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Yamaha buys Steinberg

Yamaha, known for making motorcycles and jetskis, as well as lots of musical instruments and professional audio gear, is buying Steinberg, the company behind music software Cubase and Nuendo. Cubase and Nuendo are notably the last cross-platform PC and Mac digital audio workstation (DAW) applications out there, other than the venerable ProTools which can only be purchased along with their hardware. The other two major audio and midi applications (Logic Pro and Digital Performer) are both Mac-only. There’s some other notable applications that are cross-platform, but Cubase/Nuendo, Performer and Logic are the ‘Big 3’. This move puts Yamaha directly in competition with Apple, who owns Emagic and their Logic software (now called Logic Pro and branded as an Apple product). I suspect Yamaha wants the software technology as a complement to their range of digital audio hardware, but we’ll see what happens!