“Studio” for many of us means packing musical production tools into a corner of our desk, then being able to fit the whole thing into a backpack and take it with us. It’s bringing along your entire production to a cramped rehearsal room and adjusting tracks in a hotel room. It’s putting together an assortment of unusual pieces of DIY hardware, mobile game systems and an iPod touch, and composing and performing a live PA set. So packing in functionality means a lot.

That makes it worth considering a hardware solution like Cakewalk’s V-Studio 100 in obsessive detail. Combining an interface with mixing, control, recording, and software functions makes the VS especially relevant to the computer musician.

I was one of the first people outside Cakewalk to lay eyes on the V-Studio 100. Part of the initial appeal to me was that it seemed to combine a lot of the tools I wanted into a single package.

Sure, its big brother, the V-Studio 700, is an impressive unit with loads of onboard options. But the V-Studio 100 was more my speed: it has that apartment studio, backpack-friendly attitude. And don’t let the “SONAR” in “SONAR V-Studio 100” fool you, either. While it’s great having a free copy of a special edition of SONAR on Windows you can use the VS hardware and even the plug-in bundle that comes with it on any host on either Windows or Mac. And — oh, yeah – you can also make use of all that audio I/O and mixing to do some crazy stuff with your plugged-in portable game  consoles and iPhones and homebrewed electronics.

The real test is whether this one unit can perform the tasks you need. The V-Studio 100 tries to be a number of different things:

• An audio interface (up to 24-bit/96 kHz)
• A mixer
• A control surface
• A wave recorder
• A software bundle

Correction: The street price of the whole package is US$699. (I had incorrectly put the street at $800 instead of $700!)

Anything that does that much will naturally have to make some compromises. Some of those compromises I think are rather well-conceived on the VS, while others I hope will evolve over time.

This will be partially a review, but partially a description of what it’s like using the VS, so if you do have one of these, I can hopefully give you a sense of how to begin using it.

The big traditional DAW announcement at this NAMM show was Steinberg’s Cubase 5. Cubase as a music software brand is now older than some people who read this blog, but never mind: Cubase 5 certainly doesn’t want for new stuff. And Cubase still claims to be the world’s most popular computer DAW.

Computer Music Magazine has the best coverage I saw of the new release (admittedly, I think Cubase is bigger on their side of the pond than it is here in the US):

Computer Music’s first look at Cubase RC for iPhone

Computer Music on Steinberg Cubase 5

The iPhone app, Cubase RC, is just the sort of thing I expected other developers to do, though they didn’t. It offers basic remote control functionality and even triggers arrangements, both of which ought to be pretty useful, since you can sit an iPhone or iPod touch next to / atop whatever you’re controlling or recording. And major kudos to Steinberg for making this free rather than trying to squeeze extra cash out of it.

So, what do you get out of Cubase 5 itself? Just about every area of the program has seen improvement, with the major selling points being optimized performance, vocal editing, and new beat creation tools.

There are some good bits here, but – realizing I’m biased as I’ve never been a big Cubase user – I can’t help but notice they’re lagging behind some of their competitors with some of the items. I was always impressed with the basic editing environment in Cubase, and the way it handles MIDI and soft synths. My disappointment here is that, while there are some nice-looking performance and workflow tweaks, much of the functionality comes in the form of add-ons. That means Cubase has to compete with similar efforts by other tools and (particularly) plug-ins. If you’re using Cubase, this may be great news, but if not, I just wonder if it’s capable of even inspiring an twinge of envy from anyone else. (And, hey, while you can’t convert all other users, it is nice to at least make them a bit jealous.)

The good: optimized performance for existing users, some nice monophonic vocal editing integrated with the program, and an innovative, really musical way of dealing with expressions for instruments.

Less impressive: Tacked-on features for mixing grooves I suspect a lot of loyal Cubase users may simply ignore.

I’m happy to be frank over this just to see if people generally agree or disagree – particularly Cubase users. This is all basically on paper, as well, so if there is a loyal Cubase user who wants to review these features when available, we’d love to hear from you. Here’s my (slightly uneducated) take:

On a purely technical level, how does Windows Vista work with a leading pro audio application? A lot of that depends on just how much the developer does to tune their software, and to hook into some of the new audio technologies in the OS.

I wanted to know more about how Cakewalk’s SONAR 8 DAW was specifically optimized for Windows Vista. SONAR 7 was already out in front with support for Vista’s audio plumbing, but SONAR 8 promises quite a bit more. With the help of CTO Noel Borthwick, we were able to go through internal engineering documents and communication and get the full story. (Noel, who has a resume as a Linux programmer as well as leading the top Windows audio developer’s technical efforts, has been very frank in the past about Vista, walking us through changes before launch and real world experiences one year later.)

As Noel puts it, this is “more minute detail than most sane people would care to read,” but that’s just the kind of detail we like. If you just want to know whether your software will work, this is overkill. But for those of you who, like us, are interested in why some things work, this is a good place to start. I also sincerely hope other developers on Windows will start to invest more time in some of these details.

If SONAR 8’s music features are what interest you, see our first look:

SONAR 8 Preview: Instrument Tracks, Beatscape Instrument, Transient Shaper, Enhanced Performance, Other Goodies

I’ll repeat my current recommendation on Windows. If you’ve got a system running XP and you’re happy, I’d stick with it. But I see no reason to avoid SP1, unless you have a specifically incompatible setup, now that SP1 and driver updates have brought some maturity to the platform. I find the new OS more usable and, with the right software and drivers, even more stable. (This is not what I would have said before SP1, especially early after launch.) In fact, this walk-through with Noel demonstrates why, in the case of a SONAR system, you might be happier under Vista, on a point by point basis. I’ll avoid the “versus Mac” or “versus Linux” arguments, as those tend to get more complex and abstract, but there’s some good stuff here for those of you with Windows experience.

And yes, if any developer would like to do a similar tour on the Mac or Linux, I’m all ears. But just in case you think I’m crazy when I say there is some really robust stuff for audio in Vista, now you’ll know just what I mean.