Studio One Artist Or Mixcraft 6 Pro

[Dkaudio]

Which DAW? Ive been out of the recording scene for a while and wanna get back to it.. I used to use Sonar a few years ago. But I wanna get a new one and start recording again. So.. studio one artist is $100..

Mixcraft 6 pro is $150... studio one looks better but mixcraft seems to have a ton more efx, loops, and so on.

Any prefrences between too?

[TapperMike]

Contrary to popular belief you shouldn't purchase a daw because of it's sounds.  There are sounds galore on the web as well as effects.

 

The popularity of Studio One II is based on two things ....

1. Stability.  The more bloatware put into a daw to make it look pretty or seem hip the less stable the environment becomes. Latency is added by the daw trying to do to many tricks at once.

 

2. Functionality for live performance users. 

 

As well.  The good sounds will require the full price.  It cost them to develop so it will cost you to use.  Just like any other major player daw. (Roland/Cakewalk,,,,Samplitute,,,,,Cubase,,,,,,Abelton Live)

 

I used to love the Live limited edition which came with several sound cards etc.  The thing that killed me was mixdown/mastering. It did a crap job of dithering down to an acceptable format for the web. And that was part of the hook. If I wanted good dithering with multiple compression per frequency I'd have to upgrade to the full version.

 

I've got Samplitude (had Cakewalk, Cubase, Live, etc, etc) and the selling point for me is the mastering capabilites (especially surround sound) Which is why I don't bite for the small fish.

[Dkaudio]

Sorry I havent been on here lately fellas. Ive been doing a ton of research on a few of the mentioned DAW's.  Ive downloaded the free/trial versions of them, Ive also watched more Youtube videos in the last week then ever in my life.. The "how-to's" etc. So..

Once I got past the "not-so-good looking" aspect of Mixcraft, Ive come to find it very easy to use, and with the pro version, for only $150. I get a ton of efx's, Vst's(which once i found the edit window, each vst does infact have its own, pretty good skin, with pretty much every adjustable parameter i could ask for). Also have full video mode(which is great for me, i like to pretend I'm an ameature short film maker from time to time, lol). And the pro version comes with some decent mastering capabilities.  

Add in the fact that I can use the vst's I already own(unlike the Studio one, I would have to upgrade to the next version to be able to use 3rd party vst's).

Soo... at the end of the day, even with Mixcraft not looking as "pretty" as some of the others, including Studio one, I'm going to go ahead and give it a shot. I can look past the "look" of it, especially with Sooo many features that go well with me. I'll keep ya guys updated as I begin to record some original material in the next two weeks.

Sorry for the long post.

[Dkaudio]

I guess its lame... but again there were too many positives for me personally not to buy Mixcraft

[Dkaudio]

I hope to start recording tonight once I get off work

[TapperMike]

The demo version of Studio one does not alllow for third party plugins.  The pay version does. 

 

Re bloatware:

 

Abelton Live full:

(any flavor) of all the daws I've owned it has the worst latency and is often subject to crashes. I'm running a xeon processor in my desktop which is more stable then an i7 and I've still had problems with it.  Live is great fun if you like spending hours on end creating techno (acid, trance, dubstep etc)  and then spending hours making corrections thereafter.  It's dithering is shameful.

There comes a time when you want to release your material to the world and that means dithering down your audio to an acceptable download/web format (to avoid cliping when it is a forced  through a compression alongrthm on the other side.  See my article http://forums.songstuff.com/blog/159/entry-1320-listen-to-what-theyve-done-to-my-song-an-engineering-perspective/ under "The Web"

 

Cakewalk.  Do to the way they (Roland) is packaging it  it's sluggish and overloaded with imho unnessicarily large sample libraries that you can't use outside of Cakewalk  Oddly I was a huge fan of cakewalk back in the days of windows 31 And kept on updating thru earlier verions of Sonar but just got tired of it.  And while I also was (and still am to a lesser degree) a fan of roland hardware workstations and synths in the past.  I'm just not impressed enough to pony up.

 

Sony Acid:

When Vegas owned Acid I got a lot of work doing mixdown and mastering in the format. More so then pro tools. I could load my external vst's/vsti's no problem and it was reasonably priced.  When Sony took over the first two things they did was jack up the price and remove the ability to use external plugins.  Then they installed inferior effects plugins with limited functionality/accessabilty.  Later (I've read as I was really furious over several issues with sony and decided no more) They jacked up the price and re introduced the capability of using external plugins.  Each step along the way they moved away from a real daw and moved closed to a "Compositor" for audio.  (just add your audio clips and tada its done)  As well most of my mixdown mastering was coming from other daws (cakewalk/magix/audacity/samplitue/cubase) 

 

Stienberg products

I hatedl cubase in windows 3.1 Liked it even less in Win95/98 and finally gave up trying in Vista. While I've got to love them for creating the open standard for plugins today. The interface was always crap for zoom/scrub/snap/trim.  As well if you aren't a registered (purchaser) user in good standings you can forget it.  They shut the door on trial users who might be experiencing a problem. And for that I've shut the door on them.  As impressive as the Halion (et all) collection of libraries they have it's not a real bread and butter collection.  One has to do too much tweaking to get the sounds to be bread and butter and a cottage industry has risen up which samples and tweaks the roland/cakewalk collections and then transforms them into kontakt files. Inot to sure about the legality or the quality but it's there.

 

For my personal recording I've gone back to a hardware daw. It's extremely stable I get a desirable signal response even though it's uncompressed 16 bit 44.1 wav. I don't have to fight with getting the levels where they should be and I don't have to over compress the signal.  My next daw will be a zoom R16 or R24 I much prefer getting my instruments and sound down right before I record as it saves a lot of headaches afterwards. And it's more geared to the old school musician that I am.  I can then easily mixdown/edit/master in any common daw without the glitchiness (though I prefer samplitude) and save myself hours of post production.

 

For those who are just starting out.  I'd suggest reaper (though I don't use it myself) It's a relatively straight foreward design that's easier to get aquainted with then the big league daws and easy to grow with as you learn more about the whole production side of recording.

http://www.reaper.fm/

 

http://www.musicradar.com/gear/tech/computers-software/digital-audio-workstations-daws/reaper-4-499919

 

While I agree they could do a better job with individual sound editor the rest I also agree with

[TapperMike]

I don't use reaper because I already have Samplitude and have for several years. It's not that I've got anything against reaper it's just that I prefer the mastering suite in samplitude and some of my clients (yes i still do mixdown and mastering) demand samplitude for it's recognition in the industry . It's broadcast quality mastering.  Many wouldn't need that level (actually I don't) of quality but when you work as opposed to play in the field there are some demands/expectations that clients have which you must provide. 

 

As an example.  Flash....There are or were several "me too" products that can produce swf content not just flash.  A few uears back if you wanted big fish clients you had to use adobe/macromedia flash.  Even though coding and layout are much faster to produce in something like "SWiSH Max"  The client demands and the company provides.

 

Are you a producer/mixdown/mastering engineer as a profession or do you create and produce your own material? When you are producing your own material your own concious should be your guide to what you need.  When you are producing/mizdown/mastering for others then you are better off trying to appease them (to a degree)

 

To reiterate. I don't record others. I mixdown do some non destructive editing and master for others.

I don't pitch those services here because....Most people either don't recognize the difference a trained professional can make / aren't willing to spend the money because they think by virtue of having some tools they can do it all by themselves.  Just by virtue of having a guitar does not make one a guitarist. And just by virtue of having mixdown/editing/mastering tools does not make one a producer/engineer although there are those who would believe otherwise.

 

I do record myself. When I record myself because I have the equipment I do I choose the best method that suits my workflow. I'm an old school musician, composer, arranger, and audio engineer.  First I write then I arrange then In record the complete song instrument by instrument. into a standalone daw It's a lot of pre prep but it saves time in the long run.  Then I transfer the tracks to the computer where I spend less time with cleanup eq reverb compression because I've already done that.  The clearer picture you have and the better your abilities the less time you spend fiddling with parameters.

[Prometheus]

*sigh*

 

And your answer helps the OP in which way? The point is, you have no point. Your original assertion was that you had to "pay the full price" for "the good sounds." I shot this down because it is bullshit. When you stop hedging and floundering you'll come to the same answer I've already stated. Workflow and ease-of-use are the only things that matter in a DAW, not price, not name brand visibility (unless you've got a business need), and certainly not popularity. You don't need an expensive DAW to make good music. What you need are skill and talent and a host that suits your needs. 'nuff said. Unless you want to continue telling us what an audio rockstar you are. 

 

I couldn't agree more.  Cubase, Reaper, Cakewalk, Pro Tools, you can get used to any of them with a bit of practice.  The theory behind multitrack recording has hardly changed since the late 1950's.  The only difference is that there are more tracks and the tape is a computer.

 

It's skill, talent and a bit of hard work that produces high quality recordings.

[Prometheus]

I used to love the Live limited edition which came with several sound cards etc.  The thing that killed me was mixdown/mastering. It did a crap job of dithering down to an acceptable format for the web. And that was part of the hook. If I wanted good dithering with multiple compression per frequency I'd have to upgrade to the full version.

 

There were two clever chaps called Harry Nyquist and Claude Shannon who came up with a lot of very interesting theories about digital sampling.  While some of the mathematics is very sticky for a non specialist, for any competent mathematician or computer that was built within the last fifteen years it's Micky Mouse stuff.  

 

The linchpin of Nyquist and Shannon's predictions is that If a function x(t) contains no frequencies higher than B hertz, it is completely determined by giving its ordinates at a series of points spaced 1/(2B) seconds apart.   Nyquist's Theorem leads to a formula for reconstructing the original function from these samples using a mathematical device called a fourier transform, provided that the sample rate is greater than twice the highest frequency in the spectral bandwidth of the sampled function.

 

Since the highest frequency a human can hear is 20KHz, and that's a kind estimate, in a 16 bit sample at 44.1 KHz, the aliasing errors are beyond the range of human hearing.  

 

Now, Quantization errors are another matter.  Quantization errors are inevitable when you dither from 32 or 24 bit to 16 bit.  The dynamic range of a sixteen bit system is 96 decibels.  Decibels are logarithmic, so a six decibel change is a factor of a million.  My mental arithmetic is very rusty, but as you can imagine from this, 96dB is an enormous range.  Unless you are recording a piece of music with huge dynamic variations, you don't need to worry about dithering it at all as the errors are too small to be disturbing.  Even if you are dealing with huge dynamic range variances, any DAW produced in the last few years will have dithering and noise shaping algorithms that have the problems of quantization errors in 16 bit resolution well in hand.  This is nothing new.

 

In short, in this day and age, you're not going to get a DAW that can't handle dithering to CD quality.  It's just absolutely not going to happen.

 

 

 It did a crap job of dithering down to an acceptable format for the web.

 

I suspect that dithering isn't what you're actually talking about.   What you mean is converting to a lossy format to compress filesize?  This can be done using the LAME algorithm, which is free of charge.  On the default settings the quality isn't very good, but if you set it to CBR (constant bit rate) above 192Kbps and the quality to "highest but slowest" you'll get good results.