So, what is the recommended way to use Cubasis (3.3) in a ‘hybrid’ setup, meaning using external hardware synthesizers alongside internal and AUv3 instruments?
I’ve seen Doug from the Sound Test Room using a midi track AND an audio track for every hardware instrument, which works well but gets a bit intricate when running 4 or more hardware synths into a project.
I’ve also tried using AUM with IAA connections to Cubasis, however this seems less reliable when sometimes channels break and I need to re-add them to get them to work again. In this case I can see AUM still streaming audio from the inputs to the IAA-output, however this doesn’t arrive at Cubasis and this seems to happen after mutes of channels, it’s quite annoying.
I wish Cubasis offered a combined midi & audio track type, or is there a third party plugin (apart from AUM) that can do this? Or is there another way to do this?
I love my hardware synthesizers, however I’m not sure if it’s worth the extra hassle anymore. The iPad (got a 2021 Pro 12.9") is quite powerful and there are just so many iPad synthesizers available… But it seems very wasteful to let them collect dust. Besides that, hardware has its pro’s too so I rather want to keep using them. If there was a way to quickly change the software instrument with an external one, you could keep working on a project while being mobile, using a placeholder instrument. that would be ideal.
Thank you for your message and welcome to the forum!
I’ve seen Doug from the Sound Test Room using a midi track AND an audio track for every hardware instrument, which works well but gets a bit intricate when running 4 or more hardware synths into a project.
We’ve would recommend the same procedure and setup in this case.
Alongside, it might make sense to browse the pool of available 3rd party Audio Unit instruments. Having them included in Cubasis might make things more flexible and easy…
If there was a way to quickly change the software instrument with an external one, you could keep working on a project while being mobile, using a placeholder instrument. that would be ideal.
Tapping on a MIDI track instrument icon, lets you either choose “No Instrument” (which should work great when using an external hardware synth), or choose an internal or 3rd party app instrument via Audio Unit or Inter-App Audio.
The issue with this is, when I want an external hardware synth to feed into Cubasis instead of a soft synth, there isn’t a practical way to route the audio input into Cubasis through this same track. This could be solved by making midi tracks have an audio in routing, like audio tracks - you wouldn’t know my disappointment when I discovered Cubasis doesn’t allow this. It would have been so sweet if it had this ability and I don’t really understand why.
I feel this would be of great benefit for mobile composing when returning to the studio it could be made far more straightforward to replace a soft synth with a hardware input and alternate midi routing, for the use of external keyboards and alike, with a flip of a (soft) button. And vice versa when going mobile again. Best of both worlds and would make Cubasis stand out. Imho there are no serious complications creating this. Let’s just say I dare the developers to try working with hard and software synths on a project and see if they are of the opinion the way it works now is the best way they can come up with.
So how can I motivate Steinberg to make this aspect of Cubasis better? I could send some cookies to bribe the devs? lol
