Soundcloud Integration

Steinberg Lounge
1

I noticed this was in the new cubase update.

I am curious, what is the benefit of this. Why does one even need this “feature”?

It just seems like such a non feature and a waste of developer time to me; I am sure I must be missing something.

Please enlighten me.

2

It caters to the Web 2.0 generation IMHO…

3

No “cloud” is gonna rain on my parade.
Strictly in the pocket here.

I hates where it’s all heading.

4

Soundcloud is a wonderful site to share your tunes. If you use it, you know why everyone else does too.

I also think that this could be a move to compete with Studio One. Strange, as Presonus customers welcomed the idea rather than complaining about this feature.

5

Not really a value add for me either. I don’t hate it, but I won’t use it either. For one, I never export mp3’s. I export to wav, then master, then convert to mp3, then upload to my various places.

I don’t see changing any of that because Cubase can now send files directly to SoundCloud.

6

Exactly! It doesn’t really NEED to be integrated.

I guess people are just lazy…

Hey, I know - on the next update, why don’t Steinberg provide a ‘pizza’ button that automatically orders your favourite toppings and then pauses your track when the doorbell rings. :laughing:

7

BTW, where is this “upload manager”? Can’t find it anywhere, including on the export dialog.

No mention of either soundcloud nor “upload manager” in the documentation as far as I can see.

EDIT: never mind, found it. At the bottom of the export dialog in a dropdown.

8

I’ve probably said it five times but I’ll say it once more anyway… Re: Soundcloud… It’s not a good idea to dismiss something until you fully understand what it can potentially be. What could it potentially be? Lots of things that probably don’t even occur to you if you don’t understand it all yet. I’ll give one more example and then I’ll leave it be.

This is a scenario that’s happening right now. Granted, you still might not care either way.

You’re driving home from work and this great melody hits you. You start humming it. You grab your smartphone and keep humming it. You upload it to Soundclound with your free Soundcloud app, right then (although you probably wanna wait for a red light so you don’t kill somebody… :slight_smile:), your recorded humming.

When you get home you fire up Cubase 7.5 (granted, Cubase doesn’t do all this yet, they’re just getting started) and stream the great melody you came up with through your daw, using your daw’s file browser, playing it directly from the net in Cubase 7.5 XT. You drag it in - directly from the net - directly into an audio track - with the audio track becoming a progress bar for the download. You run VariAudio on it and send the midi to your sampler.

You write your hit song around the melody.

You thank Steinberg for Soundcloud support (and continued development of it).

Literally, every musical idea you ever think of away from the studio can be sitting there waiting for you to develop it whenever you fire up your DAW. You don’t have to share your Soundcloud files with anyone else… nor use it for any social networking at all if you choose not to.

And granted, they don’t have the streaming / download / two way functionality part yet. Cubase 7.5 XT.

9

No strong feelings about SC either way, but in your example, why not just download it from your phone directly to Cubase (either via USB, or with the BlueTooth download feature in Cubase 7.5)? Skips the two steps of uploading to the cloud, then downloading back down again to the DAW.

10

Because I don’t have to wait until I get home to sync up my iPhone with iTunes and then drag in the files. I put my phone on the car seat and it sends the files by itself. As soon as I get home and fire up the DAW i can play them, immediately.

Again, if you don’t need it, don’t use it… It’s just simple free web storage that will potentially connect directly to your DAW that you can use for whatever you want to use it for … or not use it at all.

I’m not trying to convince anyone here to like it … make your own choices as usual. Only saying why some do and a lot of it has zippo to do with social networking. We’re talking small compressed files so downloads go pretty quickly unless you’re on dial-up or something. Strreaming is immediate.

That’s just one example. Another would be effortless collaboration… track sharing with FLAC stems, whatever.

Now that some understand it, at least they fully understand what they dont want, Tell Steiny you don’t want it, the streaming / download or direct tagging parts. But “social networking” isn’t the only use for it.

11

I already do this, minus the extraneous steps after this. Why would I need to drag a super-rough-almost-barely-listenable phone recording into Cubase? It’s there only as a reminder of an idea, and is already accessible on my phone.

In fact, the idea is really probably so rough at this point as to be a distraction if it were a track in Cubase.

I also have a little notepad app on my phone that I enter lyric ideas into. I don’t then upload it to the web, and then import it from Office Live into Word.

What’s the point? Technology is only going to take us so far down the road to creating an effortless, automatic hit song. I already spend far too much time wondering if I’ve got the right plug-ins, the right hardware, is all my software up-to-date, oh and if only Cubase could do this and that, then I’d be cranking out songs by the bucketload. I know better now, but still have to fight against those kinds excuses every day.

And damnit, this forum is just another one of those distractions!

12

Let’s not disect and analyze Audiocave’s example. His point, obviously is that you don’t have to use SC for social networking. If you’d actually navigate to the site, you might take a look and see what you’re complaining about. Why complain when people like me have uses for it (sometime not just for advertising our tunes). If you don’t like it, DONT USE IT. Do you know how many Cubase features I don’t touch? Our individual workflows are not the only ones being considered, I am sure that Steinberg is communicating with its most popular artists to see what they like or don’t. They seem to recognize that this forum doesn’t account for the entire population of Cubase users. Everyone who doesn’t like it needs to shut it, cause there are obviously a few folks that do have a use for it. Even if I don’t have the C6.5 yet, I know how it works cause I use it in Wavelab, which is working well.

13

I have a soundcloud account. I use it. I can appreciate what the service is.

To me, soundcloud integration in Cubase is like an electric can opener. It’s a clunky solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.

Just my 2 cents. I’m not going off on it. It doesn’t bother me. Just like the electric can opener. I don’t use one.

14

Pizza from Germany would arrive cold and late over here… great idea though! :laughing: :wink:

15

Now you’re talking…! gets my vote…!! :slight_smile:

16

Oh, and I saw there was an interesting post here, for some improvements/additions to the whole SC integration:-

17

Uh… yeah. :slight_smile: That would be too easy though.

18

For me, either. I just bought a 160 gig iPod Classic for just this reason. I want to “feel” my owned (not borrowed or rented) music in my pocket. :slight_smile:

Here are my reasons and also some fun (not real reasons) observations thrown in:

  • Unless you’re syncing, it’s completely infrastructure-free.
  • Songs can’t be removed by someone (like an artist dispute deciding they don’t want their stuff on a given cloud service, etc – like the Beatles original stance with iTunes and what happened on Amazon’s Kindle with some books being pulled by the publisher).
  • There’s no matching technology to fail and it works for music not in the match.
  • It works where (or when) there’s a spotty or no internet connection (off the grid backpacking, etc., traveling, power outages, services outages, blackouts and a zombie apocalypse. :slight_smile:
  • It doesn’t eat into your limited, throttled and precious bandwidth.
  • It doesn’t have to share (and steal) battery juice from your mission critical telecommunication device (your phone). so you don’t have to worry about, or ration your listening.
  • The battery on the Classic lasts just about forever – it’s amazing how much modern battery technology paired with a older, less CPU utilization dependent device, gives you in terms of battery life.
  • You don’t get interrupted with popups, alerts and status messages.
  • You don’t have to think about what playlists you might want for the day – all your music is on it.
  • You can put high quality, uncompressed Apple Lossless or AIFF songs on it.
  • No one else decides for you what the bitrate or audio format should be.
  • You get a nice “retro,” battle-tested UI that has the singular focus of navigating music (there’s something really nice about that).
  • It doubles as a removable harddrive that is always in your pocket.
  • You can listen to music (without problematic, sonically challenged bluetooth) and still have your smartphone or tablet use be a “wire-free / tangle-free” experience (since you’re listening to a different device that’s in your pocket).
  • The housing, with it’s stainless backing, just feels good in the hand in a way that’s different than the iPhone 4/s.
  • “Genius” is pretty amazing when it has 100+ gigs to work with. :slight_smile:
  • Even if iTunes stopped supporting it, and it was buried in drawer for 20 years, if you could find a way to charge it, you’d have a standalone, working, time-capsule of music – it would still function as it requires no external infrastructure (once the music’s on it). A silly observation, but there’s something kinda cool about that. It’s a sort of commentary on technology; the more it becomes fragile with interdependencies, the more I appreciate those technologies that are able to gracefully degrade to infrastructure-less devices (the Amazon Kindle is also like this as are two-way radios).

All that said, I really love Google Docs, in the cloud. And, I’d be fine with my music in the cloud and also stored locally / in my pocket, just not only in the cloud.

But, SoundCloud isn’t really a cloud service for storing your music, it’s a way for distributing and marketing your own music and discovering other’s music – a totally separate debate from things like Spotify, iCloud, etc.

19

If you could share projects through some service, that would be much more useful. Still not sure it would need to be integrated in Cubase, but…

Say I pay a few dollars a month and I could upload project files in various formats (cpr, flac, wav, midi, omf, etc) that would be something. I pay for the hosting…people I allow can access and upload. It would involve one single account with both an admin password and a guest password.

Soundcloud is not that from what I can tell, but I just have a very basic membership…could be wrong.

Then again, I can just upload stuff to the ftp of my website now, for no extra cost.

20

Interesting points.

Still a pointless and silly non-feature to me, in it’s current state. But as audiocave pointed out, it could be the stepping stones to something cool.

To each their own.