Steinberg History

Cubase History (21 April, 2025)

The text below was copied and modified from musicradar.com. See, for example, also Looking Back at the Early Days of Steinberg (2024), Karl Steinberg: Cubase & Computers (1995), Inside Views: Steinberg Research (1986).

Cubase
The story of Cubase, a digital audio workstation (DAW),  bears a striking resemblance in parts to that of Logic. From their roots on the Commodore 64, both applications developed into highly sophisticated DAWs. Here, we’ll find out how Cubase helped Steinberg Media Technologies grow from humble beginnings to become one of the biggest music software companies of the 21st century.

Image. The Commodore 64

Steinberg Pro 16 
Steinberg Research arrived on the scene in 1984, in the era when the Commodore 64 dominated a miniscule computer music scene.

The company, formed by Karl ‘Charlie’ Steinberg  and Manfred Rürup, offered just one product: a basic 16-track MIDI sequencer package named Multitrack Recorder.

Rürup, a keyboard player, and Steinberg, a musician and studio engineer, were some of the earliest adopters of the relatively new MIDI protocol, immediately spotting its potential for computer sequencing.

Incidentally, the company name was chosen ‘simply’ because ‘Rürup’ was felt to be too difficult for American customers to pronounce.

Multitrack Recorder sold fewer than 50 copies, but the concept was soon developed into the more advanced Pro-16, a 16-track MIDI sequencer for C64. With a clear single page interface and real-time recording, Pro-16 was incredibly powerful for its time.

Image: Karl Steinberg and Manfred Rürup

Steinberg Pro 24
In 1986, Pro-16’s successor, Pro-24, saw the company shift its focus to the exciting new Atari 520ST platform. With programmer Werner Kracht on board, Steinberg took full advantage of the ST’s built-in MIDI capabilities and processing power.

As the name suggested, the Atari’s larger memory and faster processor allowed Pro-24 to offer a further eight tracks of sequencing than its predecessor, but it also crucially allowed much more flexibility in terms of track recording and song arrangement.

Editing options included musical score notation (introduced in version 2.0), quantisation options and a step sequencer-style grid editor for drums. Pro-24 was also ported to the Commodore Amiga, although the lack of built-in MIDI support meant that it was never as popular as the hugely successful Atari version.

See also these two articles in Music Technology (July 1988) and Sound On Sound (August 1988).

Image. The Steinberg Pro 24, a forerunner of Cubase, running on Atari ST

Image. The Atari ST and the Commodore Amiga

From Cubit to Cubase
Pro-24’s lifespan finally came to an end in 1989 with the announcement of a new Steinberg sequencer, Cubit. The name change signaled a major overhaul of the product, with a clear timeline interface and a much more advanced feature set.

From the Cubase Forum: Cubase was indeed called Cubit in during the development stages, right up to beta version 0.808. The name change was necessary because there was a database software provider with an existing product with the name Cubit, and we didn’t want to risk a costly name-change action after the release. Cubit, as a name was consciously chosen because of its meaning of ‘from the nose to the end of the (king’s) stretched out fingers’ to indicate the eye/mouse/computer relationship – literally what you touch is what you move. Cubase was quickly selected as a replacement name, even though some people said it now sounds like a database program. We know, and knew then, that the French were less than happy with the name:.

• it’s how it sounds in French, not its literal meaning. Here’s the likely reason: In French, “Cubase” is pronounced something like [ky-baz]. Now, if you say that out loud in French, it sounds very close to: “cul base” – which can be interpreted as “low ass” or “base ass”, and “cul” (pronounced like “kyu”) is slang for butt or ass in French. So essentially, to a French ear, Cubase can sound like a cheeky or mildly crude play on words—something like “bottom-based” or “butt-base.” Not exactly elegant or ideal for a polished music production tool! That’s likely the reason why the French were “less than happy” with the name—it sounds a bit vulgar or funny in an unintentional way.

Image. Cubase 2.0 (1990). See article in Sound on Sound.

The first version of Cubase was notable for the introduction of the clever MROS (MIDI Real-time Operating System) protocol, an early spiritual predecessor of the Steinberg/ Propellerhead ReWire system (which has been discontinued with Cubase 12 in 2022), which allowed the ST to carry out basic multitasking and transfer musical data between programs.

Despite the success of the Atari version, Steinberg released the first version of Cubase for the Mac operating system in 1990. Acknowledging the power of the Mac for music making, all Cubase development switched to the more advanced platform at this point.

Image. Macintosh Classic (1990)

1992 saw the arrival of Cubase Audio, the first version to offer audio support in addition to MIDI sequencing capabilities. Initially only available for the new Power Macintoshes (which boasted 60MHz processors – blisteringly fast for the time), the software was developed by British programmer Mark Badger and based on Digidesign’s hardware and TDM engine.

While continuing to develop for Mac and Atari, Steinberg also acknowledged the importance of the Windows operating system and entrusted a new project to programmer Ralf Kürschner.

In late 1992, Cubase 3.0 for Windows (see article and  article in Sound on Sound) joined the Steinberg line-up. Although it wouldn’t offer the audio features of its Mac counterpart until a couple of years later, the Windows version of Cubase opened the package up to an even larger market of home PC owners.

Plug-in revolution
Having already beaten Emagic’s Logic to the punch with audio support, Cubase hit another crushing blow in the summer of 1996 with the introduction of VST (Virtual Studio Technology) plug-in effects.

VST was the first plug-in expansion protocol designed specifically for audio applications, allowing effects to be added to the core Cubase application. Rather than relying on external processing hardware, VST plug-ins allowed Cubase to use the host computer’s native processing power to manipulate audio in real time.

The protocol was expanded in 1999 with the introduction of the version 2.0 specification, which allowed plug-ins to be controlled via MIDI, opening up the possibility of VST instruments (VSTi plug-ins).

Steinberg’s decision to release the VST Software Development Kit (SDK) and license the technology to other developers ensured that VSTs became one of the dominant plug-in formats. The introduction of plug-ins can rightfully be considered one of Steinberg’s greatest contributions to the development of music software.

Paths diverge
Windows users finally got their hands on plug-ins with Cubase VST 3.5 in late 1997, but the major upgrade arrived for the Mac the following year.

Cubase VST 4.0 offered Logic-style Folder Tracks, a Marker Track, basic customisable interface options including Window Sets, groove template creation and a variety of smaller tweaks. More importantly, though, the flagship version of Cubase was renamed VST/24, signalling the introduction of 24-bit recording.

Cubase SX
The current incarnation of Cubase first arrived in the summer of 2002, when Steinberg released Cubase SX, rather than being named Cubase VST 6.0 as would seem logical. Steinberg again chose to go back to version 1.0 in order to symbolise that this was an entirely new product.

Legacy code was ditched and the new version of Cubase was built on the much more advanced Nuendo audio engine. With sample-accurate audio editing in the arrange window, 5.1 surround mixing, dramatically improved automation and multiple undo levels, SX brought Cubase into the 21st century.

Cubase SX was updated regularly over the course of the next seven years but in 2006, the SX suffix was dropped and Cubase 4 introduced the MediaBay and Sound Frame for browsing settings. Also featured were Control Room monitoring options taken from Nuendo and a number of new plug-ins including the HALion One soft sampler.

The future
2024 marked Steinberg’s 40th anniversary. At the moment of writing this post we have Cubase 14 which no longer uses the famous dongle. In addition, there exist a range of other Steinberg software products like WaveLab, Dorico and Spectralayers, which I also use in my music production efforts.

Videos

Video: Atari Cubase Cubase 3

Gallery

Image. Steinberg Cubase 3.