Steinberg
More info
- Creator
- Karl Steinberg, Manfred Rürup
- Released
- 1984
- Owner
- Yamaha (since 2004)
- Type
- Company (audio software)
- Website
- steinberg.net
The Hamburg company behind Cubase — and behind VST and ASIO, two interfaces that most home studios still quietly depend on.
Karl Steinberg and Manfred Rürup started in 1984 with a MIDI sequencer for the Commodore 64, then moved to the Atari ST, whose built-in MIDI ports made it the studio computer of its day. Cubase arrived in 1989 and drew tracks as horizontal blocks on a timeline, a layout that now looks like a law of nature in every DAW.
The interfaces were the lasting contribution. VST (1996) let anyone write effects that ran inside other people's software, and ASIO (1997) gave Windows an audio path with latency low enough to actually play through. Both were made freely available, which is precisely why competitors adopted them. Pinnacle bought the company in 2003 and passed it on to Yamaha a year later. Nuendo is the post-production sibling.