This month I thought we'd take a break from covering the downloadable-music wars and look at a couple of products geared toward producing--and reproducing--music from home.
Steinberg's Cubasis VST is powerful, versatile, and, best of all, cheap recording software for the PC (with a Mac version on the way). It integrates the main ingredients from Steinberg's Cubase recording software into a compact package that lists for $99, but can easily be found for much less. You'd be hard-pressed to find a less expensive hard-disk recording system.
One of the program's most attractive features is the Arrange Window, a user interface for handling up to 32 audio or 64 MIDI tracks. It also has components of a professional mixer, with channel faders; mute, solo, and pan features; and a highly intuitive master that yields a CD-quality stereo mix. When mixing, you have access to two equalizers per channel, one insert-effect option per channel, and two effect-sends with four included effects at your disposal.
For instrumentation, VST provides a polyphonic synthesizer, a bass-guitar function with various pickup and plectrum options, and an automated virtual drum machine.
Editing MIDI files is quick and easy with the unit's detailed MIDI editor, while the score editor lets you edit your work as a musical notation and prepare your score for print-out. Finally, VST's mastering function lets you finish the job with fade functions and CD-burning software.
If you're fired up about recording on your PC but find yourself befuddled by some of the above terminology, do yourself a favor and look into MIDI recording before trying VST. Even if you have experience with analog recording (as I do), you'll run into some dead ends (as I did) if you don't spend some time in the digital-recording arena first.
One other thing about the VST package: It takes some muscle to run. The minimum requirements include a Pentium 200MHz chip and 64MB of RAM, and to make full use of the system's effects you need a high-performance computer. Beyond that, all that's necessary is a standard Windows sound card and the willingness to jump in and start experimenting.
OK, you've created the Great American Homemade CD. Now, how do you get the word out? CD manufacturing is still prohibitively expensive and complex for most do-it-yourselfers. Primera Technology has made burning CDs at home practical with the Composer Optical Disc Duplicator. This device lets you duplicate up to 50 CD-Rs per job at speeds of up to 12x--the fastest speed currently available.
Once a job is started, Composer's robotics and software work automatically, without human intervention. Authoring and duplication PrimoPro software from Prassi (included) can be learned in an hour or so. You can also print directly onto your discs with either of Primera's ink-jet or thermal disc printers.
The potentially intimidating process of making your own CDs is made less so by the Composer's set-it-and-forget-it interface. The unit's front panel is deliberately bare-bones; you just start the duplicating job and end it. The Composer picks up a disc from a spindle, burns it, finalizes it, and grabs the next one. Nothin' to it.
The full-bore Composer set-up isn't cheap (about $2,500 not including a printer), but if you're serious about pressing and distributing your own CDs, it's indispensable.
The Hot List
The award for most generous band of the month goes to Pavement, whose Web site includes not only MP3 files of rare and unreleased tracks, but also of entire concerts and radio broadcasts. At the moment, the band's site contains shows from 1992 and 1994, as well as a live, in-studio broadcast from Santa Monica, Calif., station KCRW-FM.
Another quirky group, the Beta Band, takes an interesting approach at its site. The site doesn't feature much music, but it does have a direct link to several MP3 search engines, giving users implicit permission to download Beta Band tracks wherever they can find them.
