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Nuendo weighs in at nearly three times the price of its little brother Cubase.

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Whereas Cubase has long been a staple product for computer musicians, those working in post-production for film, TV and radio are more likely to turn to its sibling, Nuendo. The two apps are superficially similar, but each has its own exclusive features.

Post-production is where music, sound effects, actors' dialogue, etc, are compiled into a finished stream of audio in a specific format - it might be in surround sound, too.

This is where Nuendo steps in, with features such as extensive surround support (up to 12 speakers), pro video and sync functionality, import/export of a wider range of formats, and network collaboration.

"Surround Panner v5 makes the previous effort look chunky."

Traditionally, certain features in Nuendo have filtered through to Cubase (and vice versa), and in fact, there are a few things in Nuendo 5 that are also in the recent free Cubase 5.5 update.

Of course, here we'll focus on the musical side of Nuendo 5.

Dialogue box

The Cubase/Nuendo MediaBay is something that, until now, hasn't really clicked with us. The idea is that you use it to index all the relevant data (audio, MIDI, projects, plug-in presets, etc) on your drives, so that you can browse, filter and preview it all at your leisure.

It's been overhauled for Nuendo 5 (and Cubase 5.5) and we're pleased to say, it's really making more sense now. The layout has been refined and it just seems more logical and friendly, not to mention swifter overall, making it something we actually want to use.

You need to tag all your data for it to be of much use, but that chore could well be worth the effort for post-production houses. Also new are Clip Packages, whereby you select a bunch of related audio clips and export them - you can later pull them from the MediaBay to recreate the original structure of clips.

Many music producers create beats with samples on audio tracks, and we found Clip Packages to be a great way of stashing away such 'composite beats' for later use.

New in the mixer is the Wave Meters view, which shows a visual recreation of the clips on the audio tracks scrolling upwards. It doesn't show the channel's output data, though, and while that does mean you can see what's coming up in advance, it still feels like an underdeveloped idea - you can't adjust the speed or scrub by dragging, for instance.

Next up is Direct Routing, enabling you to designate eight possible output destinations for each channel, and then flick between them with a single click. You can switch multiple channels at once, and even select multiple destinations, and it's all automatable.

It works nicely (aside from a momentary level increase during the change), though you can't set a level offset for each output. Note that you can now arm multiple channels for recording too.

Just drive!

There's a new pitchshifter plug-in, Pitch Driver, with a claimed range of "up to 24 semitones", but while you can go two octaves down, it seems you can only pitch up by one.