Maestro

I think there is one or two 😉 Not sure how any computer literate person can find Samplitude's Score Editor "Mystifying." It's actually not that jam packed. It just has a much better engine for interpreting and displaying the MIDI than Cakewalk does. It's pretty easy to use. Cubase's Score Editor is far more mystifying than Samplitude's, and a lot of that has to do with how much more functionality Steinberg has packed into that editor. Feature Richness has a tendency to do that. Cakewalk's Score Editor is not unintuitiive or hard to use. It's just bad.

Depends on what they add in 11.5. Otherwise, you can lose considerably more money to willfully sacrificed productivity gains "shelving" useful new features ... waiting to save a pretty low amount of cash in the long term.

Lol. Lots of people made that mistake. The worst thing is how much MAGIX charges for those upgrades, which add very little - and much of the functionality, plug-ins, etc. in Samplitude are basically legacy software. They NEVER touch them, improve them, fix bugs, etc. It's decent for audio editing and mastering. Can be a budget WaveLab Pro stand-in (in its Suite SKU) when you can catch a super deal. However, the GUI slowdowns I encountered with X4 make it completely unusable for me for production. The performance was just too bad, and it even affects audio playback. Also, they have sketchy VST3 support. Every version of their products come with an "All-New VST3 Engine" because it's always terrible.

Standard Disclaimer:

HALion Sonic SE is the Steinberg equivalent of UVI Workstation. No, they aren't going to give upgrades off of a free product that anyone can get from the Steinberg website. Yes, it's literally the same product. It's bundled with Cubase because it's their product, and their sample/synth playback engine, for the content that comes with Cubase (and Dorico) and from Steinberg (and partners that create for that platform). There is no logical reason why they would give upgrade discounts to that, the same way no one expects UVI to give upgrade discounts off of UVI Workstation, for the same reason. Should they also give upgrades from Cubase to Dorico because Cubase has a score editor? Absolutely nothing stupid about it. No one is paying for HSSE3 to be bundled in Cubase. That's why it's in literally every SKU of Cubase, down to AI and LE. What people pay a little extra for are the sound libraries that Cubase bundles, and those are played back through instruments like HSSE3. You paid nothing for HSSE3, so why should they basically give you money for having it?

No. Lol. What? 11 Pro is a $100 upgrade off 10.5 11.5 will be a $60 update off of 11. 10-11 is about more than $100, because you're coming from 2 releases back. Cubase Pro .0 to .0 upgrades are comparable in price to DAWs like Studio One (which is $150 for a full version upgrade i.e. 4 to 5). The difference is that the cost is split between the 0.5 update and 1.0 upgrade (Studio One doesn't have yearly releases, Cubase does... so the overall maintenance costs are quite comparable). What you're being charged is accurate. That's the cost of not staying up to date. People who stay up to date save money in the long run. The others are going to have to make up the difference by exploiting discount promotions (which everyone can do - by buying extra upgrades and simply saving them until the next version releases, and upgrading at a discount). Steinberg has had the same policy regarding activations giving the current release at time of activation for a decade or more.

T-RackS 5 MAX installs like 7 plug-ins that aren't included in the MAX package (Leslie, Sunset Reverb, Space Delay, Tape Machine x 4). Those are trivial to Hide or Disable in your DAWs or NLEs. You can set AmpliTube to show only the stuff you own. Those are really nitpicky "issues." Multiple vendors do this. The Harrison Consoles Ava installer does this, as do plug-in installers from MAGIX and scores of other developers. If you buy 370GB worth of aAplications and Sample Libraries from a company (like I have) and don't immediately back these up to a HDD, then I don't think you can really complain about having to pay to redownload them after 6 months. Again, IK Multimedia is not alone in doing this. Many companies do, because not every company is super huge and can afford to hemorrhage money away in the form of server bandwidth costs. That's kind of the point, given that's the core of their business. They survive because the exaggerations of a few forum posters actually do not dictate the experience of the other millions of their users. And why are people abusing the DEALS forums with threads that have nothing to do with Deals? There is another forum area for this minutiae. Don't post here just to farm views and replies.

The only issue I've had with IK Multimedia is that the shipping for a physical SampleTank 4 MAX took 9 days to leave them and then 3 days to get here despite me doing 2 Day Shipping (and paying extra for it). Then, the USB Thumb Drive was defective and it took 3 days of back and forth for them to finally agree to ship me a new one, but they forgot to send me the shipping label so that add another day to that. I ended up just having a friend download it all onto a 2.5" HDD and mailing it to me. But I still wasted money paying for the physical package and the shipping. That being said, it was on Sale as a $119 (Download) Crossgrade off of Total Studio 2 MAX - so, I wasn't completely miffed. IK is usually pretty good about discounting you if you contact them and tell them you own multiple products. There seems to be a very clear pattern where users run to forums and complain about this company, even before they contact IK Multimedia. In 98.6% of cases, contacting support gets them a suitable resolution, but they run to forums to skip the queue because Peter is pretty consistent about noticing these threads and jumping on the case. They get a lot more flack than they deserve. Also, the installers are fine. Just download everything and then extract the zip files to a common root drive. Run one installer and everything installs in one go. Sometimes, the problem is between the computer and the chair. The installation issues mostly fall in this category. The new product manager is pretty good at handling the application installations and Authorization/Deauthorization.

No. It's really not.

I bet that sounded like a great joke when you thought about it, huh?

1. Windows isn't any more or less bloated than a typical Linux desktop system, especially if you're getting a user on something that installs a full system without them having to cherry pick which packages to install (half of them with horrible descriptions, and tons of -devel crap in the list). Have you ever seen the amount of crap Fedora, OpenSUSE, and other Desktop Distros install onto a system? Windows is lightweight compared to that. Ubuntu does install a relatively compact system, but last time I tried it I had to go and install about 50 dependencies just to install actual software I wanted to use onto the system. Windows also uses about as much RAM on a fresh boot as macOS and a Linux Distro. Linux Graphical Desktop distros often use more, unless you start tweaking the system to "remove the bloat." Same with disk space, and Microsoft has been decreasing that by quite a bit by getting rid of old code and optimizing other parts. There was a Windows 10 release that literally gave users back gigabytes of disk space. Windows is pretty efficient, especially now. Keep in mind, Windows NT is not the same as the Windows 9x systems that Linux came onto the scene competing against. Everything changed after XP [practically] obsoleted those old Windows releases. 2. There's nothing dumbed-down about Windows. If you want to script or use a more powerful command shell, it has that option. PowerShell. There is more than enough for a power user there. The main difference between Windows and [especially earlier] Linux Desktop Distros is that it was designed to be highly intuitive and consistent. Windows software general adheres to CUA standards, so common keyboard shortcuts are consistent across applications. Menus are arranged relatively consistently across general purpose applications. Iconography is more consistent. All of this makes the system easier to use, and more productive to use, in fact. The issue with earlier Linux Desktop Distros is that there were too many clashes when it came to competing UI Toolkits and Peripheral APIs. You had distros installing tons of GTK/GNOME, Qt/KDE, and even some Motif apps by default - never mind the other stuff. These applications tended to use different iconography. They tended to use different theming engines. They tended to use different keyboard shortcut standards. You even had different application using different Audio APIs, among other things. The system ships with like 5 different shells, and different distros could default to a different shell. Did you live through samba? Lol. Making a user think 10x as much just to use your system doesn't make the alternative dumbed-down. It makes your offering a terrible user experience. Not everyone wants to edit all of the config files necessary to level those disparities enough to not be an impediment. The fact that most users can use a Windows or macOS system and probably never have to touch a Command Line or an Admin Utility is a triumph of UX design. That is incredibly impressive. I cannot say that Linux has [yet] gotten there, and it's been over two decades. This isn't just due to familiarity, either. New users hop onto Windows systems and never have to do this. When I moved from Windows to macOS, having never used the OS before, I never needed a command line and I was up and running - and VERY productive - after like ... 3 hours on the system? Windows was there by Windows 3.0. Mac OS was there even before then. Microsoft and Apple simply had different priorities and development/design targets than the people developing Linux. And the lack of infighting within those corporations made it easy for them to deliver the type of UX that they have delivered. When the Linux Community is busy reinventing the wheel 100x over, it's a lot harder to compete with that. There was always too much unnecessary development duplication, IMO. Lots of good comes from that, but it pretty much killed it in terms of competing seriously for mindshare and marketshare in the consumer desktop market. The nature of the server market is such that it naturally avoids many of the worst parts of Linux, so it goes extremely well there as a result.

1.0 Upgrades are $100 0.5 Updates are $60 ----- Cubase 10-10.5 = $60 Cubase 10.5-11= $100 IMO, the price of the updates are reasonable. The big issue for many is the cost of entry, especially if they can't cross-grade.

The 0.5 Update will cost more coming from 10.5 than from 11, so he'd have to wait for the 11.5 Update as well as a Discount Promotion. Honestly, unless the update really doesn't offer anything of worth to you, you're better off just upgrading now. 0.5 Updates are only ~$60, anyways. The only way you'll save money is buying 11 now and then waiting until 11.5 to activate it, but that is like 9-10 months off. Just not worth it, IMO.

Are you really any different than them given this response? The only thing separating both camps are where they tend to hang out and what the general consensus at those places are. F/OSS Fanatics and people who champion their choice DAW are no different. That's why they call it "DAW Wars." Not really any different than the "OS Wars" that have - frankly - largely died out over the past decade. These days, I actually think the DAW fans are worse. They're even insulting cross-discipline, now! 😉 ----- Waveform looks good, functionally, but I really can't stand looking at it.

Sphere makes literally no sense when you can cross grade to Studio One Pro for $169 and then upgrade from $149 every couple of years.... or rent-to-own from Splice. Notion was on sale for $60 or so, for months, on Amazon, so that is a negligible investment. Unless you never look out for promotions, or don't know where to find the lowest, tax-free prices for software, Sphere just doesn't look that good. The only argument for it is if you're going to be constantly turning it off, so that you only pay like $30-45 a year for it... But at that point, why even bother? Why not just use Cakewalk and the army of high quality cheaper stuff on the market, and some of the better freebies? Using Stock VSTs and Instruments [exclusively] made more sense many years ago when the market wasn't completely flooded with them and the costs made it prohibitive to stock up tons of high-quality virtual instruments. What was "upper echelon" back then is now almost free today, and free plug-ins and synths/instruments are on par with or better than stock stuff from back then. I also agree that it's a slippery slow. Many companies are creating subscription packages as a sort of fallback, just in case they stop profiting so much off of the sotware license sales.

Even when the display of the score is wildly inaccurate? An accurate score is needed for productive work. No one is asking for press-ready output out of a DAW score editor. I'm asking for a more accurate representation of the music. DP delivers that to a far greater extent than Cakewalk. You're free to prefer one DAW to another, you're not free to pretend objective differences in the quality of this feature are "personal preference." Never had this issue on my machine, and the issue with Cakewalk's isn't performance per se. It's that the playback is often not in sync with the audio, and the Staff View doesn't display tons of notes accurately. This is awkward when looking at the score while paying things back. This may be due to other components of the pipeline, but I've not done tests THAT extensive. However, the PRV does play in time... so I'm doubtful of that. I only speak to things I've used. Touche. I don't care what DAW you use, or why. I am not here to convert or convince you. I'm giving feedback. My reply had nothing to do with that; your reply did. My reply had to do with the issues I saw in the Cakewalk Staff View - all of which are fairy objective and easy to test and verify (and, indeed, longstanding). I don't care about reputation. DP's scoring display is far more accurate than Cakewalk's. That is fact. I want to look at a score view and get the most accurate representation of the music as possible. That is why it exists, otherwise, why bother? No one made that insinuation. This is only a pissing contest insofar as your reply was pissy. That's the extent of that. What you prefer has nothing to do with what you were responding to, so I really don't care.

How much music it can show on one screen is really of no concern. How accurately it can display the music and notation (notes, symbols, articulations, etc.) is most important. If I want to view tons of music on a screen, I'll just use the piano roll. DP has one of the best in-DAW score editors on the market.

Cubase's Notation Editor has nothing to do with Dorico. If they ported over a feature or two, that is practically ignorable in the grand scheme of things. That being said. for a DAW Score Editor, it's fairly complete. Pro Tools and Studio One both do use the Scoring Engines from their "sister products" (Sibelius and Notion) and have decent round tripping with them (particularly Studio One <-> Notion). Steinberg hasn't even bothered to integrate Cubase and Dorico, yet. Their Expression Maps implementations aren't even the same (maybe they'll port this over to Cubase :-P). The products are quite different. Digital Performer, Samplitude Pro X, MixCraft, and others have Notation Editors in the DAW that are better than Cakewalk's, but don't own Scoring/Notation Software packages. The biggest issues I have with Cakewalk's Staff View are: No MusicXML Import No Display of Common Scoring Symbols - Ideally, these would import and display properly with MusicXML import, as they do in many DAWs that have that feature. It's very difficult to get the score to display decently. For example, it's hard to get grace notes to display properly - or at all. The score view often does not sync up properly with playback. That being said, there are a number of DAWs that completely lack a Score Editor/Staff View (FL Studio, Ableton Live, Reason, etc.) so things could be far worse than they are. I've had too many issues exporting MIDI both from DAWs and Notation Software and then importing into another. I refuse to work that way, anymore 😞

As someone who has both Cubase Pro 11 and Studio One Pro 5.1, I was quite underwhelmed with it given the kind of hype it sees on the internet (though I always take that with a grain of salt). It was only $169.00 Tax-Free on cross grade from Best Service during the promotional period, so I didn't lose much on it. On the bright side, it may develop into something I'd use as a daily driver DAW, so securing upgrade pricing at such a huge discount isn't a bad deal considering it's a fairly "reliable" product line in terms of sticking around. But Cubase updates/upgrades are fairly cheap, so that's not much of a factor. Dirty Secret... But aside from a few convenience features, I actually prefer producing in Samplitude Pro X over Studio One. Too bad MAGIX's support is so bad ($250 upgrade fees for longstanding bug and performance fixes, etc.). I had to jump off that ship.

Link to the Beat Magazine website? Seems hard to find on a search engine cause it has such a generic name... EDIT: Found it searching KVR. Obvious in hindsight, but didn't even surface near the top in Google. When linking deals, please always include a link to the originating website. Not just to a page asking for a secret word.

Anything would. MIDI Learn is FTW and SampleTank is a workstation, so this makes it easier to map things. I prefer the new M-Audio Oxygen Pro series. the 49 key keyboard is amazeballs and they're supposed to be coming out with a 32-Key Mini that is going to be very competitively priced. Their new 192 | # Air interfaces are better than this. This is too big to carry around, to having the interface in the keyboard is not really advantageous for me. And IK Multimedia is pretty terrible with shipping. Last time I ordered from them with 2 day shipping it took 9 days to ship and then 3 days to get here. I think the smaller sized iRig I/O make a lot more sense, though. @ $299, I'd rather pay the extra $60 for better knobs, pads, faders, features and a better audio interface (and I can walk into Guitar Center and get it, avoiding potential shipping issues - doubly so if you end up getting a unit with problems).

Transfuser 2's interface is pretty compact (some people want a bigger UI, to be more ergonomic), and you can collapse areas of the UI that you don't need. It's actually pretty compact when you need it to be. If you look at the bar where the branding is ("Transfuser 2" and "AIR" logos), there are buttons to collapse the different panels. Browser, Editing Panel, and the Groove (Middle) Panel can all be collapsed. The UI is also resizable. Ironically, it's one of the few VST2 plug-ins I've used that implements resizing decently. ---- Transfuser 2 adds the equivalent of Studio One's Impact XT, Sample One XT, and [a lot of] Mojito onto Cakewalk by BandLab. And, of course, thousands of Loops and Samples. It's also great for Loop Slicing and mapping slices across the keyboard (i.e. ACID Pro's "MIDI Playable Chopper"), among other things. You can drag and drop between the plug-in and the DAW. I'd only buy it on sale, anyways, but many of the users here have access to AIR Instrument Expansion Pack 3 Complete due to sales and discounted upgrades (basically making it a $75'ish bundle). Another oldie-goodie that I like is iZotope BreakTweaker, because the Step Sequencer and Drum Editor in Cakewalk just can't get it done for me. Plus, it ships with a ton of usable drum samples.

AIR is used to develop tech for other products, like AKAI MPC Device FW and DAW Software. They just aren't really doing anything to upgrade the older Synths. Sample Libraries are expensive and arduous to develop. A lot of companies are still selling sample libraries that are 10+ years old today, because of this. It's REALLY expensive to hire orchestras, staff, and spaces to do this. If you want to provide something at a low price point, you're probably not going to end up with a decent product. IMO, the SONiVOX Orchestral Companions sound better than cheap libraries like Garritan Personal Orchestra. The issue with them is that they use uncompressed samples and dont have the RAM Management features that Samplers like Kontakt/HALion have (where they can automatically purge unused samples, etc.). This causes them to use massive amounts of disk space, as well as a lot of RAM. One Orchestral Companion uses almost as much HDD space as the entire HALion Symphonic Orchestra, due to the lack of Compression. In addition to that, some of the note ranges of the instruments are too small. You cannot play the violin parts for Vivaldi's Four Seasons with Orchestral Companion | Strings. You'll end up with tons of missing notes at the upper end of the range in any places. Aside from that, the samples sound pretty decent, considering the price, and come with all the basic articulations. If you want something comparable to stock sounds in [many] other DAWs, I do think the AIR and SONiVOX stuff has value when viewed from that perspective. But they're the first thing to remove once you start buying instruments and synths (or getting some of the better Free stuff that exists, these days). These SONiVOX instruments (and multiple others, in fact), used to be Kontakt Libraries, but Native Instruments requires licensing to be used in Kontakt Player. This has forced many developers to create their own sample playback instruments. SONiVOX, Garritan, HSO, etc. Many of these companies used to develop for Kontakt, but have since created their own players, becasue it saves them money to do so. I still think their 88 Ensemble is one of the best low-priced piano instruments on the market (in terms of sound, at least). The problem doesn't exist if you install iLok License Manager from the PACE site before installing the AIR plugins. In that case, the installer will skip the iLok installation (for AIR - SONiVOX products like Vocalizer Pro will still install the old version alongside the newer version, so you have to uninstall the "duplicate" immediately after the intaller finishes). It's a bigger issue when you install on a fresh machine and let the installer install an old version of the iLok software. You don't need junctions for the installation of samples with AIR Plugins. The plugins allow you to set the content directory upon installation and even after installation. You just move and then tell it where to find the sample files. No different than SampleTank or UVI Workstation. The only one that is tricky is Structure 2, since it creates a symbolic link in a ProgramData or AppData directory that it uses (Steinberg Library Manager does this when you install some libraries to a non-default location, as well).

I think it's cause a lot of people don't RTFM and started complaining that they couldn't use the products because they were popping up saying they weren't authorized. So, they embedded an installer for PACE in their installers, but didn't bother to keep the installers up to date (nor is that practical, because iLok is constantly upgrading their license manager, like Steinberg and others do as well). A bit issue is that some of the older iLok installers install alongside the newer version and this can cause some massive issues. So you have to make sure you uninstall that duplicate installation immediately after the application installer completes. Some of SONiVOX's plugins do this - Vocalizer Pro, for example.

Doubt they care. Arturia has copied devices and Behringer is renown for basically cloning other companies' devices. Arturia has an entire collection of sounds based on copying analog synths... *shrugs*