DAW Wars: The Fanboy Strikes Back

[Musicianaire]

Forgot to mention another one in my previous post: Pro Tools.  Tried it, and liked it, but two things stopped me: Price and support.  I had an extremely hard time getting help when I needed it during the trial period.  Avid told me to ask in the forums for help, and the forums told me to ask Avid.... like wtf??  That was the end of my Pro Tools affair.

Edited December 24, 2018 by Musicianaire

[Starise]

When I looked at Pro Tools I seen a price of something close to 1000.00 to buy it outright or use their payment plan. I like Meng's payment plan much better. I was one of those who bought Cakewalk software when it was for sale. Not sure what the future holds for CbB, though Meng has said he won't charge for the core program unless I misunderstood him.

Meng reported 5 million downloads of the program. Something should come of that.

[InstrEd]

I got Samplitude bundle too last year. Don't know if I'll update to X4 or not. I like the program but don't know if the price for upgrade is worth it to me.  SO3 I got too but never registered it,  I used the demo.

Finally registered it and got X4 upgrade for free. Just getting into the program and I love the arranger and mastering section. Plus several other programs I brought. Still CBB seems like it will be my #1 DAW with learning Samplitude and SO4 for backup.  SO4 might get the nod in the future if I get one of there control surfaces. I here it integrates with SO4 really well.

 

[Steev]

1 hour ago, Starise said:

When I looked at Pro Tools I seen a price of something close to 1000.00 to buy it outright or use their payment plan. I like Meng's payment plan much better. I was one of those who bought Cakewalk software when it was for sale. Not sure what the future holds for CbB, though Meng has said he won't charge for the core program unless I misunderstood him.

Meng reported 5 million downloads of the program. Something should come of that.

Pro Tools is a bottomless money pit.. It never stops costing you something close to another 1000, then another 1000, and then when you finally think you've got it made to the top of the heap, Apple will reinvent Thunderbolt, give it a new connector design,  and Avid will drop support for your audio interface, and all your FX plugins will stop working stably.

But......... Pro Tools is the industry standard, and it'll never stop making you money if you take the time in mastering it so like it or not it's the only way to maintain a stable footing and living in the industry, save for the highly unlikely event of becoming the next big thing in the  rock star world, is being the guy who knows how to use Pro Tools..

 That being said, I like Pro Tools well enough, maybe not as much as I love Cakewalk, but I do like it very much.. Why you ask?? Because 9 out of 10 professional recordings I'm involved in are deeply involved in using Pro Tools, and 10 out of 10 mixing sessions I'm involved are done in Pro Tools.

  I gave up raving about how much better I feel Cakewalk is then Pro Tools years before Roland even thought of passing it on to Gibson Brands because nobody in the industry that will to pay me on a regular basis for services rendered could care less about anything other than making the quickest and smoothest profit return on their investments with and thru their finer "Financial Instruments". And the sound of any other "Instruments" falls squarely into deaf ears and will forever be ignored as the incessant whining of the gears of the talented and such who seek the ever elusive unicorn of perfection.

 And so looking at it in that respect, I could only assume that Pro Tools is in fact the best DAW anyone could learn how to use if you have any intentions of actually making money in the music industry.

 And while I have always much preferred working in Cakewalk as a simple affordable solution and way to take my music projects to a much higher level of creativity with all the professional quality tools included in the box  that I could ever afford to do with building Pro Tools to a reasonably comparable powerful creative solution.

 As far as the folks in industry are concerned, being nothing is going to be released before running thru Pro Tools as an industry standard, and other DAW is merely an added expense for us creative types which is and I'm pretty sure will always be considered "None of their business." anymore then they care if you play a $300 Epiphone Les Paul or a $4500 Gibson Les Paul. Because in the end product, nobody will be able to tell the difference anyway.

 

And so what would be the best DAW anyone could possibly hope for? Well you're never going to find out if you keep jumping from ship to ship before you actually know enough to make an informed decision about everything your DAW can do and build a working knowledge and understanding of how to use it.

 You can waste your entire lifetime sifting through learning curves and never actually learn a damn thing about recording properly or creating great sound music projects that way. Or understanding the importance of knowing the differences between choosing a VCA, FET, or Opto compressor? Cakewalk has them all, seek and you shall find.

 Ever wonder why Cakewalk ProChannel has 4 different types of EQ's built into one module? Why do high pass filters effect the bass and low pass filters effect the high freqs, and why you should even bother using them? What's so freak'in ultimately COOL about having 3 choices of Channel and Buss emulation built in?

Ever wonder what ProChannel even IS, and why it's one of the things about Cakewalk that sets it heads above any other DAW out there for very useful, powerful, and important tools included in the box? What makes it different then just using an FX bin?

 Ever work with Cakewalk's "Take" and "Envelope" lanes? Drum Replacer? Matrix? Vocal Sync? Audio Snap? Session Drummer 2 or 3? Dimension Pro? Rapture? Rapture Session or Pro? Cakewalk Studio Instruments? TTS 1? Sonitus plugins?

 Do you know the difference between Channel plugins, Buss plugins, and Mastering plugins? Or why you can, but really shouldn't use place them in the wrong places.

 Of course the only rule to making rock music is "there are no rules", but knowing what the rules are before breaking them is a great way to realize that maybe it isn't the DAW being as stupid as you may think, LoL.. Keep making that mistake and you deserve to be forever broke buy new DAWs until you find one that can read your mind and automatically "know what you want it to do."?

 It's MUCH easier to adapt to a DAW that it is trying to find one that will adapt to you.

 

 If you could think about comparing DAW's as you would "Coloring Books" and all plugins and tools as the "Colors", you should clearly be able to see that Cakewalk comes stocked with the biggest box of "Crayons" and "Color Pencils" of any other DAW.

[Starise]

@Steev

I was once more of a black and white kinda guy. Now I've become more vanilla on some issues, DAWs being one of those.

Much of how you make a choice has a lot to do with a person's environment. If I went to a mixing engineer school I would probably be using Pro Tools today, even it was only on the side since most reputable schools and colleges are still using PT. I can imagine a professor here and there  recommending their students learn more than one DAW.  CbB is an easy way to get into an alternative DAW. The only issue there is they might not go back.

On the old forum there were several who admitted to using PT as the mastering DAW  at work but they mixed all of their tracks in Cakewalk and imported to PT . They use it at work because they have no choice. Most studios have it on hand in case a client wants to work in it. I don't think PT is bad. I simply never had a need for it. Knowing that some think CbB is easier to mix in it doesn't boost my faith in it any more. If I had a studio for hire I would likely have it on hand and I would need to learn it.

A high resolution .wav crosses over to anything, so it's really up to what a person likes likes.  With 5 million downloads and counting CbB might become a very common DAW in the near future.

It'll be like- Grab a copy of CbB and shoot me some tracks. With the new export function this is literally the case.

[InstrEd]

yep bandlab users but I bet there are a lot of cakewalk DAW downloads happening too

[Will]

I think it's partly a genre thing too. From what I can gather, nearly every studio in Nashville is using Pro Tools, so the country people seem to be really big on it.

[Toddskins]

On 12/24/2018 at 10:09 AM, Starise said:

I am beginning to write notation for groups. I needed a program to use for that. As someone who prefers creating in a DAW in real time, the idea that I could export to Notion from Studio One appealed to me. I DON'T like writing notes in one at a time in any program be it midi or notation. CbB has some notation ability which maybe I should investigate more. I believe it is very rudimentary though. Would get the job done on a simple project. 

For those looking at notation option there's also a decent marriage between Sibelius and Pro Tools. Maybe better in some ways than Studio One/Notion. Never used that setup personally. You don't need rewire with Studio One though it has the option. You can use another built in protocol that makes transfer easier to do. 

1) You should seriously consider playing your song on your MIDI controller and record it.  Then you will have your song available as a MIDI file from which you can then EDIT it with Cakewalk's Notation Staff View.  Actually, regardless of what DAW you like, playing and recording your song on a MIDI controller is the fastest way to get your music into your DAW and be ready to edit it.

2) I own Sibelius and it's generally horrible.  And it's because all the notation software programs out there, save one (Finale'), are a bitch to work with.  I have written about this several times over the years on various forums, but I'll try to make this short:

Sibelius and others (not Finale'), force all the notes in a measure to add up to one (1).  Therefore, when you import the song you played as a MIDI file into these programs, it will force all your notes to be strange values because the measure must add up to one.  Nobody plays perfectly and your notes will be on either side of the measure when you record.  We are not robots when we play.  So then the notation software will assign strange values to your notes, because if you played a little fast and have a few extra notes in the measure (or even just one extra note) from which you set the tempo while recording, the notation software will force smaller values on your music in order to make the measure add up to 1.  You don't understand how horrible and infuriating this is until you read the next paragraph.

Now, you go into edit that score with all the notes assigned strange values, and as you attempt to push the notes into next measure to make it "right", the notes left behind will again be re-assigned new values.  Or, you attempt to change the 1/16 note into an 1/8 note, and it either will not allow you to or it will change all the other notes remaining in the measure so they all add up to 1.  It's a nightmare.

Finale' (which I do not own, but have verified), allows you to edit the music like a Word processor.  You can insert notes into the existing MIDI score, and Finale' gives you the option of pushing the notes to the right further to the right WITHOUT modifying the notes to the left.   And you can edit the value of a note without the program forcing changes on the other notes.  It gives you options on how you wish to handle the remaining notes.

That's the way notation software should work.  

When I wrote Sibelius about this issue a few years ago, they wrote me back and said they were not able to accommodate the need I wrote about because their core software is designed to be that way (adding up to 1).  So all their latest versions continue this inherent "flaw".  It's not a problem if you write music from scratch with a digital pencil, so to speak, but if you import a MIDI file that you played, forget all about trying to correct and edit it with Sibelius and the others.   Cakewalk does not have this problem due to its simplistic way of editing and not really being a notation software program.

Edited December 26, 2018 by Toddskins

[Byron Dickens]

On 12/23/2018 at 3:45 PM, Alex H. said:

I have tried that DAW a little bit and while it is very good for mixing "in the box" I didn't find it useful for composing music. I don't know it is implemented yet but during my testing it lacks a proper PRV. The audio and MIDI editing were basic at most.

Mixbus is intended to be an emulation of Harrison's analog consoles and a tape deck.  MIDI is an afterthought tacked on to it. 

 

I have the regular Mixbus  (Not 32c) and I think it is fantastic for mixing.  Instead of a console emulation plugin,  the WHOLE DAW is a console emulation. 

 

I tried REAPER but it never just quite clicked with me. It is impressive,  however.  One thing I really do like is the way it can natively  handle timing corrections much simpler than SONAR's old Audio Snap.

 

A long time ago I tried some version of  Cubase and couldn't make heads or tails of it. Same with  Ableton.

 

 

[Starship Krupa]

3 hours ago, Toddskins said:

Sibelius and others (not Finale'), force all the notes in a measure to add up to one (1).  Therefore, when you import the song you played as a MIDI file into these programs, it will force all your notes to be strange values because the measure must add up to one.

Oh holy mother, really? Still?

When I was notation-shopping I settled on Finale Note Pad, which is freeware, like our CbB, so I guess I missed out on how prevalent this still is, but I've encountered it in other programs.

It's like there was a Procrustes Bach (Procrustes was the serial killer/blacksmith in Greek paganism who had an iron bed; he would invite travelers in to stay the night and if they didn't fit the bed perfectly he would either chop off anything that stuck out, or stretch them until their limbs "fit.") who came up with this. You try to tidy things up a little bit, or decide that you want that note to sustain just a bit longer and BLEAHHH suddenly your measure and the one next to it are littered with little dots and rests and hemidemisemiquavers to make up for it. Which makes it worse, it looks like a caterpillar stepped in some ink and walked across scoring paper.

Heaven help you if you play a chord and your finger slips, or if you decide you want to voice the chord a bit differently and then throw the timing off with the slip of a mouse. The results look worse than having "slide over to make room" turned on in CbB (sorry).

Every time I tried to get "serious" about producing sheet music of my stuff for other musicians to use and tried one of these programs, it made me just drop the project entirely until I started working with Finale and then Mixcraft (which also seems more forgiving).

I am very happy to hear that Cakewalk doesn't do this. It made me feel like I was in some horrible Dickensian math class, had made a mistake, and was being punished by a Snape-like instructor. Or like that movie I saw the trailer for that seemed to be about having The Great Santini for a drum teacher.

[backwoods]

When Gibson wound up Sonar I spent $299 to bring my old copy of Pro Tools up to date. That gives a years updates and the ability to use the DAW as is after the year is over.  It's a good DAW and the manifold keyboard shortcuts are right up my street-- can work extremely quickly. One cool thing is that the compulsory iLok protection now has the option to be run from the cloud so the PACE dongle is not required. Slate, McDSP, and a couple of others also give the option of ilok cloud too.

[Steev]

@Starise

I certainly agree on owning and using multiple DAWs and NLEs for video editing, emphasis on digging in deep, learning and "USING" them.

I'm pretty sure Cakewalk was always by far the most common DAW used for Windows computers. I myself became aware of it because it came bundled with a new Windows 95 computer I bought back in the day, and I immediately started using it to edit MIDI sequences I had previously made on my Roland MC 500 hardware sequencer that required floppy discs for storage that could only hold 1.5 mb of MIDI files. My Win 95 computer had a mind blowing 1 GB hard drive.

Couldn't do MIDI with Pro Tools in 95 which only ran on a Mac and so I fell in love Cakewalk. But unfortunately Cakewalk couldn't do audio so Pro Tools had to stay, and the Mac and the Win 95 where joined at the hips with a MIDI sync MTC.

 But by the time SONAR 4 Producer hit the shelves Cakewalk became #1, not just in my studio, it was the #1 most award winning  DAW in the WORLD! It was so stable and feature rich it was awarded the MIPA Awards.. In other words, it was regarded as so stable and feature rich as  the only DAW you will ever need, and at a ridiculously low affordable price..

 And so before anyone gets all angry at the fact Gibson charged them $500 for SONAR Platinum I'd like to point out the fact that you couldn't buy all the included 3rd party FULLY LICENSED plugins that came bundled for free with SPLAT for $500.

 Truth be told, I wasn't happy in the least with Gibson's $150 per year subscription plan model and decided to drop it. But then, right before I decided to stop renewing,  Addictive Drums and a choice of 3 MIDI packs was added and that was a better deal then I could get from XLN Audio themselves, and then there was Rapture Session, Cakewalk's new and improved LP EQ and LP MB, and my #1 buss go to piece Cakewalk Adaptive Limiter.. What am I stupid not to get Addictive Drums at such a discounted price?

 And that tradition of updating Cakewalk still stands today thanks to Meng and all the folks at Bandlab, and it's free, and that means we have $150 extra per year to add any plugins and instruments of our choosing.

 You might still keep up, but you have to look for your own discounted price deals.

 

@backwoods

You only get to keep the latest paid for version Pro Tools for Avid subscription plan, not all those killer FX plugins.

 

Edited December 26, 2018 by Steev

[Starship Krupa]

I was most recently using Mixcraft before Gibson and then BandLab dropped their sad and then happy bombs.

Mixcraft is kind of "the little DAW that could." 5 years ago I wanted to get back into home recording after more than 10 years away from it, so I shopped around and the best bang for the short-of-buck was, IMO, Mixcraft.

I had tried REAPER before, and gave it another brave try, but it ended in bafflement and disappointment as it always has. One of my benchmarks for a DAW is "how long does it take me, from a cold start, without cracking a manual or help file, to be able to record 30 seconds of audio and then edit the middle 10 seconds out of it?" Many will concur that with REAPER, depending on the individual, this might be measured in hours or even days rather than minutes.

And while, yes, REAPER does have a robust and active user forum, there is a whiff of that Linux-y "if you're having trouble using the software, you're a doofus" attitude, where it seemed like there was an uncomfortable priority placed on maintaining an image of REAPER as being just as beginner-friendly and easy-to-use as its competitors. So if a newbie posted that they were flummoxed by the weird-ass workflow, too much emphasis was on "defending" rather than just explaining. This may have improved now that the program is more secure in the market.

If there are any REAPER fans here, before you get in my grill, I'll just say that I know REAPER is powerful. It is so, so powerful. Its power is too much for a mind as small as mine to comprehend, which is why I must never, ever be in the same room with it.

It's likely that the reason that it took me over 2 hours to arm a track, record a clip, and chop 10 seconds out of it was that because in REAPER, a track can be anything you want it to be. It can be an audio track, a MIDI track, a bus, a video track, a score track, an automation lane, a patch bay, a quiet place to while away a few hours while the family is out of the house, the gum you stuck to the underside of your chair in 6th grade, the sensation of heat, or the concept of sensation itself. So I probably had created a "gum" track when I should have created an "audio" track, and when I clicked what I thought was "arm" probably meant "chew." Or I had chosen the wrong color of audio, which had to be selected ahead of time or else nothing would work.

The company who makes Mixcraft on the other hand, Acoustica, their motto is "Software should be easy to use!" True to this, my test took 2.5 minutes to complete once the program had finished installing. Another trick for checking out DAW's is to read their user forum and see if people are shrieking like the souls of the damned about uncorrected bugs and missing or poorly implemented basic features that span major releases. Mixcraft is very good about staying current on the bug fixes. Their dev team is responsive.

The price was hard to beat, under a hundy for something that had no restrictions as far as track count and would handle VST's. Also rudimentary video editing. You can put in fades and transitions and overlay text and stuff.

I spent a few years with Mixcraft, really I learned my DAW chops with it. But I was starting to outgrow it, and happily, that coincided with BandLab's announcement. My biggest complaint with it vs. Cakewalk is the console. Mixcraft's console is so feature-challenged that almost all mixing I have to do in Mixcraft, I do in the Track View. I only set up cue mixes in the Console. And of course, Cakewalk's Console is un-freaking-REAL. Also Cakewalk's playback engine sounds better. I ran some tests with sine sweeps and there were artifacts (many digital audio programs have them, you might be surprised) whereas SONAR tested relatively clean, so that may be an explanation, but I could hear a difference right away.

One feature where Mixcraft whips Cakewalks butt is in the robustness of that playback engine. I was/am on the Mixcraft beta team, and if their playback engine just stopped, and it kept stopping under the same conditions, be they heavy RAM or CPU load or whatever, you'd write that up as a bug report and they'd set about fixing whatever is wrong with the program that is causing it to do that. There's not a blue window that pops up saying how "unfortunate" it is that playback went casters-up in the middle of your mixing session. So that was, uh....different. I had gotten used to being able to do just about anything I wanted to with the playback running.

Their way of handling submix buses by dragging and dropping, and how they can be nested as many times as you wish is really fab. Submixes act the same way that "track folders" do in Cakewalk, there's no distinction. You can collapse them and MSR all the tracks underneath and all of that.

But weak mixer console, take lanes that you can't collapse, VST3 handling that's still kinda iffy, weak keyboard shortcuts, no support for theming, weaker MIDI routing. It's still a "starter DAW," albeit a very good one that can play with the big players in many situations. Despite the quality of the product, I suspect that they may fall to BandLab's pricing scheme on the current Cakewalk.

[Feral State Sound]

On 12/24/2018 at 5:09 PM, Starise said:

I am beginning to write notation for groups. I needed a program to use for that. As someone who prefers creating in a DAW in real time, the idea that I could export to Notion from Studio One appealed to me. I DON'T like writing notes in one at a time in any program be it midi or notation. CbB has some notation ability which maybe I should investigate more. I believe it is very rudimentary though. Would get the job done on a simple project. 

For those looking at notation option there's also a decent marriage between Sibleus and Pro Tools. Maybe better in some ways than Studio One/Notion. Never used that setup personally. You don't need rewire with Studio One though it has the option. You can use another built in protocol that makes transfer easier to do. 

In my opinion, the strongest DAW  notation wise it is Digital Performer but it is not widely used and the Windows version still has issues. Pro tools + Sibelius, Studio One + Notion and Cubase + Dorico also seems interesting but... If we have to use two different programs for doing decent notation editing We not to use CBB + Musescore for 0$? Nevertheless, I hope some changes on the CBB staff editor, even the REAPER staff editor is much more powerful. 

[Steev]

@Starship Krupa

Good write up on Mixcraft, sound to me like you have found your second DAW. 

 Noticing you use Presonus FirePods I'm kind of suprised it isn't Studio One considering it ships free, and their starter edition is actually quite impressive to say the least, and the Pro version kind of makes me think they are destined to knock everyone but the strongest survivors out of the box withing the next few years, as they seem to be the only one making some great technological leaps and bounds in all the right directions in the past few years.

 And doing so basically by listening and learning from what their users want, just as Cakewalk has always done from the beginning.

 Anyone here still remember 12 Tones Inc. and Grieg Henderhoff? I'd be willing to bet Meng does, as they seem to be like "Brotha's from other Motha's" and or "Two guys who went to different skools together" ?

 I was actually considering moving over to SO 1 during the Gibson shutdown and almost jumped on their $300 cross-grade offer after noodling around with a friends Studio One 3 studio set up running thru an Audio Box 4x4 which I wasn't all that fond of after using Focusrite for so long.

 I brought over my Scarlett 18i20 gen 2 for a try, and that indeed put quite a bit more "POP" under the hood of SO Pro3 and then he decided he didn't want to live without Focusrite preamps anymore and started to save up to go the Focusrite route.

 But by the time he could afford the change over, SO Pro4 was released along with the new Presonus Quantum audio interfaces and a very powerful epiphany struck again, and his attitude and life had changed once again.

 And I must concur, that is one truly super duper Shocker of badazz WORKSTATION to the 12th power!!

 But is it better then my Cakewalk/Focusrite workstation? Maybe as far as the endgame is concerned, but Cakewalk still rules in the choices and paths you can take in getting there.... But fortunately for all of us concerned, it's humanly impossible to tell, so I'll be staying on the same course.

 There is NO DAW better then a DAW you are intimately familiar with.

 And there is no better hardware then newer hardware that can keep up pace with newer software technology.

[Toddskins]

10 hours ago, Alex H. said:

In my opinion, the strongest DAW  notation wise it is Digital Performer but it is not widely used and the Windows version still has issues. Pro tools + Sibelius, Studio One + Notion and Cubase + Dorico also seems interesting but... If we have to use two different programs for doing decent notation editing We not to use CBB + Musescore for 0$? Nevertheless, I hope some changes on the CBB staff editor, even the REAPER staff editor is much more powerful. 

Musescore is another one of those notation programs that force everything to add up to 1.  'Could not care less that it's free since it's a nightmare to work with editing existing MIDI songs.

[Toddskins]

14 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

Oh holy mother, really? Still?

When I was notation-shopping I settled on Finale Note Pad, which is freeware, like our CbB, so I guess I missed out on how prevalent this still is, but I've encountered it in other programs.

It's like there was a Procrustes Bach (Procrustes was the serial killer/blacksmith in Greek paganism who had an iron bed; he would invite travelers in to stay the night and if they didn't fit the bed perfectly he would either chop off anything that stuck out, or stretch them until their limbs "fit.") who came up with this. You try to tidy things up a little bit, or decide that you want that note to sustain just a bit longer and BLEAHHH suddenly your measure and the one next to it are littered with little dots and rests and hemidemisemiquavers to make up for it. Which makes it worse, it looks like a caterpillar stepped in some ink and walked across scoring paper.

Heaven help you if you play a chord and your finger slips, or if you decide you want to voice the chord a bit differently and then throw the timing off with the slip of a mouse. The results look worse than having "slide over to make room" turned on in CbB (sorry).

Every time I tried to get "serious" about producing sheet music of my stuff for other musicians to use and tried one of these programs, it made me just drop the project entirely until I started working with Finale and then Mixcraft (which also seems more forgiving).

I am very happy to hear that Cakewalk doesn't do this. It made me feel like I was in some horrible Dickensian math class, had made a mistake, and was being punished by a Snape-like instructor. Or like that movie I saw the trailer for that seemed to be about having The Great Santini for a drum teacher.

What you write is funny.  What's not funny is how many people defend those notation programs to the death, regardless of what you just acknowledged.

I cannot tell you how juvenile and hardheaded they get when you point out the obvious flaw.   I just gave up on those characters.  You can't fix stupid.

[Toddskins]

And regarding CbB, what new users probably have no idea about (and they are in for a joyful surprise) is how many Cakewalk Sonar veterans there are who are absolutely the best guys you might ever come across who will help you and support you in whatever problem you have with the CbB DAW, Plugins, VST pathway issues, Fx, you name it. 

They don't belittle you for your ignorance and having to ask the question several times when you don't understand, and they go outside the normal scope of the issue and don't have a problem helping you with related things (what type of Computer should I try to get?).

And these guys have been around a LONG time.  They know things that stymie many of us.  Great, great resource of guys come along with CbB.

Edited December 26, 2018 by Toddskins

[Tapsa Kuusniemi]

I'll add my assesments to this thread. After the Gibson debacle I went for Studio One and Bitwig. Previously already had Reaper but that one is too much for the tweakers to suit me (basically you can turn it into anything you want, if you have time, patience and some coding skills).

STUDIO ONE 3 and 4: The workflow is intuitive and the Scratchpad is one of the most brilliant features. The Browser is miles ahead of CbB as is setting up multiout instrument tracks. MIDI editing is more basic than in CbB but fairly intuitive as well. ARA  functionalities are probably the best on the market (kicking up Melodyne on a track is quite an experience compared to Sonar/CbB but hey Presonus is sitting on the tech).  Video functionalities are fariyl basic, but better thatn Sonar / CbB. Coming from CbB there was a learning curve as to the GUI but it wasn't too much.

BITWIG: Bitwig isn't for everyone. It is a pretty much completely differently though DAW from the rest. It takes quite a bit of time to get to know ins and outs coming from Sonar/CbB but once you get a grasp of the software then it is quite intuitive. Bitwig is not for heavy MIDI projects, those it can not handle like CbB, Studio One or any of the other major players. VST Sandboxing is probably one of the best things. You can crash a plugin and it just crashes the plugin only to be able to reload it with one click. A superb function. But the real thing with Bitwig is the modulation system. You can assign modulators to everything. And that is why I think Bitwig has a serious future for sound design work.

[Toddskins]

5 hours ago, Kuusniemi said:

BITWIG: Bitwig isn't for everyone. It is a pretty much completely differently though DAW from the rest. It takes quite a bit of time to get to know ins and outs coming from Sonar/CbB but once you get a grasp of the software then it is quite intuitive. Bitwig is not for heavy MIDI projects, those it can not handle like CbB, Studio One or any of the other major players. VST Sandboxing is probably one of the best things. You can crash a plugin and it just crashes the plugin only to be able to reload it with one click. A superb function. But the real thing with Bitwig is the modulation system. You can assign modulators to everything. And that is why I think Bitwig has a serious future for sound design work.

I tried the free Bitwig version that came with a MIDI controller I bought, and cannot imagine anybody thinking it is good.  Horrible software, totally unintuitive, failed to recognize settings after being set, registration problems that could not get corrected.  And UGLY.  

And that was their way of enticing me to upgrade to their "pro" version for my hard-earned money?  <shaking head>

Edited December 27, 2018 by Toddskins