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If you want to pan with the surround panner from the mixer view, you have to be rather precise about grabbing the little ball which represents the orientation of the signal within the soundfield. Double clicking the panning box brings up an expanded view which is a very well crafted and useful graphic with a color gradation showing the relative levels in each of the surround speakers (see Fig 1.)

Fig. 1: Expanded panning window
(click for larger view).

I recorded 18 tracks, and my CPU usage was up to around 40%. I decided that it was time to add some effects.

Clicking on the FX button on a particular channel from the mixer view brought up what was essentially a channel strip in a rectangular box. I could assign an effect to a particular send, which is a global setting which will appear on other channels, and then add effect to the channel that I had selected. This channel strip view was a nicely laid out workspace (see Fig. 2). After assigning four effects (one effect to four sends), and giving some level to a couple of these sends on just a few channels, my CPU usage was up to about 60%.

Realtime
Adding level to the sends, moving faders in the mixer view, etc., gave very immediate results with only the slightest latency. Also, during playback or recording, I was able to move easily around the program, changing screens and jumping around with no problem, sluggishness in screen draws, or anything of that nature.

The mixer view, however, does not give you a minimize button, so if you close it and reopen it, it pops you back to the channel 1 position. You could always click away from it to put the screen in the background, but that would force you to arrange your windows so that a little corner of the mixer would stick out and allow you to click it to bring it back to the foreground. One little bug is that, if you have your track view set to maximum screen-size, opening the mixer will cause it to pop into the set-screen-size mode. Maybe they can tweak that.

Importing Audio

Fig. 2: Channel strip view (click image).

The import list from the file menu is extensive, from wav and aiff to CD ripping, OMF, video and audio from video, to Cubase songs and MIDI files.

I imported a wav file, which took 40 seconds or so to import, and then about a minute to draw the waveform. Since this was a wave file that corresponded to my current song project, I went to the position on the timeline where the audio was to play. I noticed that when clicking on and bringing the cursor to that point on the timeline, that my CPU usage jumped to about 75%, and my computer locked. After restarting, I realized that this was Nuendo's thing, to buffer the audio upon placing the cursor, the upside being that audio begins to playback immediately when play is engaged.

By mistake, I had the cursor at the 2:00 point, so the imported audio was placed there. Moving the audio back to the beginning of the track was easy, just by clicking on the track to highlight it and dragging it to the left. As I dragged it, I was given a little readout of the current position of the beginning of my audio clip, which was updated as I dragged it. I like that.

Project #2
I decided to take things at a slightly different pace for the second tune. I wanted to experiment with the creativity that a program such as Nuendo might afford me.

I imported a MIDI file, and used those tracks to trigger audio that I then recorded into Nuendo. I built the tune more slowly, paying more attention to levels and sounds. Adding effects as I went had a feeling of building the mix from the ground up. The idea of total instant recall in a system that is fully self contained caused me to think in terms of sounds going to mix very early in the game.

As I was tweaking knobs, I noticed that knobs could be turned using the scroller on my mouse. Value readouts could also be changed using the scroller, and the corresponding knob moved in response. I found this very handy.

After importing the file, I found that my project would start and stop. This seemed to be a performance issue, but I knew that my system was in good shape. After going to the Nuendo website for a software update, I noticed in the bug list advice not to use the Audio/MIDI template. It's hard to imagine that the template doesn't merely consist of a handlful of audio tracks and a handle of MIDI tracks added to an empty template. Nevertheless, I decided to create a project by running MIDI from the program that it had been created in, and just using Nuendo to track audio.

The Next Big Step
So I installed a removable tray for my boot drives so I could pop in Win 98 or Win 2000 according to my mood. At first blush, Nuendo would not run on Windows 2000, crashing moments after the song was launched.

In Part II of this review, I will have installed the Nuendo updates, and otherwise have tried to resolve the W2K issue with Steinberg.I'll also push the limits of the program, and attempt to discover what benefit another 256M o' RAM will bring.

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