The channel strips have high and low-pass filters, a noise gate, four-band StudioEQ, three different compressors, a spectrum analyzer, tube/tape saturation section, a brick wall limiter, and maximizer. There are 150 factory presets included.

You get Voxengo's studio-grade 64-band spline CurveEQ, a large, built-in mix bus meter with a choice of various standards including Europe's EBU R128 loudness for broadcasters as well as Bob Katz's K-System metering. There is also VST Connect SE for Internet recording sessions and the latest version of MixConvert for high quality down mixing of multi-channel surround sound mixes.

On the music composing side is Chord Track, a dedicated track within the Project window that identifies the music's harmony structure and generates Meta data about chord quality and scale. Changes in Chord Track can change the harmonic content of both MIDI sequences as well as audio tracks that have already been analyzed with VariAudio.

Chord Assistant comes with Cubase 7 and provides the ultimate tool for songwriters looking for just the right chord and/or suggesting harmonically related chord progressions. New in both versions is Hermode microtonal tuning technology that adjusts flaws of traditional well-tempered scales through a process called dynamic retuning.

Much more about these new versions of Cubase 7 and Cubase Artists 7 than I can fit in this preview! There are many new samples, instruments, and MIDI loops for HALion Sonic SE, Goove Agent and Beat Designer products. Steinberg also announced Nuendo 6, sharing many of the same great improvements now available in Cubase 7. Cubase 7 sells for $599.99 and Cubase Artist 7 is $329.99, is cross-platform and runs 32/64-bit for Windows and Mac OS X Intel.