Steinberg has announced that the latest update to its Cubase SX and Cubase SL music production software products are now available as downloads from the Steinberg website. The update features over new 50 new functions as well as numerous other enhancements, and is available now as a download from www.steinberg.net.

“Providing over 50 new features in a free update reflects the importance we at Steinberg attach to customer care and product support,” says Steinberg’s Senior Product Manager for Music Technology Arnd Kaiser. “And alongside the many other enhancements, support for the new Studio Connections Audio and the extended multiprocessing capabilities establish this update as a further milestone on the development of Cubase,” Kaiser continues.

For existing Cubase SX3 customers, the update to 3.1 brings major new developments in the area of hardware integration. The advanced Studio Connections functionality, which links Cubase SX to MIDI hardware supporting this standard, has been further upgraded to include full audio integration. External instruments and effects supported by Studio Connections Recall and Audio now behave like virtual instruments and effect plug-ins, offering not only mixing directly within Cubase SX, but also one-step audio mixdown and “freezing” of the connected audio hardware. Any hardware, which does not support Studio Connections, can now also be integrated directly into the VST mixer in Cubase SX 3.1 as External Instruments or External FX including full MIDI control and latency compensation.

The 3.1 versions of Cubase SL and Cubase SX also offer a range of other new features. These include the new “Equal-Power” panner which maintains equal power across the entire panning range, while the new Mixer key commands offer full control of the entire VST mixer using customized key commands. Users of Cubase SX/SL 3.1 can also render playback parameters into MIDI data, “freezing” MIDI track play parameters quickly and permanently for project transfer to another application. Cubase SX/SL 3.1 include advanced multiprocessor support, including the latest dual-core processors from AMD and Intel, giving professional users full access to the latest high-end workstation computers with dramatic performance gain. Cubase SX3.1 now supports Steinberg’s DTS and Dolby Digital Encoder plug-ins, allowing Cubase SX users to encode to these popular industry-standard surround formats..