At first I thought, “meh”, on both. I figured I can just as easily upload to SC after I’ve quit Cubase so it’s a feature I’ll never use. I bought the original EZMix 1 when it first came out for cheap and never even used it beyond trying it out and thinking I can do better with a little more work myself.
This personal project has also allowed me to appreciate the idea of keeping a network connection open, something I’ve railed against in the past. I still don’t think it’s appropriate in a professional environment where there are paying clients involved or when doing serious work and I’ll be disconnecting from the net once this is done.
Over the past few months I’ve been taking time here and there to to salvaging about a hundred hours of old cassette demos, some as old as 28 years, some of them shedding like a Siberian Husky in Death Valley. Digitizing the cassettes, auditioning songs, and culling multiple takes from poorly organized, sometimes unlabeled, tapes had turned into a bit of a chore; there was no way to shorten or speed up that part of the process. Now that all the tapes are digitized and individual songs sorted, I don’t want to spend an inordinate amount of time on “Mastering” and uploading to the internet for what amounts to a nostalgia trip for me and a few old friends. This is where Cubase’s SC uploader and EZMix 2 with the “Mastering Pack” are proving to be useful. I’ve still had to use a few tools outside of EZMix to solve the more serious problems but for the most part EZMix is good enough.
Using the Soundcloud uploader in Cubase and EZMix 2 is a convenient time saver. The Soundcloud feature is something I’ll definably use again and I wish Steinberg would do something similar for Bandcamp. I can’t see using EZMix much beyond this project, however, it was worth the price of upgrading for this project alone just to help plow through all these old songs (some quit embarrassing and a few kind of inspiring). It’s good to have found something I thought I’d never need, until I did, and it was there.