wax&wires

Cubase RC For iPhone

The big news from Steinberg at NAMM 09 was Cubase V, but a lot of people were buzzing about the iPhone app they demoed near the end called Cubase RC (or Remote Control). Cubase RC is a free app that will be available in the iTunes app store sometime this spring.

Cubase RC – Transport ViewHere’s the release from Steinberg’s site:

“As long-standing developers for the Mac platform, we decided to come up with this fun, inspiring yet very useful little application for the iPhone and iPod Touch,” comments Helge Vogt, Steinberg’s Product Marketing Manager for Cubase. “Owners of these two Apple products will be able to control Cubase for an interactive and enjoyable mobile controller experience, including functions like activating recording while playing an instrument or performing and remixing a song live on stage using the Arranger Track,” Vogt adds.

Utilizing the iPhone and iPod Touch onboard WiFi capability to directly control Cubase 5, Cubase RC supports a large range of functions, including comprehensive transport control, Marker location, toggling of essential functions such as Metronome, Cycle Mode and many more. Cubase RC also controls the unique Cubase Arranger functionality, allowing iPhone and iPod Touch owners to play segments of a production live, display the song position and chain status and use the Jump control to skip to a predefined song section.

Cubase RC is based on the powerful Steinberg Kernel interface (SKI) technology for seamless integration into the Cubase software core. Cubase RC controls Cubase 5 running on both Mac OS X and Windows platforms.

So there are essentially two views for Cubase RC. One is a transport view that lets you start and stop playback/recording remotely. Very handy for those of us who record ourselves. The second function is the one that has me interested.

Cubase RC – Arrangement View

The Arrangement View of Cubase RC lets you trigger marked sections of your song on the fly. That has great promise for producing some entertaining live performances. You could walk away from your lappy and still control your song from across the stage as you engage the crowd. Excellent idea. I wonder how much that will push Cubase into performance territory previously reserved for Ableton Live.

If you have the iPhone apps from iTouch MIDI that we’ve covered before, I don’t know that Steinberg’s release is big news to you. I still think it’s great that they’re building in native support for wireless control without any third party company introducing new potential for bugs.

You can check out Cubase RC and the new Cubase V on Steinberg’s site.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 16th, 2009 at 6:39 pm. It is filed under wires and tagged with app, cubase, iphone, remote, steinberg, transport. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.