Audiobus: Use your music apps together.

What is Audiobus?Audiobus is an award-winning music app for iPhone and iPad which lets you use your other music apps together. Chain effects on your favourite synth, run the output of apps or Audio Units into an app like GarageBand or Loopy, or select a different audio interface output for each app. Route MIDI between apps — drive a synth from a MIDI sequencer, or add an arpeggiator to your MIDI keyboard — or sync with your external MIDI gear. And control your entire setup from a MIDI controller.

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Sample/Audio Editing in Cubasis.

edited December 2015 in App Tips and Tricks

Just thought I'd share a new discovery in Cubasis that for me really is the 'Tip of the Year' :)
Had I discovered this earlier it would have saved me (and probably others) a lot of frustration during the year.

I'd been for long looking for a way to do sample accurate editing in Cubasis and was always annoyed by the 'invisible snap value' that was present as Cubasis defaults to 1/192nd note resolution even when the Grid is turned off.

When editing audio the 1/192nd note 'ticks' vary in length depending on the songs/projects tempo making accurate selection when zoomed in next to if not completely impossible.

The Cubasis manual states this (for the Audio/Sample Editor):

"Between the main and miniature panel lies the ruler, which includes a playhead and two selection locators. Use these to adjust the selection within your audio event, which is marked blue. Depending on the your current time display setting (in the transport panel), the ruler will either display time in seconds or bars / beats."

What surprised me was that the 'grid-snapping' is only active when 'bars/beats' is shown while if 'time' is shown no snapping happens yippee!!!

So for sample-accurate editing set the 'time display' to 'time' instead of 'bars/beats' and voila, sample-accurate editing!

I have to apologise to @LFS for all the complaints about 'bugs' in Cubasis when it was in fact my own lack of 'RTFM & Understand IT' that caused the frustrations, sorry...

As Spock would say: It's only Logic since there is no note-values to snap to when only time is shown...

I'll also take this opportunity to wish all here at the AB-Forum a Happy and Productive New Year 2016!
/Samuel

Comments

  • Great tip. Thanks. That was bugging me last week!

  • edited December 2015

    Hmmm, that doesnt seem to make any difference for me. I still seem to get the snapping with grid off and whether I am on bars/beats or time. Maybe I am doing something wrong? Could you post a screenshot? I am on Air1. 8,4,1 although I doubt it is my setup, but who knows...

  • @AudioGus said:
    Hmmm, that doesnt seem to make any difference for me. I still seem to get the snapping with grid off and whether I am on bars/beats or time. Maybe I am doing something wrong? Could you post a screenshot? I am on Air1. 8,4,1 although I doubt it is my setup, but who knows...

    Double-Tap the audio-event to open it in the Audio-Editor, it's different from 'resizing' the events on the time-line where it's still locked to the 1/192 regardless of time or bars/beats shown.

  • edited December 2015

    @Samu said:

    @AudioGus said:
    Hmmm, that doesnt seem to make any difference for me. I still seem to get the snapping with grid off and whether I am on bars/beats or time. Maybe I am doing something wrong? Could you post a screenshot? I am on Air1. 8,4,1 although I doubt it is my setup, but who knows...

    Double-Tap the audio-event to open it in the Audio-Editor, it's different from 'resizing' the events on the time-line where it's still locked to the 1/192 regardless of time or bars/beats shown.

    Oh sweet! You can still split the sound on the timeline too though and not be locked! good find! that is nifty.... :)

  • I am so looking forward to finding out what Steinberg has in store for us in the next few updates. Just a hunch but I am thinking something good is coming.

  • Here are some screenshots showing the editing resolution.

    IMG_0783 is with 'time' and smallest possible 'selection'. It can be zoomed in even more but a 'selection' can not be shorter than this. For trimming this is not an issue as the 'end-point' is usually far away from the 'start-point', this is however the smallest selection that can be 'processed' (fade in/out, normalise etc.) in a sample.

    So if a few samples need to be deleted it's better to set the end / start-point and 'trim' as the start / end-point can be set sample-accurate.(well, as long as the resulting selection is not smaller than the smallest possible selection).

    The other two (IMG_0781 & 0782) show the 'jump between points when grid is off and bars/beats are used for the ruler.(ie. smallest selection at 90BPM when bars/beats is used for the ruler).

    For day-to-day usage the switch between Bars/Beats & Time did the trick when 'grid-off' was causing annoyance.

    I'm happy I found this :)

  • @Tritonman said:
    I am so looking forward to finding out what Steinberg has in store for us in the next few updates. Just a hunch but I am thinking something good is coming.

    Maybe We'll get some nice 'Time-Stretching'. Just grab the handles of an audio or midi segment and drag it to alter it's length. Any improvement to the MiniSampler is warmly welcomed too like SoundFont support, Layers, Filters/Envelopes/Modulation, MPC-Style Pads to trigger chords & samples, and well and option to change tuning of a sample (+/- semitones and cents).

    2016 will indeed be an exiting year.

  • edited December 2015

    First time poster here.

    There are a few key thinks that I am very surprised that Cubasis lacks:

    1. MIDI mapping
    2. Effects preset saving
    3. Better sync and midi functionality
    4. Better sample editing.

    Thanks for the tip in this thread!

    g

  • Welcome @ghostly606, now you've piped up, don't be, er, you know, invisible (and Happy New Year to you also...).

  • edited January 2016

    Been playing around with the Cubasis Audio/Sample-Editor in quite a bit and came up with a few ideas.

    If the 'Audio-Event' has been adjusted on the timeline (ie. the file-playback selection has been changed) those changes should be visible in the Audio/Sample-Editor as a 'Selection' when the event is opened for editing, this would make it easier to 'trim & save' the Selection(s) as new file(s).

    It should also be possible to 'tap-in' multiple splits to an Audio-Event while remaining in the Audio/Sample-Editor without having to manually select the 'splitted' segment and re-split etc.

    This would be very handy for 'chopping up' audio-files for re-arragement and for creating new MiniSampler instruments by saving each 'Event' as a new file.

    As it is now the Audio/Sample-Editor shows the whole file selected as default making it tedious to save the 'Event-Segment' as a new file as the selection is lost (ie. not shown) when opening the Audio/Sample-Editor.

    As an example it's pretty darn time-consuming to chop up a 2 bar loop into 16 or 32 segments and save them as individual files and bring them into MiniSampler.

    Other 'nice to have' features would be 'Save/Export Selected Audio-Events as Files'. This would automagically 'trim' & 'save' each Audio Event as a new file.

    This could be extended to 'Send Selected Audio-Segments to MiniSampler'. Mini-Sampler could then 'Auto Map' the segments to pads or keys for quick and easy re-mixing.

    Mini-Sampler should also include Fine/Coarse-Tuning for every sample.

    I'm very eager to see/hear what @LFS and the people at Steinberg are planing for future releases of Cubasis :)

  • Very good post ... thanks for sharing @Samu.

    Maybe there are more hidden solutions for some of Cubasis odd behaviours?

    I wonder if Cubasis snapping to zero when entering program changes could be cured somehow. Turning off snapping to bars does turn off snapping to zero but I don't want program changes every fraction of a second. I do want them to snap to rhythm but still be able to enter a 1 or 2.

    I wonder for what situation they think snapping to zero is usefull? Like, I have that synth with awfull patches 1 and 2, so good that Cubasis snaps to zero or 3 ? :wink:

  • @nick said:

    I wonder for what situation they think snapping to zero is usefull? Like, I have that synth with awfull patches 1 and 2, so good that Cubasis snaps to zero or 3 ? :wink:

    That's a good one, I honestly fail to see the logic behind the decision to jump between 0 and 3!?
    Unfortunately it affects all controllers not just program-change :(

    I wish Cubasis would go back to 'old-school' where it was possible to set Bank/Program-Change in the inspector for every 'Event' and it was also also possible to 'transpose' events that were 'aliasing' a source (ie. make one bass-line, make an alias of it and transpose the alias). This is the way it used to work in Cubase 2.5/3 in the good old days.

    A 'built-in' GM/GS-Style 'Mixer'/'Patch-Selector' would come in handy now that we have apps like Roland SoundCanvas available for iOS, and well maybe a built-in Soundfont Player & Creator. MiniSampler is a good start.

    Other ideas would be to make it possible to trigger/play the events using keyboard or pads and 'record' the performance to the timeline (an 'event-trigger track'?). This 'idea' comes from the good ol' Music-X for the Amiga.

    But before all that I wish we'd get AUi and Link support in Cubasis. When that happens it would most likely trigger a flood of AU-Compliant apps because everyone seems to be waiting for proper hosts for the AU-Plugs.

  • edited January 2016

    Great find Samu.

    But even if you could find this out by properly reading the manual (which i also read front to back and missed it), this is maybe not the best design on Steinbergs part. How about an "off" setting for the snap?

    Regarding small/large controller values, this is eliviated by changing the snap value (you would think this was related to time no?).

  • The 'snap to invisible grid' in the Audio-Editor bugged me for a long time. The time-line still has the 1/192nd note snap-grid regardless if bars/beats or time is shown.

    It was by accident I found that setting the ruler to 'time' disabled the grid-snap for Audio/Sample-Editor.

    I always though this was a 'bug' as it was already possible to do sample-accurate editing in the MiniSampler and it appeared to use a derivate of the same editor.

    Once the 'Holidays' are over and the people at Steinberg are back at work we'll see what happens :)

  • @RigVader said:
    Great find Samu.

    But even if you could find this out by properly reading the manual (which i also read front to back and missed it), this is maybe not the best design on Steinbergs part. How about an "off" setting for the snap?

    exactly!

    Thanks for the tip but it's too late for me now.Auria Pro is my new master and i don't look back.There are still a lo of other flaws in cubasis that NEVER got fixed/improved.,some of them known for years.I'm done with it for now and only medium excited about what steinberg could do with Cubasis 2.0.

  • edited January 2016

    That is nice. It is great to have such a rock solid DAW for iOS and this idea just made it even better, Thanks Samu. It is really no wonder that so many people choose this DAW. Really psyched for the upcoming year with Cubasis!

  • edited January 2016

    There are a fundamental things, that are either pretty obviously broken (e.g. mixdown only consistently working at 256) or wich pretty much defy existing standards and common sense.

    My problem is that Steinberg (or whoever develops Cubasis) are not open to discuss or very willing to acknowledge usability or design issues. Personally this makes me confused if they have problems appreciating some elements of DAW design, or if they are maybe rather struggeling with how some of their systems are implemented, which means they are not trivial to refactor. My personal hope is the latter and that the team will choose to fix the fundamentas, before adding more stuff on top. As an additional wish for the new year, please more transparancy.

    Note: I'm not saying that many many things in Cubasis are not working wonderfully well and are well though out :-)

  • I agree, in many regards a wonderfull app, but it is frustrating how reluctant they are to acknowledge that some things are so odd that they need to bechanged (like the snap to zero behaviour)

  • Needless to say I've dug just about every corner of Cubasis inside and out trying to figure out 'work-arounds' for many things some with success some left unsolved, like why there are sync-issues when freezing IAA-Instrument tracks?

    It's beyond my understanding why the results vary so much, sometimes the notes are triggered too early, sometimes too late (comparing the frozen and live-track to the midi-notes that were sent the changes in timing are not linear, the change back and forth randomly?!).

    Since the 'freezing' is not 'live' there should be at least a remote possibility to have the frozen and midi-track match the midi-track in timing using automatic delay-compensation or something similar.

    For IAA-Generators I've resorted to changing the midi-delay to match the 'buffer-size'(the latency varies depending un the buffer size used in Cubasis) so that the transients at the start of the recordings don't get chopped off. It's easier to delete some empty space at the start of a recording than recover lost transients.

    Maybe it's 'bugs' in IAA-Frameworks that causes this and makes it very hard for developers to 'get it right'?

    But most of the time Cubasis works just fine, and it will be interesting to see how the 'other apps'(BM3, FL3 etc.). tackle the issues when the new updates arrive.

  • I'll probably be compiling an in-depth list of issues I find with Cubasis and ventilate them elsewhere if that's of any use.

    But I'll just mention 'Triplets'. It's possible to quantise notes to 1/8t and 1/16t but there are no 'grid-lines' available for 1/8t and 1/16t. I fail to see why that was left out!?

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