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Steinberg Get it on CD 3.0

Mark Fowler-Child — 2002-10-11T12:07:58.000Z

Mark Fowler-Child, PC Magazine, Friday 11 October 2002 at 12:07:58

Superb authoring tool best suited to audio CD recording

Steinberg's Get it on CD 3.0 is the latest version of the company's CD authoring software.

Many professional, semi-professional and amateur musicians/composers use Steinberg's sequencing and recording software.

However, many of these use more ergonomic and better-featured software from other vendors to cut CDs. This latest version of Get it on CD goes some way to redressing this.

New features in version 3.0 include the ability to copy CDs directly from a CD-Rom drive and write to the CD-Extra (mixed media) format, as well as a label and CD case insert designer, and original sound quality (OSQ) proprietary lossless audio compression.

Some of these features (such as the label designer) have been present in competing products like Nero Burning Rom for some time, so it's good to see Steinberg is finally catching up with the competition.

The program gives seven options at startup, which guide you through the process of creating audio, data or mixed data and audio CDs, taking backups, copying a CD, grabbing audio from a CD, designing CD labels and converting files to MP3 or WMA formats.

All the options are straightforward and offer help and advice where needed. The new features of version 3.0 centres on audio CD creation and it's here that Get it on CD 3.0 offers the most.

Effects include an eight-band graphic equaliser, stereo width control, enhancer and bass boost. A compressor is also included. The ease with which these features can be used helps to produce a uniform maximum level and tonal balance across a whole CD of original material.

As with other Steinberg products, a lot of plug-ins are included, among them pitch correction, reverb and chorus.

Get it on CD 3.0 is a good audio CD authoring tool with a host of features that make it suitable for most CD writing tasks.

Contact: Arbiter Pro Audio Group 020-8970 1909

www.steinberg.net

Price: £39.99 (ex. VAT)

Fact file

Minimum system requirements: OS Windows 98/ME/2000/XP
CPU 100MHz
Memory 32MB
Hard disk 40MB

Steinberg Cubasis VST 3.0

Mark Fowler-Child — 2002-09-25T15:16:45.000Z

Mark Fowler-Child, PC Magazine, Wednesday 25 September 2002 at 15:16:45

A well-featured audio tool capable of very professional results.

Cubasis VST 3.0 is the new low-end version of Steinberg's successful Cubase VST professional audio and Midi recording product, and is supplied with a copy of the Wavelab Lite 2.0 audio editing tool, itself a cut-down version of Wavelab.

This version of Cubasis offers much of the functionality of Cubase VST 5.1 (£229.78 ex. VAT), but at a fraction of the price.

Installation and set-up is a little more complex than in other areas, but this mainly involves ensuring that your sound card is installed properly and setting up an ASIO DirectX or Multimedia driver.

Documentation and online help cover the set-up aspect well. Users with correctly installed sound cards should experience no problems.

Cubasis VST 3.0 offers audio recording to a maximum of 48 tracks and Midi recording to 64 tracks, but only 64 can be used in any one song.

This is one of the differences between Cubasis and Cubase, although this should be more than enough for most users. Midi tracks can be conserved by merging Midi data and it should be remembered that The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's album was recorded on (effectively) only six tracks.

Recording Midi via an external controller such as a keyboard is simple, as is editing or creating Midi events and notes by hand using the mouse and keyboard.

Audio recording is also easy, but one of the limitations of Cubasis is that it records at a maximum sampling rate of only 44.1KHz with 16 bits. While this shouldn't be a problem for most, if you need higher sampling rates/bit depths, you'll need Cubase VST 5.0 or similar.

Recording and playback is controlled by a transport bar that replicates most of the controls of a tape recorder and also displays tempo, time signature, cycle points and so on. Editing an audio track using Wavelab Lite is also quick and simple.

Cubasis VST 3.0 includes the same VST instruments found in Cubase VST 5.0, namely a Universal Sound Module (a Midi-compatible sound module), the Neon (a polyphonic synthesiser), VB-1 (a bass synth) and LM-9 (a drum machine).

It also includes rudimentary CD writing functionality and a CD-Rom containing 600MB of royalty-free samples, sounds, sequences and songs you can use in your own compositions. You also get a copy of AIST's Movie Xone software, which allows you to use Cubasis VST 3.0 to create multimedia presentations.

There's also a huge range of plug-ins available, both DirectX and VST, that you can use with Cubasis. These range from simple effects to processing tools and complete software instruments. Cubasis VST 3.0 also allows you to save your compositions as WAV or MP3 files.

Cubasis VST 3.0 offers more than a taste of high-end products such as Cubase VST 5.1 while imposing only a few restrictions, such as limiting tracks per song.

If you're serious about your bedroom compositions, or need a low-cost, fully-featured product for business use, it's well worth a try.

Price: £59.99 (ex. VAT)

Minimum requirements: Windows 98/98 SE/ME/2000/XP; 133MHz processor; 64MB Ram; Audio MME, DirectX or ASIO compatible sound card.

Contact: Arbiter Pro Audio Group 020 8970 1909

www.steinberg.net

Roxio WinOnCD 5 Power Edition

Laurence Grayson — 2002-07-23T10:34:16.000Z

Laurence Grayson, PC Magazine, Tuesday 23 July 2002 at 10:34:16

An incredibly inexpensive jack-of-all-trades collection of tools.

WinOnCD 5 Power Edition is effectively a wide collection of CD utilities bundled together under the same product name and user interface.

As well as the obvious CD copying tools, it includes audio encoding, VideoCD creation and disc emulation from CD images. The interface will be familiar to anyone with experience of earlier versions of WinOnCD, as it's virtually identical.

Divided into two sections, WinOnCD uses the top half of the window to list the directory structure of your PC for system navigation and file location.

Files from here can then be dragged into the bottom half of the window, which usually represents the file structure of the particular project you're working on. To make things easier, a start up screen is presented which lists the various job types available.

This is divided into six groups: Favourites, Data, Audio, Video, Copy and Other. Each group contains different options within that category and a specific description of each one.

The Data section includes standard options for creating a data CD, appending existing volumes, making bootable discs and creating hybrid MAC/PC-compatible volumes. However, the selection now includes Universal Data Format volume support for data DVDs and OverSpan data CDs.

This latter feature lets you create file sets that would normally be too large for a single CD. A copy of the OverSpan utility is automatically included on each disc, allowing you to transfer large amounts of data to a system without WinOnCD installed.

The Audio section includes options for creating standard audio CDs from compressed audio formats such as MP3 or WMA, audio CDs that contain separate data files in a second session or music albums suitable for playback on MP3-compatible CD or VideoCD/DVD players.

Music files that don't match the required destination format are transcoded first, while compatible files can be burnt directly to disc. MP3 albums include a customisable HTML file for playback through a browser, as well as M3U play list information. You can also attach image files to each track.

The Audio section includes an advanced audio editor, so you can analyse audio tracks, add effects, silence or fades, adjust pitch and gain or cut out unwanted noise before burning your compilation to disc.

WinOnCD 5 Power Edition also lets you create basic and interactive VideoCDs (VCDs) and Super VideoCDs (SVCDs) by importing MPEGs. For MPEG-2 DVDs, a plug-in is required, which Roxio claims will be on sale soon.

Again, non-compliant files will be transcoded into a VCD or SVCD-compatible bit rate before the disc is burnt. Interactive VCDs can be built with a basic menu system and include image slideshows with background music.

A distributable VCD player can be included on the disc for PC playback. As with the Audio CD options, disc artwork can be created, along with image acquisition from Twain scanners.

These advanced features complement an already impressive range of CD copying and authoring options. Raw data copying can be used to circumvent copy protection and DirectCD is included for simple packet writing.

Ripping CDs to WAV, MP3 or WMA is supported with compressed bit rates up to 320Kbit/s for MP3 and 128Kbit/s for WMA, while CDDB internet querying is included for CD track and title information.

What lets WinOnCD 5 Power Edition down is its user interface. With the inclusion of so many disparate elements, trying to adapt the Explorer-style layout to fit some of the advanced features results in a cluttered appearance.

Price: £54.99 (ex. VAT).

Minimum requirements: Windows 98/SE/ME/2000/XP; 400MHz processor; 32Mb Ram; 80Mb hard drive space.

Contact: Roxio www.roxio-shop.com