Steinberg Media Technologies has announced that its new Personal Music Production System, Cubase Essential 4, is now being shipped out to its distributors worldwide. The availability of Cubase Essential 4 at local outlets may vary regionally.

Tailored to musicians, home studios and anyone on a tight budget, Cubase Essential 4 is a streamlined version of Steinberg's Cubase 4. Including a powerful yet compact set of audio recording and mixing tools, comprehensive MIDI features and a full set of next-generation VST3 plug-ins including a "fantastic-sounding" guitar amp plug-in, Cubase Essential 4 is shipping now to resellers worldwide. Compatible with both the latest Mac and Windows operating systems, Cubase Essential 4 costs €149.00* and replaces Cubase SE3 as Steinberg's entry-level version of Cubase.

Cubase Essential 4 features include:

• Comprehensive composing, recording and mixing tools including 64 audio tracks, unlimited MIDI tracks, 44 included VST3 and MIDI plug-ins, 16 VST instrument slots, full latency compensation and much more.
• Integrated HALionOne sampling instrument with over 100 playable instruments including waves from the Yamaha Motif synthesizer.
• Built-in Amp Simulator for instant guitar recording with 14 amps and 10 speaker simulations with a new, easy-to-use interface.
• AudioWarp real-time time stretching and pitch shifting with formant correction for natural-sounding transposition and full tempo matching.
• Arranger Track with pattern-based arranging tools stores up to 16 different arrangements for on-the-fly reordering of song sections, experimenting with arrangements or live performances.
• MediaBay sound management technology for intuitive management of all audio, MIDI and video files, track and instrument presets with in-context auditioning.
• Instrument Tracks offer fast and efficient handling of VST instruments and add VST instruments to a project in a one-step operation.
• Track Presets are best combined with the MediaBay for instant saving and recall of audio, MIDI and instrument track parameters, including drag and drop into the project or onto an existing track.
• Drag & Drop for Insert FX for fast swapping of inserts and copying/moving plug-ins between tracks in the Cubase Essential 4 mixer.
• Cross-platform: Windows XP and Vista, Mac OS 10.4 and 10.5, Universal Binary.
• Many more new features for customers upgrading from Cubase SE3 including Track Freeze, VST Plug-in Bridge, a redesigned Sample Editor, Advanced QuickTime 7 Support and much more.