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Showing results for tags 'Budget.'.
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I have become increasingly frustrated with my current stock of daws. Many of the issues had become show stoppers that disuaded me from purchasing upgrades in the past. So far back that I'm not eligible for upgrade pricing to current versions and I find the pricing of those current models not consistent with the value they represent to me as a consumer. I'm choosing not to go back to any DAW I've had in the past. And I've tried to keep an open mind to daws I haven't tried. I'm not going to try every DAW in the universe. The three daws I've chosen to test are... Reaper, Presounus Studio One, Mixcraft. It's looking like Mixcraft after two days of testing and several days of accumlulating opinions of others. Each are offered in a price range I find acceptable. I had no horse in the race to begin with though I did recognize the popularity of reaper amongst budget concious novices and the stalwart reputation that Presonus has earned in the industry over a very short time against the DAW giants. Reaper Reapers footpint is very small. A small lean daw should mean faster, more stable operations and reduced latency. When I asked around what reaper users thought the most compelling reason to buy it I got "Yeah it's really cool, this thing is amazing" type responses which did nothing to educate me as to the actual benefits of using reaper beyond price. Reaper didn't come supplied with a project file. (,,,hmm) It. Did have an option to run both 32 and 64 bit plugins built in. Even after recognizing my vsts, vsti's and Direct X plugins it failed to load them. The UI was quite atrocious. Not only in appearance but in window feature sets. Even after setting all my preferences correctly I still had problems handling the most basic of functions, such as importing a midi file. When I did import the midi file and hit play no sound emminated from my speakers. I had to manually assign the midi out on each track to my microsoft wavetable synth. Even though I'd already set that up in my preferences. Simply getting something midi to playback was a challenge. And then it was out of sync.. I took my findings back to the daw forums I frequent and the response from reaper users was mostly along the line of "you're lying, that's impossible" to the rare supportive response of "Oh, you need to become a member of the forums and get this extension and do X,Y,Z" The reaper forums are rather helpful and they seem like a nice bunch but something stuck in my crawl. Why should I have to install brakes to test drive a new car? I spent about two days following everyone's advice and I'm still not satisfied with the results. Presonus Studio One II Producer I like the presonus brand of hardware devices. They have a lot of very solid ideas when it comes to mixers etc. Studio One is highly regarded by Daw critics and casual users alike. Studio One has quickly become the go to daw for "real musicians" and stage (band) engineers who, while being very tech saavy prefer a streamlined workflow with stability being of greatest concern. I can't begin to tell you how many people I know personally who have moved to S1 from both more expensive and less expenive daws to embrace presounus's flagship daw. All lavish praise to it's sensible workflow and most importantly stability. Which is key when working in "band" situations. One quibble I have with S1 is the pricing structure. One is required to purchase the pro version simply to use third party plugins. Quite frankly I think that's a rip off and it does not bode well going into the program when one is forced to accept the supplied plugins which may or may not be up to standard with third party developers be they free or pay. First impressions. Upon start up an startup wizard page is displayed. I've always found this to be a marketing ploy designed to guide amatuers over having any real value. I downloaded the 64bit version and it was having a hard time recognizing my 64 bit plugins (forget a pre installed jbridge) Only Independence free was recognized. No project demo file. (really? really?) I loaded a standard midi file into the program and....Yes the GM sounds properly loaded for the corresponding instruments. Not bad, not great. I'm less interested in the supplied plug in instruments then how well it handles the wide variety of virtual instruments I already own. While I did like the included instrument plugin display and the tabbed view of the instruments on a per track basis. I wasn't impressed with the footprint. Making it very hard for me to access simple things like the mixer and the transport controls while said plugin was displayed. I did some cursory exploration with the automation mixing and effects. Yes it was highly stable. Yes I did notice improved latency issues. No the included plugins for all the pretty showed only minor enhancement and nowhere near on par with third party plugins I've used in the past. I tried to create a mixdown of the then prepared midi file to .wav I tried and tried and tried. When the program exports to wave it has to shut down so that the .wav can play in an external media player (windows media player) Tried as I could the first few .wav files were trunicated (did not last as long as the song) When I got one that wasn't trunicated it crashed the windows media player. I had to test it in winamp. The wave file set to 44.1 16bit was... impressive when I could play it. I found no dithering issues present as I've found with major brands (Abelton Live) It was a very clean mix with a wide dynamic range, plenty of separation and nicely saturated headroom. But still the fact that I couldn't play the file in windows media player was a downer. ...next up Mixcraft
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