Our Technologies

Since the foundation of the company in 1984, Steinberg has constantly pushed back the boundaries of what is possible in digital audio. Our groundbreaking technologies offer flexible, cost-effective and intuitive ways of realizing your full creative and professional potential, and for the basis of countless production environments around the globe.

VST: Seamless integration for virtual instruments and effects

The Virtual Studio Technology (VST) interface is nothing short of a revolution in digital audio. Developed by Steinberg and first launched in 1996, VST creates a full, professional studio environment on Windows and macOS computers.

VST allows the integration of virtual effect processors and instruments into the digital audio environment. These can be software recreations of hardware effect units and instruments or new creative effect components within a VST system — all are integrated seamlessly into the host application. Since these connections are virtual, there is no need for messy audio or MIDI cabling. All functions of a VST effect processor or instrument are directly controllable and can be easily integrated with external equipment.

Being an open standard, the possibilities offered by VST are steadily growing. New virtual effect processors and virtual instruments are constantly being developed by Steinberg and other companies. Leading VST instrument creators include renowned software companies such as Waldorf and Native instruments. Companies such as Spectral Design and TL Audio have contributed virtual effect processors.

ASIO: The low-latency, high-performance audio standard

The Audio Stream Input/Output (ASIO) architecture forms the backbone of VST. ASIO addresses any needs a professional audio recording solution might have. It does this by supporting variable bit depths and sample rates, multi-channel operation and synchronization. As a result, the user gets low latency, high performance, easy set up and stable audio recording within VST.

The entire system becomes controllable and offers complete and immediate access to the audio system's capabilities. Since its introduction, ASIO has become a supported standard by leading audio hardware manufacturers.

VST System Link: True connectivity for the virtual studio

This standard has brought true connectivity and platform independence to the digital audio world. VST System Link enables the transfer of synchronization, transport and audio data between two or more workstations equipped with compatible software and hardware over standard digital audio cabling systems such as ADAT, TDIF, AES/EBU or S/PDIF. Because it uses the audio stream itself, synchronization is completely sample accurate, even across multiple workstation configurations. VST System Link lets you take your audio projects to new levels of complexity, and offers unbelievable flexibility in the working environment.

Note Expression: A revolutionary new way of controller editing

A major limitation of MIDI is the nature of controller information. With the exception of poly pressure (polyphonic aftertouch), controller messages such as modulation or pitch bend are channel messages. It is important to understand that articulation data on one note usually also affect any other note playing on the same track/channel at the same time.

With VST 3, Note Expression is able to break free from the limitations of MIDI controller events by providing access to VST 3 controller events that circumvent the laws of MIDI and provide articulation information for each individual note — even in a polyphonic arrangement.

SMuFL: Standard glyph mapping for musical symbols

Initiated by Steinberg and now developed by the W3C Music Notation Community, Standard Music Font Layout (SMuFL) is a specification that provides a standard way of mapping the thousands of musical symbols required by conventional music notation into the Private Use Area in Unicode’s Basic Multilingual Plane for a single (format-independent) font. SMuFL categorizes more than 2,400 discrete symbols used in conventional Western music notation, into 108 ranges, and provides detailed guidelines for the design and use of fonts intended for use in applications that draw symbolic music notation (DAWs, scoring applications, etc.), and for use in text-based applications (word processors, page layout tools, etc.).

Steinberg has also made available a complete, reference font family, Bravura, that is licensed under the permissive Open Font License.

Read more at www.smufl.org