DAW recommendations

[madox]

Hi,

I am looking for a new DAW, and would really appreciate any recommendations. I will try out a few, but I only want to buy one, and use it for quite some time. I'm not yet sure what I will be spending.

I am running WinXP for my music, at the moment, and will be buying a new you beaut PC later in the year. I'm planning on buying a new firwire audio interface soon, which comes with Cubase LE. I am mostly using hardware synths via MIDI, along with a couple of softsynths on my main PC, and one old DOS box which boots as an AXS soft synth MIDI sound module.

I have been using EnergyXT, but am pretty unimpressed with its limitations, and poor software design. What I liked about EnergyXT was its fairly intuitive interface, and ease of MIDI sequencing of external hardware instruments.

As for the other options, I am pretty out of touch with the market. My (limited) impressions are as follows:

• Cubase will be my next trial. I tried it many years ago, and really didn't like the interface much. I felt it was a bit cluttered/disorganised, and unintuitive, though it did seem to be very capable, once oriented to it.
  
• Live seems like a different sort of beast, in terms of workflow, and it seems to have a lot of vocal support. Looks like a really polished interface. I have no idea what it is like to work with yet.
  
• Reaper seems to be a decent low cost audio recorder/workstation, and MIDI issues are getting some dev attention.
  
• Protools has worked on its MIDI features in its latest incarnation, though appears to still be really expensive.
  
• Logic is built on a really good rep, and seems to have good user opinions. Latest version seems to need some fixing though. Also, being Mac only would mean a couple of changes for me, though I am still considering it.
  
• FL Studio has grown up a lot, and from my quick try of it early last year, it seems to be a decent program, pretty easy to work with, and I was quite happy with my test run of its sample library.
  
• Cakewalk, I have very little idea about, except that I know its been around for a while.
  

I know there are also some freeby DAWs, though I am yet to look into this in any concerted way.

Thanks for any insight that may be offered,

-madox

[aminoplacid]

Certainly I would check out any demos that are available first.  Most DAW's probably have a demo of some sort.  Personally I use Live and really like the workflow  because of it's gearing towards loop based sequencing and ability to work with DJing.  My recommendation would be to steer away from freebie DAW's.  This is only because they may not exist next week or they may not be very feature rich.  Also, support and user base may be limited.  With an established app, the developers are constantly working to improve it and may be more invested in doing so than a free app.  I also liked Cubase SX when I played with it 4-5 years ago on a PC.  Logic, when I used it nearly 6 years ago, was a bit uncomfortable for me but that may have changed since.  That was only because of how the track routing was setup.  Hope that helps some.  Look forward to other input.

Good luck in your search! :)

[stryd_one]

I'd bump cakewalk up that list a bit; it's the original pro sequencer on windows, has always been quite midi-focussed. Temper is dope too, but it's pretty unusual... I wonder though... what kind of music do you make? What kind of things do you want to do with it?

My #1 bit of advice would be: try everything.

[Echopraxia]

My work flow has never been more faster and more creative when using reaper. They took what worked for logic and went with it. I used to use logic on windows untill they bitched out on me. Ever since I looked into mac versions but they always missed something or there was a bug that was worse on mac. Logic is gonna take awhile to get good again. Any one wanna chime in on this. I used to use logic all the time untill the 1gb ram limit on the win ver started affecting my vst creative side. For some reason sonar never clicked with me. even with the ver 7 with new midi stuff. When ever I thought something would work a certain way, it didn't and that happened way to much for me to find sonar useful. Cubase had it moments for me but fell short with some midi editing and I didn't like mouse functions. I used sx ver 1 and have not used ver 2,3,4. If you wanna use a daw that focuses on a jam packed mouse click interface do yourself a favor and check out reaper. It has a mapping utility for your faders and all that good stuff. It is no Bull free for evaluation with no ending trial period. Use it untill you feel that you should pay basically. Updates roll out every month or so it seems like. Meaningful ones too. Good luck with your quest. It will have its ups and its downs and take forever if you let it consume you.

Regards echo

PS if you really don't give a fuk try MTV music generator / Music 2000 the original. Same program different names. Not part 2 or 3 on playstation those are complete pieces of shit. With Music 2000 / MG You could import wavs and edit parameters for every single note which I still think every other daw on the planet lacks this feature inthe way they pulled it off. Its like a sampler sequencer where all the notes have there own edit table where you can change pan, pitch, delay effect type, adsr and how many times the note repeats. To bad the sound quality sucks and the company went off the deep end.....

[stryd_one]

I used to use logic on windows untill they bitched out on me.

Any one wanna chime in on this.

Yeh word the f*** up man. that sucked. Personally the mac-style mouse driver drove me nuts, but that aside, logic was great. Then they went the asshole route.

[madox]

Hi folk,

Thanks for the replies.

I will definitely be trying out a few DAWs before I settle on one, and testing the final few in the most detail.

Personally I use Live and really like the workflow  because of it's gearing towards loop based sequencing and ability to work with DJing.

I haven't done any DJing for quite a few years, and I haven't tended to work in a live mixing on the fly kind of way, though I can see the benefit of that style of working. Live is definitely on the list, at least for a try.

My recommendation would be to steer away from freebie DAW's.  This is only because they may not exist next week or they may not be very feature rich.  Also, support and user base may be limited.  With an established app, the developers are constantly working to improve it and may be more invested in doing so than a free app.

This is pretty much my take on things. EnergyXT is a cheapy program, and is actually a re-write of a feeby. The issues with the software just look like repercussions of bad software design/planning, and dire limitations of dev team resources. The hardware support is decades behind the market. I am willing to look for exceptions to this, though. For example, Reaper also offers a very low cost license, and appears to have a very active dev team, and frequent releases. I'm yet to test it though.

I'd bump cakewalk up that list a bit; it's the original pro sequencer on windows, has always been quite midi-focussed.

The list was in no way meant to represent an order of preference; I should have mentioned that. I don't know much about Cakewalk, and will give it more attention.

Temper is dope too, but it's pretty unusual.

Thanks for mentioning Temper; I had forgotten about it. I have not tried it yet.

I wonder though... what kind of music do you make? What kind of things do you want to do with it?

I mostly do ambient, and chillout, and some tech and underground trance (not modern commercial style). I want intuitive and convenient MIDI editing. I value good MIDI editing features above built in synths or drum machines, etc, as I figure I will likely just use VST plug-ins if I want these anyway.

I do want decent hardware support, but I figure any hardware with ASIO drivers will work fine with most DAWs. I am looking at a pair of Phonic Firefly 808's (I want the cheap I/Os; hopefully they won't sound too cheap).

My #1 bit of advice would be: try everything.

Yes, ideally I would try everything. In practice I will have to focus my attention to some extent.

My work flow has never been more faster and more creative when using reaper.

Reaper is definitely on my list of things to try. Do you do much MIDI editing with it? Do you have any issues using it to compose with MIDI hardware? Reaper doesn't seem to have such a good rep in this regard. I haven't looked into it much yet, though.

Logic is gonna take awhile to get good again. Any one wanna chime in on this.

Yeah, if some Logic users could chime in, that would be great!  :)

For some reason sonar never clicked with me. even with the ver 7 with new midi stuff.

I think it will be a bit different/new to me too.

Cubase had it moments for me but fell short with some midi editing and I didn't like mouse functions.

That was my experience in the past too. I think the last version I used was with the first release of VST (I think it was just called Cubase VST from memory). My friend had it in his home studio. I found I couldn't do a lot of MIDI editing, that I used to do with my really old Amiga based sequencer, and left a bit unimpressed. My friend did more of his work in audio, with some work with MIDI as well, and I was pretty impressed with what he could do.

If you wanna use a daw that focuses on a jam packed mouse click interface do yourself a favor and check out reaper. It has a mapping utility for your faders and all that good stuff. It is no Bull free for evaluation with no ending trial period. Use it untill you feel that you should pay basically. Updates roll out every month or so it seems like. Meaningful ones too.

I do tend to use mouse editing quite a bit, so that may turn out to be a good selling point for me.

Good luck with your quest. It will have its ups and its downs and take forever if you let it consume you.

Yeah, it's getting that way.

Personally the mac-style mouse driver drove me nuts...

Ooh, that reminds me; I'm really not a fan of Mac mousing. I'm assuming one could just install whichever mouse one likes, though. I think the standard Mac mouses are just designed to look pretty. Logic does still seem to have a lot of really devoted fans.

Thanks again folks. Comments are much appreciated.

[stryd_one]

On the topic of freebie/shareware/cheapo apps, it should be remembered that they will often contain features which are not available elsewhere, as they may not be commercially viable (yet). Ableton Live was an example of that once. I certainly wouldn't write off the cheap stuff right away - not that you seem that way inclined, but just to offer another perspective on cheapies..

As for cakewalk, the best thing I could tell you from my experience is that you should use it like a normal windows app. Historically (meaning, I dunno if it's still this way) cakewalk was the only seq which followed standardised windows UI conventions. For example, copy was CTRL+C and paste was CTRL+V, while it was something else on cubase and logic etc. Of course you can customize the keyboard shortcuts, but the point is, if you use it like it's MS Word/IE/Explorer/notepad/etc, you'll get used to it real quick. That was a while ago, but I expect that it's still quite similar.

The logic mouse thing was worse than you think... On PC, there was a custom mouse driver inside the app which stole the real mouse cursor and showed you a customised one. For example, there was no right-click, but there was click+hold. It was crap. If you're considering mac or linux, then this list could be expanded...

[madox]

@stryd_one: Thanks again for the comments. I will keep this in mind for Cakewalk/Sonar. Sonar is the current Cakewalk DAW, right? That's how it seemed from their website.

The only reason I had considered using Mac at all, was to try Logic, as I previously had heard of it commanding an excellent reputation. I can get access to Macs, to test on.

I have used Linux for my daily computing for a couple of years. I find it pretty decent for this, but I haven't found it to perform so well for multimedia tasks. I tried the latest real-time kernel, and found it introduced a fair few bugs, and had issues with USB MIDI interfaces. Generally I don't think it gets great driver support. I feel like it may be a bit of a can of worms. Ardour seems to be developing into a decent program though, and some speak highly of Rosegarden, and Jack looks decent too. Overall, I think WinXP is a bit easier to work with, has performed better for me for audio, and I have a couple soft synths I like in XP.

Cheers

[stryd_one]

Oop yeh sorry, old habits... twelvetone systems ... cakewalk .. sonar .. etc. I tend to roll em all into one bag.

It's offtopic, but you'll probably find that you have better luck with the realtime linux kernel if you run it from the get-go. If you add it later, stuff tends to break, along the lines of what you mentioned... Still, it's just not as easy to use as windows is...

[madox]

Oop yeh sorry, old habits... twelvetone systems ... cakewalk .. sonar .. etc. I tend to roll em all into one bag.

Yeah, that's pretty much where I'm coming from too.

It's offtopic, but you'll probably find that you have better luck with the realtime linux kernel if you run it from the get-go. If you add it later, stuff tends to break, along the lines of what you mentioned... Still, it's just not as easy to use as windows is...

Hey, thanks for the tip. I may have to try this on a new installation, and see how it goes.

Cheers

[Echopraxia]

As for reaper, you can get away with just using left and right click on most things and ctrl, shift and del come into play but I think you can still use just the mouse for thoses functions too but I am not entirely sure on that. As the midi editing goes I love it. Hardware or VST. When I enable a track for recording and record I can turn and twist my knob err knobs and the cc data will come up on the track. I have not post-edited midi data too much aside from automating volume and changing notes velocites. Recently though I have had problems with reaper closing unexpectedlywhich all daws have done to me by the way. But it only started happening to me when I had the need to install some stupid ad-aware and quicktime  ect... I am using xp but am now comtemplating to go back to vista 64 to use 8gb or ram because my tracks are getting up to 3gb large and that could be a problem too. I could not seem to get stylusrmx to work on it multitimbral aswell and glitch vst :(

[Phattline]

for me: ableton live....

because: its fun to work with it.... i produce with it....oh noo i performe with it.... with it as basis sequencer... you can "PLAY" music.

[Echopraxia]

I messed with ableton live alittle and my impression was that it is like a very big mmt-8 sequencer. How does midi file dumping work when you try to bulk load midi into ableton? Can you send whole songs to ableton and and have each midi track as differnt clips in live? I still like using a good piano roll and arranger and live seemed to be lacking(not my taste) in this regard. I wouldn't mind using other sequencers and dumping midi songs into ableton for live freestyle. Can that be done pretty easy?

[Mr. Otto]

Can you send whole songs to ableton and and have each midi track as differnt clips in live?

Yes you can. All you have to do is drag and drop a midi file into the session or arrangement view and Live will automatically split each track in a separate clip. Then you need to assign an instrument to each clip and that's it.

Edit:

Right after I wrote this post I went to Live's web page. And for my surprise, they announced Live 8. First I thought, ok just a few nice new features, nothing I won't be able to live without.

But then I saw this : http://www.ableton.com/extend

And that, my friends, is a killer.

[Goblinz]

Very nice!

[stryd_one]

Extend has been discussed elsewhere on this forum too. We're waiting on feedback from the ableton devs (who are nice enough to get directly involved with us, rules) to tell us about how it's going to play in with open-source/DIY/budget use (as compared to LiveAPI)

Search the forum for posts containing ableton and sort by date, it won't take long to find :)

[Mr. Otto]

I was actually more interested in the fact that with MFL you could finally modify Live's synths and/or make your own, just like you can in Reaktor. Witch would, at least for me, transform Live in a real do-it-all software. Before that I just couldn't let Reaktor go.

The whole fuzz about djstyle control really isn't my thing...  I'd be more than glad on helping members to acomplish any of theirs projects regardless of their final objectives, though. If I just knew a bit more about it all. Hopefully, it won't take long.

Regarding open-source. It is a shame it isn't Pure Data for Live.

[stryd_one]

Well if you wanted that, you could have swapped reaktor for max, and exported the instruments as VSTi ;)

It is a shame it isn't Pure Data for Live.

Sadly yes. Probably not as much profit involved in such a thing....