Cubase Sx Experiences, any reviews anywhere at all? Options

Cubase SX for OSX has been out for over two weeks now, so I believe. And yet I can't find any reviews of it, and no one seems to be mentioning it...

The silence is deafening. So, has anyone got it? Has anyone seen a review of the OSX version?

I was excited about the release, but there is no demo, and I can't find anyone who has anything to say about the product based on actual experience... I'm not sure that I want to buy something based on such a lack of information.

Any links at all to a review would be welcomed - no, I don't mean the official blurb, I mean a really thorough review of it.

cheers all

[D-plex]

Okay, now for some good news...

Obviously, it’s very frustrating only being able to play back six audio tracks at a time, so my first investigations into Cubase involved trying to squeeze more audio out of the software. Similar to Levon River’s post above, I have gotten very good performance out of Cubase in OS9, being able to play at least 12 audio tracks at once.

Because I had imported a Cubase 5 song rather than starting a SX project from scratch, I decided to see if anything got screwed up during import. And I found out something interesting.

In my original Cubase 5 project, each of the twelve vocal takes I recorded was being sent through the same VST mixer channel. This was because I was using a combination of chorus and delay on the vocals, and I wanted to compare how each track sounded through the effects. The tracks were never meant to be played at the same time, and setting identical effects for different VST channels would have been laborious. So I just went ahead and funneled ‘em through the same channel and turned tracks on & off to compare them.

The Cubase SX version did not mimic this behavior. When I imported the song, it changed things. First, it gave each of the audio tracks its own VST channel. Then, it very helpfully duplicated the VST effects I was using on the vocals to each of the 12 VST channels. It also named each of the tracks "Channel 12," making me think that they were still being sent through the same channel. The end result was that every time I turned on another audio track I was also turning on another instance of a chorus effect, a delay, and EQ settings. To make matters worse, these are the old-style Cubase 5 versions of the effects, which Steinberg offers in SX, but with a “use at your own risk” warning. No wonder the CPU was freaking out!

I immediately turned off all VST effects on all tracks, and I am overjoyed to report that I can play all 12 audio tracks at once and the CPU meter never even reaches the 10% mark. (It sounds great, too...a choir of 12 voices all singing the same thing. I really need to play with vocal harmonies more.)

I hope I didn’t panic anyone too badly with my first report. I will continue to relate my experiences with SX here. I guess my first lesson is that importing old Cubase 5 song files is not a seamless process. My next goal, now that I know that the audio works, is to solve any issues with running Reason through Cubase via Rewire.