Cubase and Nuendo add ARA support – great news for Melodyne users

Cubase and Nuendo add ARA support – great news for Melodyne users

 

Do you use Melodyne in Cubase or Nuendo? You’re in for a treat! Steinberg has released maintenance updates for both of its flagship DAWs, adding a feature that many had been waiting for. The latest versions now come with ARA support. This could greatly improve your workflow with Melodyne and other ARA 2 compatible plug-ins.

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With the newly added ARA support, Cubase 10.0.30 and Nuendo 10.1 are catching up to DAWs like Logic Pro X, Reaper and Studio One, which already support the data exchange protocol developed by Celemony and Presonus. ARA (Audio Random Access) allows the host application to exchange audio data with Melodyne much more seamlessly. Previously, you had to transfer audio to the Melodyne plug-in in real time. Besides being a time-consuming process, this also prevented you from making edits to the original audio tracks outside of Melodyne. With ARA, Melodyne integrates seamlessly, feeling much like a built-in editor, Celemony says.

Seamless Melodyne integration

ARA makes it unnecessary to load Melodyne as a plug-in. Simply select an audio event and choose the Melodyne extension, and Melodyne will open like any other editor and analyze the audio. This allows you to use all of Melodyne’s features directly in the DAW, without the need to transfer audio back and forth. Melodyne also shows events preceding and following the selected event. And if you decide to edit the audio track by copying, pasting, moving, muting or shortening events, these changes show up immediately in the Melodyne window. That’s a huge workflow improvement over previous versions, and now Cubase and Nuendo users can benefit from it as well.

According to Celemony, there are still some tasks that require workarounds, like adjusting audio events to the song tempo. Also, level changes to events and fades can only be performed before equipping that event with Melodyne. Celemony says that the latter issue should be fixed in a future Cubase update. For the time being, these things still require you to render your Melodyne edits to audio. But I think the advantages of ARA greatly outweigh these small issues.

Compatibility

ARA support is available in Cubase 10.0.30 and Nuendo 10.1. Both are free updates for registered users of Cubase 10 and Nuendo 10, respectively.