Cubase 10
Price: Pro – £291; Artist – £153; Elements – £57 (inc. VAT) Speak to your dealer for upgrade pricing and site licences.
The flagship DAW software from Steinberg, Cubase, has been updated and reaches the milestone of version 10. A firm favourite among countless schools and professionals alike, Cubase has been slowly evolving since 2002 to reach its tenth version.
The latest version boasts a range of new features including improvements to its pitch and time correction algorithms (VariAudio), the ability to match takes against a single reference track for easier editing and the addition of some new plugins. One of the greatest additions is an update to the excellent Groove Agent player – one of the greatest pieces of drum software ever made. If you are on a previous version of the software it's definitely worth upgrading to Cubase 10 now. There's never been a better time to upgrade as, with the launch of Cubase 10, the update cost is the same for whatever older version you have.
The SRP is just £43 (ex. VAT) per seat for a Cubase Pro 10 education site licence update from Cubase 4, with no limits on the number of seats.
RØDECaster Pro
Price: To be confirmed
Podcasting is seeing something of a resurgence and this is something that schools and musicians are becoming ever-more interested in. RØDE has announced the launch of a hardware device designed to make podcasting easy for all.
The device is a small-format mixing console featuring a range of high-quality mic preamplifiers, four headphone sockets and the ability to record to an internal SD card or output direct to a USB socket for live broadcasting. For schools that might want to experiment with phone-in radio shows, phones can be paired via Bluetooth and the RØDECaster Pro features vocal effects and easy playback of audio for a complete radio show style podcast.
Voices of Soul
Price: $199 [£156] (introductory price)
One of the things that sample libraries traditionally don't do very well is vocals. EastWest has just announced the launch of Voices of Soul, featuring recordings of session vocalist C. C White singing a wide range of sounds for use in projects.
The sample library includes a range of sounds including syllabic sounds, legato phrases for melodies and over 600 complete phrases and improvisations to be embedded into projects.
