the rhetoric before so I'm not going to get into it.

Suffice to say there isn't any one right answer to all your needs. Cubase is an awesome midi sequencer that records audio and allows you to add VST effects and do wonderful things. If you need to be medling with audio at sample accurate detail then forget it. If you want to record someone playing guitar and work seamlessly with midi tracks then Cubase works like a dream. It's up to you to decide what your demands are going to be.

merry seasonal greetings to all you midi audio wankers ;-)

Kevan in Kanadada