Cakewalk VS Studio One WORKFLOW ( Creative Sauce Video )

[Mark Morgon-Shaw]

Thoughts ?

 

[OutrageProductions]

Coming from a lifetime on large format consoles where a session setup was basically 'from scratch' every day, the concept that I can spend just enough time to create a preferred drum kit and save it as a track/buss template works just fine for me. Same for orchestration of 60+ instruments. 

My music theory is polished enough that the chord progression is in my head as I compose, so, while the S1 chord track would be nice for many, it's not that high on my wish list.

He's got some good points though, especially for people trying to learn the DAW who are neither real engineers, musicians, or producers.

[Lord Tim]

This was one of my criticisms of his first livestream, that he didn't provide examples (and fair enough too, that was beyond the scope of what the stream was about). Well, here we go, this is great!

Very elegant implementation for those things in S-One. It'd mean a bit of a re-write in some cases for Sonar I'd imagine, and the Chord Track is very likely something already on the radar since it's been a long-standing request.

One thing that I would argue is that for day-to-day use for doing multi-out instruments, you'd set up a template. I couldn't imagine screwing around with setting outputs and naming them, etc. when I can right click on a blank spot, Insert Track Template, and I have all of my instrument ins, outs, busses, colours, names... all done for me in 2 seconds. It takes a while to set it up first, but then it's set and forget.

I do really dig the drop-onto-a-track send creation, although since we have patch points/aux tracks this could get a little confusing as to what you'd prefer to create.

I actually thought he was going to mention MIDI routing, which is definitely a sore spot in CbB, so that synth chain thing was a bit unexpected. Cool idea! I do something similar with Bluecat's Patchwork plugin, but it would be nice to have a native solution like this.

But these are great things for the Bakers to have a look at for sure.

Edited June 21, 2023 by Lord Tim

[User 905133]

My thoughts:  (1) He is very clear in articulating the workflow differences he chose to cover and the reason for his preferences and his caveats. (2) At my age, I need to go with what is automatic for me because it takes too much out of me to learn new workflows.  (3) I have learned to use CbB's Workspaces to facilitate my workflow preferences for different kinds of projects I work on and the different kinds of tasks I use.  

I don't have Studio One.  It might be better for all the benefits Mike covered, but for a few years my brain has been shedding a lot of crap stored up there without making extra space for new stuff.

Just a personal decision. Please don't tell me I am wrong.  I am not trying to convince anyone else what works for me is better for them.  I'm finally learning this. 😉 

Thanks for asking. 

[mettelus]

A couple things with the Chord Track in S1 that seem to get misconstrued at times:

1) It uses the same functionality as Melodyne (and Melodyne can be leveraged to achieve this today), but I did check when it was first released and it is baked into S1 (no Melodyne was required to make it function in S1).

2) The chord track allows for adjustment of both audio and MIDI material after recording, which makes it a nice composition tool in that regard (especially if doing something like using loops that sound cool but are in the wrong key). The tempo and chord tracks combined will let one drag/drop material almost willy-nilly and make them conform to the tempo and chord structure of the piece but also allow them to be changed after the fact from those two track guides.

[Bruno de Souza Lino]

I've always seen Studio One as Cubase with a bit more polish. Not to say Cubase is a bad DAW (like ProTools), but they're victmins of the whole "backwards compatibility syndrome," which means your audio settings are spread across 5 different windows for example.

A few other features of Studio One include:

- Your audio I/O are exposed as mixer tracks, which allows you to use plugins as hardware effects and print them in your recording.
- Chord Track: This one is a step up from Cubase's Chord Track (which only works with MIDI) in a considerable way.
- MIDI setup and mapping is a breeze and doesn't require you to be one of the people which created MIDI or have a PhD in MIDI implementation.
- Studio One Remote: This used to be available only to the Professional version, but has been made available to both paid versions since v6. No faffing about with random Android/iOS apps which will have some compromised implementation of DAW control. Setup for it is also a breeze. All you need to have is your control device and the PC running Studio One in the same network.
- Musical Functions: This can be thought of as CAL on steroids. It even does things which I'm yet to see other DAWs do like custom selections which allow you to, say, select every other note from a specific MIDI event, for example. Even FL Studio can't do that, requiring you to do some weird selection hack.
 

[Teegarden]

I find the comparison a bit premature knowing that the last update (with probably mainly bugfixes) still has to arrive and that there's a new big update with new features coming up (Cakewalk Sonar, the paid update of CbB). Let's first see what that brings...
Apart from that I think that several issues Mike talked about could easily be done fast in another way, with templates in CbB like @Lord Tim clearly mentions (in the end maybe even faster than in Studio One if you use particular ones regularly) for example. Combining the best of these two methods would even be nicer, making setting up the templates faster, of course. Who knows what the new Cakewalk Sonar will bring...  

From what I've understood the new Sonar is nothing more than CbB with new bugfixes, improvements and new features added, just like it always has been. So:

Sonar = Cakewalk by Bandlab =Cakewalk Sonar

It's just that now you'll have to pay again (like before). Several posts and reviews make it look like they are different pieces of software, which IMHO they are definitely not.

If you make a long comparison list of features between DAWs I'm sure you'll find many things better in other DAWs, just like CbB will be better on many other things.

A few years ago Noel said that the are just a small team. They had a long list of things they wanted to do, but limited resources seemed to delay things or make bigger changes impossible.
Now that Sonar is going to be paid again they probably can expand the team and implement more improvements and new features in a shorter timeline. And maybe acquire and implement new external technology and VSTs.

In the paid days Sonar was regularly considered the best or one of the best DAWs in reviews. Cakewalk/Sonar has shown often to be at the forefront of new smart improvements, especially in the days when you still needed to paid for it, but even after that despite limited resources. The same key developers are still with us, so I'm sure they will come up with pleasant surprises in the near future and don't doubt that they will make the DAW come up as a serious contender next to Cubase, S1 Protools etc. If they price it smart, the future could be bright...

 

Edited June 21, 2023 by Teegarden

[Bruno de Souza Lino]

2 hours ago, Teegarden said:

A few years ago Noel said that the are just a small team. They had a long list of things they wanted to do, but limited resources seemed to delay things or make bigger changes impossible.

The small team reason works...Until you learn that REAPER is developed by 2/3 people most of the time.

[Lord Tim]

Or you could end up like Vegas Pro where those guys are doing a mammoth job trying to get decades of creaky code up to scratch but are clearly struggling because of their limited resources. It's definitely a lot harder with a legacy product, rather than starting from scratch like Justin did.

I think the thing we need to remember going forward was that this first iteration of Sonar will be similar to how CbB was when it changed from SPlat - that was identical to SPlat but with 4 months worth of bug fixes, and that's it. But look at it now - it's a HUGE improvement from where SPlat was 5 years ago.

Overhauling the bitmap based UI is a MASSIVE job alone, so even if nothing else changes in this first version, that alone is solving a bunch of issues going forward and making user facing updates a lot easier, rather than having to work around 20 year old UI decisions. It'll be interesting to see where this ends up in 5 years, like CbB.

Edited June 21, 2023 by Lord Tim

[Jim Fogle]

On 6/20/2023 at 9:45 PM, User 905133 said:

My thoughts:  (1) He is very clear in articulating the workflow differences he chose to cover and the reason for his preferences and his caveats. (2) At my age, I need to go with what is automatic for me because it takes too much out of me to learn new workflows.  (3) I have learned to use CbB's Workspaces to facilitate my workflow preferences for different kinds of projects I work on and the different kinds of tasks I use.  

I don't have Studio One.  It might be better for all the benefits Mike covered, but for a few years my brain has been shedding a lot of crap stored up there without making extra space for new stuff.

Just a personal decision. Please don't tell me I am wrong.  I am not trying to convince anyone else what works for me is better for them.  I'm finally learning this. 😉 

Thanks for asking. 

@User 905133, I thought Mike's introduction covered this point very well.  He mentioned there are some users that have used Cakewalk or Sonar for years or decades and have no desire to learn a new DAW or workflow.  The nice thing is you will still be able to use CbB for free or update to Sonar  once it's released.

[Starship Krupa]

I think the drag and drop workflow things he demonstrated were pretty slick, although you can already drag an instrument from Cakewalk's Browser onto the Track Header pane and have it create the instrument track of your choice without popping that dialog. All you have to do is set the choices in the dialog the way you like and then untick the box that asks if you wish to see the dialog every time.

It's a thing about Cakewalk: it's packed with slick little features that nobody knows about. If you're not Smart Swiping and Quick Grouping, I use those all the time. I mentioned Quick Groups to Mike in the comments of the video and he said that S1 does something similar to quick groups.

I've read some of S1's marketing hype, and it seems like they have an overall philosophy that focuses the workflow on dragging and dropping. That shows in the end product. Cakewalk's UX suffers somewhat from having been created by so many different teams under different product management. There doesn't seem to be a unifying design philosophy applied to it. Maybe there are/were multiple design philosophies? Cakewalk was around before drag and drop was even a thing on the PC.

Dragging and dropping FX onto the headers to create audio tracks....nice enough, but kind of a novelty (unless you are aiming for every operation to be able to be triggered by a drag and drop). The ability to select and drag two FX onto the FX bin would be a nice thing, though.

Dragging FX onto the Sends bin and it automatically creates a Send track? I think I actually thought about that for Cakewalk at one point but didn't bring it up. I'd use the heck out of that.

I typically don't use drag and drop from the Browser much because it doesn't offer anything special, but if it automatically created send tracks, and you could drag multiple plug-ins at the same time, that would change my attitude toward it.

People have been mentioning templates as how they avoid the repetitive chores of setting up projects, and perhaps S1 lends itself more readily to a "blank slate" approach, starting from an empty or minimal project. When you aren't so sure ahead of time where things are going to go. The more deviation from the template, the more the workflow exposes itself.

Anyway, I'm sure the devs are paying attention to these videos and the resulting threads. This drag and drop track and bus creation is probably not all that difficult to implement as it doesn't ask the program do anything it can't already do, it's just another way to tell it what to do.

Drag and drop to the Send bin to create a bus, hold Alt to create an aux track.

P.S. He also showed (but didn't talk much about) how you can resize the modules in S1's mixer, which I have wished for since I started using Cakewalk. There can be a LOT of wasted real estate in the Console depending on how many FX and Sends you're working with, whether you need the gain knob visible, etc.

Edited June 22, 2023 by Starship Krupa

[User 905133]

Taking the video as a whole, he focused of a number of things that were important to him and presumably to most (or maybe all) of his followers. However, he left out a number of things that might be more important to others. As a result people who have no experience with Studio One would have to try Studio one to make comparisons themselves.

I agree that his intro (approximately 4 minutes long) and his conclusion provide a context for his opinions.

However, the personal workflow efficiencies he highlighted might not be the same workflow efficiencies that save someone else considerable time.  For example, I save considerable time with preferred common tasks by having well-tuned Workspaces that satisfy my efficiency needs. Regrettably, from his video I have no idea if Studio One has some kind of massive customizability function for workflows.  It might or it might not.

Based on what he chose to focus on and how he framed his Cakewalk v. Studio One comparison, he hasn't sold me on the benefits of Studio One.  

1 hour ago, Jim Fogle said:

He mentioned there are some users that have used Cakewalk or Sonar for years or decades and have no desire to learn a new DAW or workflow. 

On 6/20/2023 at 9:45 PM, User 905133 said:

(2) At my age, I need to go with what is automatic for me because it takes too much out of me to learn new workflows.  (3) I have learned to use CbB's Workspaces to facilitate my workflow preferences for different kinds of projects I work on and the different kinds of tasks I use.  

To clarify my comment, its not that I have no desire to learn a new DAW or new workflows; its more that given his personal efficiencies (as demonstrated in the comparison video), he did not convinced me that it is worth my while to spend the time to learn to use Studio One to find out if it would meet my needs.

On 6/20/2023 at 9:45 PM, User 905133 said:

I need to go with what is automatic for me because it takes too much out of me to learn new workflows. 

Sorry if this wasn't clear.  This is not simply about inertia, maintaining the status quo, stick with a set of specific learned steps.

If I need to create personal workflow efficiencies for certain sets of musical tasks I will be working on, (1) I know I can create targeted Workspaces in CbB, (2) I know how to create them, (3) I know that using them will repeatedly save me many steps (once I take some time to set a new Workspace up), and (4) switching between different custom Workspaces has become automatic. 

Based on the video, I would have to teach myself Studio One even before I knew whether or not there was a comparable feature that would give me the flexibility to create workflow templates, and if there were, I'd then have to teach myself how to use the flexibility tool to begin to see if it were better in Cakewalk.

The video is called "Cakewalk VS Studio One WORKFLOW" and upon watching the video for a second time, I now see his failure to compare Cakewalk's workflow flexibility feature (Workspaces) with the counterpart in Studio One a serious omission.

PS: Because I asked in a public thread, I already know that Workspaces will be carried over to Cakewalk Sonar.   

Edited June 22, 2023 by User 905133
fixed typo

[Starship Krupa]

7 minutes ago, User 905133 said:

I save considerable time with preferred common tasks by having well-tuned Workspaces that satisfy my efficiency needs. Regrettably, from his video I have no idea if Studio One has some kind of massive customizability function for workflows.  It might or it might not.

The new feature blurbs for S1 v6 indicate that they just introduced that kind of UI customization. I only have S1 Artist v4, so I don't have a way to compare them.

[Bruno de Souza Lino]

3 minutes ago, Starship Krupa said:

It's a thing about Cakewalk: it's packed with slick little features that nobody knows about. If you're not Smart Swiping and Quick Grouping, I use those all the time. I mentioned Quick Groups to Mike in the comments of the video and he said that S1 does something similar to quick groups.

While Quick Grouping is one feature that sure not many people know about, Studio One ups it a bit by having it on by default. Want to change the volume of multiple tracks at once? Just select those tracks and move the faders. You can also create selection groups or have a VCA track, which makes the process set once and forget.

6 minutes ago, Starship Krupa said:

Dragging and dropping FX onto the headers to create audio tracks....nice enough, but kind of a novelty (unless you are aiming for every operation to be able to be triggered by a drag and drop). The ability to select and drag two FX onto the FX bin would be a nice thing, though.

As of version 6, there's several ways of adding effects. Dragging and dropping is only one of them. There are multiple places where you can access the track window (which a sort of throwback to the channel window Cubase has) without having to open the mixer or any inspector.

8 minutes ago, Starship Krupa said:

Dragging FX onto the Sends bin and it automatically creates a Send track? I think I actually thought about that for Cakewalk at one point but didn't bring it up. I'd use the heck out of that.

You can also select all tracks you want to send, right click and go "Add FX/Bus for selected tracks." This is a feature which has been present since version 2.

10 minutes ago, Starship Krupa said:

People have been mentioning templates as how they avoid the repetitive chores of setting up projects, and perhaps S1 lends itself more readily to a "blank slate" approach, starting from an empty or minimal project. When you aren't so sure ahead of time where things are going to go. The more deviation from the template, the more the workflow exposes itself.

But Studio One also has templates. You have project templates, track templates, instrument templates, macros...And since you can do the dreaded "Copy only certain stuff from other projects" thing which Cubase and ProTools do, you may not have to create templates at all depending on your workflow.

 

[Lord Tim]

Just wanted to address a couple of points:

22 minutes ago, Bruno de Souza Lino said:

While Quick Grouping is one feature that sure not many people know about, Studio One ups it a bit by having it on by default. Want to change the volume of multiple tracks at once? Just select those tracks and move the faders.

Aside from holding down CTRL as the modifier, how is that different or better than just swiping down the tracks in CbB and adjusting a fader? If anything, that follows most of the Windows paradigm by having CTRL as a multi-select thing.

22 minutes ago, Bruno de Souza Lino said:

You can also create selection groups or have a VCA track, which makes the process set once and forget.

THIS, on the other hand, is definitely something missing from CbB, and I'd love to see it added. We can make Aux tracks or Busses, but if you have complex routing or sends from those tracks, it gets complicated super fast. What's especially baffling to me is we can do proper groups (not quick groups) but you can't actually automate things like volume using a grouped control. Even with that extra clunk of having to use groups, that's still better than having nothing at all, although I'd much prefer a VCA track.

22 minutes ago, Bruno de Souza Lino said:

You can also select all tracks you want to send, right click and go "Add FX/Bus for selected tracks." This is a feature which has been present since version 2.

CbB has multi-add as well - select all of your tracks, hold down CTRL (following the same paradigm as mentioned earlier) and right click > Insert Send.

22 minutes ago, Bruno de Souza Lino said:

And since you can do the dreaded "Copy only certain stuff from other projects" thing which Cubase and ProTools do, you may not have to create templates at all depending on your workflow.

This is another much wanted feature from me. Definitely clunk by definition - it's something you *can* do now but there's a heap of extra steps to achieve it, where it's handled much more elegantly in other DAWs.

Edited June 22, 2023 by Lord Tim

[Bruno de Souza Lino]

2 minutes ago, Lord Tim said:

Aside from holding down CTRL as the modifier, how is that different or better than just swiping down the tracks in CbB and adjusting a fader? If anything, that follows most of the Windows paradigm by having CTRL as a multi-select thing.

Because Quick Grouping sometimes doesn't work or doesn't work for everything.

8 minutes ago, Lord Tim said:

CbB has multi-add as well - select that track, hold down CTRL (following the same paradigm as mentioned earlier) and right click > Insert Send.

I believe there's more than two ways of adding multiple effects in Studio One, but I'll have to check and come up with a response later.

[Lord Tim]

1 hour ago, Bruno de Souza Lino said:

Quick Grouping sometimes doesn't work or doesn't work for everything.

If you could come up with examples of what it doesn't work on, that'd be useful to pass on to the Bakers. I think consistency is going to be one of those things that everyone keeps returning to when we start talking about getting rid of any clunk. Quick Grouping really should work consistently across all controls.

[Starship Krupa]

1 hour ago, Bruno de Souza Lino said:

While Quick Grouping is one feature that sure not many people know about, Studio One ups it a bit by having it on by default.

Not sure I'd care for that. I've never used a DAW that operates that way. Something you get used to, I guess.

2 hours ago, Bruno de Souza Lino said:

As of version 6, there's several ways of adding effects. Dragging and dropping is only one of them.

I'm still on v 4, so it took me a bit of flailing until I twigged their philosophy, and that drag and drop was usually the first thing to try in S1.

2 hours ago, Bruno de Souza Lino said:

You can also select all tracks you want to send, right click and go "Add FX/Bus for selected tracks."

Which in Cakewalk requires the extra step of depressing the Ctrl key after you select the tracks.

2 hours ago, Bruno de Souza Lino said:

But Studio One also has templates.

I never said it didn't. Don't all DAW's have them?

I'm not trying to diminish Studio One, I'm comparing the strengths (and weaknesses) of the two programs. I think Studio One is a great program, lots of good ideas there that I would love to have in Cakewalk.

This might not be a popular opinion, but it seems to me that feature-wise, CbB (as it is today) is comparable to Studio One Artist. The big missing feature in Artist is the Chord Track from what I can tell. Compared to Artist, Cakewalk also lacks the integrated samplers, and its other bundled instruments are kinda dire. Studio One Artist 4 added the samplers a few months after CbB first shipped. A couple of years later, Presonus added support for 3rd-party VST's to Artist 5, which is when it became a viable option, IMO.

BandLab pushed the meme that "Cakewalk by BandLab is the formerly $499 SONAR Platinum for free," but it never was. Feature-wise, CbB (when it was first issued) was pretty much the formerly $199 SONAR Professional, which was Cakewalk's 2nd-tier option.

Cakewalk Sonar when it ships will be competing with the $99 Studio One Artist, and Studio One Artist is stiffer competition these days, as is the $149 (but frequently discounted) Mixcraft Pro Studio. It will be interesting to see what the pricing looks like. Cakewalk has obviously been the best bang for the buck for the past 5 years, but that may change.

2 hours ago, Lord Tim said:

What's especially baffling to me is we can do proper groups (not quick groups) but you can't actually automate things like volume using a grouped control.

This is something that I too would like to see addressed.

[Mark Morgon-Shaw]

5 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

P.S. He also showed (but didn't talk much about) how you can resize the modules in S1's mixer, which I have wished for since I started using Cakewalk. There can be a LOT of wasted real estate in the Console depending on how many FX and Sends you're working with, whether you need the gain knob visible, etc.

I talked about this years ago somewhere on these forums and postulated it would require a move to vector based GUI to be doable so it will be interesting to see if we get more mixer view options now going forward.

[User 905133]

7 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

The new feature blurbs for S1 v6 indicate that they just introduced that kind of UI customization. I only have S1 Artist v4, so I don't have a way to compare them.

No rush on my part to switch to Studio One. I can wait until Mike (or someone else) does a full comparison of the two with regard to workflow.