Just curious. Steinberg just emailed an add for Cubasis 3, but I know nothing about what it’s actually used for, other than some form of music recording. What is the source of music to be recorded? Is it built-in to Cubasis? What device(s) do the recordings go to? Is Cubasis itself hardware or just software. Etc. I’ve looked at some YouTube videos, but they all assume I already know the answers to such questions and deal mainly with working the interface – which looks a little like Dorico’s Play mode, albeit more involved.
Most importantly, is Cubasis of any use to Dorico users – or the other way around?
Digital audio workstation (DAW) programs are based on creating and editing audio data either by making “live” recordings, or using MIDI instruments, but with MIDI the focus is on “live” real-time sound creation, not on score notation.
Cubase and Cubasis are software only. If you want to record audio, you also need microphones and an audio interface to your computer with preamplifiers etc. On a mobile phone, you can use the phone’s built-in microphone (which is there so you can make phone calls, of course!). The audio and MIDI “tracks” are just computer files, organized into a complete “project” in a similar way that individual staves are organized into a complete score in Dorico.
In Dorico, most of what you see in play mode is generated from the staff notation, and you can then edit it to improve playback. In a DAW, there is no “staff notation”, you are working directly with the MIDI data.
The focus on “live performance” stems from that fact. Staff notation is suitable for writing music note-by-note (and has been used that way for centuries of course) but you wouldn’t want to enter a lot of music into a DAW by drawing each note into a piano-roll display, and then editing the numbers corresponding to its MIDI data properties. Instead you play it “live” on a MIDI keyboard and the software records what you play.
In fact most DAW software now has a simple “score editor” so you can enter music notation to create MIDI data, but it is not designed to produce “professional quality” printout of the score.
AFAIK Cubasis has the same relation to the full Cubase program as Dorico SE or Elements have to Dorico Pro. The recent adverts are for a version which runs on a mobile phone rather than on a desktop computer system (plus other hardware) in a recording studio.