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Presonus Studio One 5 Pro

Larry Shelby

By Larry Shelby
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TheMaartian

TheMaartian

Posted
Posted

I bought a license to Studio One Pro v2 before I bought one for SONAR. The only real reason I got into SONAR was the forum. The Studio One forum was, and continues to be, of little use to me. I stopped using SPLAT when it transitioned to BandLab. I also stopped using Reaper because I was spending too much time screwing around with the GUI and not recording. I had kept updating Studio One, and returned to it full time.

Nothing is perfect, but no regrets here, either.

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Tim Smith

Tim Smith

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13 hours ago, John Maar said:

I bought a license to Studio One Pro v2 before I bought one for SONAR. The only real reason I got into SONAR was the forum. The Studio One forum was, and continues to be, of little use to me. I stopped using SPLAT when it transitioned to BandLab. I also stopped using Reaper because I was spending too much time screwing around with the GUI and not recording. I had kept updating Studio One, and returned to it full time.

Nothing is perfect, but no regrets here, either.

I find this to be the case as well with any other DAW forum. I once went to the German side of the Cubase forum. You wanna see sparse go there. "HALLO!" "irgendjemand hier?" 

Oh there's Riginakld come back from yodeling in the mountains!

Seriously though I guess we are all a little different. I still use both Cubase and Cakewalk which says a lot coming from a guy who once had very little good to say about Cubase. I need to stop cutting on Germans as they put out a very nice DAW. 

Some of that DNA came into Studio One- Gifted German coders also. 

I wish I could say I use Studio One a lot. I don't, but I'm very glad to have it.

Can someone tell my what makes it their favorite? I see it as  utilitarian and mostly solid. Mastering section rocks. It seems to do everything almost anyone needs it to do. The bundled plugins are very nice. The bundled instruments, no so much. I wasn't overly impressed with the midi functions. Passable. I think Cakewalk has better midi implementation, so this DAW  feels more like it was made for a live player who wants a DAW. Integration into Presonus gear is nice, especially faderport.

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abacab

abacab

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Posted

I put my MIDI hardware in a storage closet 10 years ago. Studio One can do anything with in-the-box virtual instruments that I need it to. The rest of the features are a bonanza!

The only shortcomings for S1 that I have seen others express is possibly the MIDI hardware support, and post production abilities. Those users claim that Cubase excels in those areas, and would switch to S1 if they were covered more comprehensively. But not an issue for me. No regrets!

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abacab

abacab

Posted
Posted
5 hours ago, Tim Smith said:

The bundled instruments, no so much

Yep, I bring my own instruments. Been doing this for a while, and have accumulated many of them. But for first timers, the PreSonus offerings are a great value and sufficient to get rolling.

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MusicMan

MusicMan

Posted
Posted (edited)
49 minutes ago, abacab said:

The only shortcomings for S1 that I have seen others express is possibly the MIDI hardware support, and post production abilities. Those users claim that Cubase excels in those areas, and would switch to S1 if they were covered more comprehensively

To this day, I still think Cubase has the strongest MIDI offering. That was also a huge reason why I never bothered with Protools when it was holding a huge market share. Cubase just covered both Audio and MIDI so well. I think that most of the DAWs have some very cool unique features, but when I think about what is most complete for what I do, Cubase sits on top and Cubase 12 in particular I think they've just got so many things right.

N.B.. not the grace period license conversion process... But the DAW ?

Edited by MusicMan
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TheMaartian

TheMaartian

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I know that Steinberg is working on a new licensing scheme, but I avoided Cubase specifically because of the eLicenser dongle.

I had dealt with iLok's various dongles going all the way back to the Centronics port app-specific dongles. You could "supposedly" chain a couple of them in series, but that never worked. Only the dongle physically connected to the port worked. The others in the chain never did. And iLok NEVER provides any assistance, always referring you back to the app provider.

I wasted a bunch of money on Steven Slate's plugins which required the iLok USB dongle, which was unreliable on my desktop DAW and used up a precious USB port. Slate added cloud support, but that's worse than a physical dongle. They refuse to: a) support iLok's soft licensing (to the PC), and b) respond to any attempt to communicate with them regarding the issue.

So, I swore off physical dongles. The fact that Steinberg is working on some kind of soft licensing process is no longer relevant to me. I'm past the point where I'd make a major investment (learning time and money) in a new DAW.

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MusicMan

MusicMan

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Posted
12 minutes ago, John Maar said:

I know that Steinberg is working on a new licensing scheme, but I avoided Cubase specifically because of the eLicenser dongle.

I had dealt with iLok's various dongles going all the way back to the Centronics port app-specific dongles. You could "supposedly" chain a couple of them in series, but that never worked. Only the dongle physically connected to the port worked. The others in the chain never did. And iLok NEVER provides any assistance, always referring you back to the app provider.

I wasted a bunch of money on Steven Slate's plugins which required the iLok USB dongle, which was unreliable on my desktop DAW and used up a precious USB port. Slate added cloud support, but that's worse than a physical dongle. They refuse to: a) support iLok's soft licensing (to the PC), and b) respond to any attempt to communicate with them regarding the issue.

So, I swore off physical dongles. The fact that Steinberg is working on some kind of soft licensing process is no longer relevant to me. I'm past the point where I'd make a major investment (learning time and money) in a new DAW.

Oh they're not working on it .. Cubase 12, including 12 Artist and 12 Pro are dongle free ?

I hate wasting USB ports on stupid copy protection devices personally and had not upgraded to Pro for that reason as well.

So no dongle for me and C12Pro is miles in front of any DAW I've ever used for my tastes/requirements.

Agreed on learning another DAW though.. Cubase was too slow to move when all the competition didn't have a requirement for a dongle and I think it hurt them and people like you may never either go back, or consider them now as they have a DAW they like.

Will be interesting seeing a wave of new users that can now demo them without having to buy a dongle.. that was the crazy part.. who wants to buy a dongle to even demo something?!

So glad they're gone ?

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MusicMan

MusicMan

Posted
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7 minutes ago, Tony Carpenter said:

I went S1 when I bought my StudioLive series 3 mixer. Definitely no regrets, and I went Sphere because I learned with Izotope too, subs overall are cheaper.  And yes I know I won’t own passed my last full purchase, but that’s not bothering me anymore.

my .0200

Nothing wrong with subs in my opinion.. but only ever as an option. I don't go for them personally, but they work well for many people, so why not ?

I am against the aggressive sales tactics of some companies that limit certain features, or new features only to the subs version when there's a perpetual equivalent of that product.

If they only have subs and no perpetual, I'd either not start using them, or stop using them too.

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Tim Smith

Tim Smith

Posted
Posted
8 hours ago, John Maar said:

I know that Steinberg is working on a new licensing scheme, but I avoided Cubase specifically because of the eLicenser dongle.

I had dealt with iLok's various dongles going all the way back to the Centronics port app-specific dongles. You could "supposedly" chain a couple of them in series, but that never worked. Only the dongle physically connected to the port worked. The others in the chain never did. And iLok NEVER provides any assistance, always referring you back to the app provider.

I wasted a bunch of money on Steven Slate's plugins which required the iLok USB dongle, which was unreliable on my desktop DAW and used up a precious USB port. Slate added cloud support, but that's worse than a physical dongle. They refuse to: a) support iLok's soft licensing (to the PC), and b) respond to any attempt to communicate with them regarding the issue.

So, I swore off physical dongles. The fact that Steinberg is working on some kind of soft licensing process is no longer relevant to me. I'm past the point where I'd make a major investment (learning time and money) in a new DAW.

At this point I believe Steinberg have most of the bugs worked out of their new licensing scheme. But yeah, you probably missed a lot of headaches.  I never totally liked the idea of dongles either. Way back before Korg went to online licensing I received a syncrosoft dongle in their M-1/Wavstation package as a part of that package. Dual purposed it for Cubase when I bought it. Same dongle. iLok is a different setup with a different company. I have iLok too.  I like that it lets me move my licenses to another computer or save a lot of issues if my DAW goes down. I also have my Waves licenses on a USB thumb drive. None of it has ever given me any trouble.

The good news is the dongle is a thing of the past with Cubase and you can put it on three computers with the same license.

Cubase is still retailing at prices much much higher than most DAWs. 3 bills for S-1 and between 5-6 bills for Cubase. I complained about that for a long time. I still think it's out of touch for a lot of people. I found a deal on Cubase and frankly that's the ONLY reason I own it. Even though I have the $$ I was determined I would not pay that much. Maybe I'm cheap?

Maybe I'm different than most users. I tend to go back and forth on DAWs depending on what I'm trying to do and that has never been a problem for me. If I had a faderport I would probably be using S-1 a lot more. As it stands I use other hardware midi controllers.

You can perform many of the same functions in all DAWs, but not all are as intuitive on some things, for midi I prefer Cubase. 

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Tim Smith

Tim Smith

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Posted
7 hours ago, MusicMan said:

Nothing wrong with subs in my opinion.. but only ever as an option. I don't go for them personally, but they work well for many people, so why not ?

I am against the aggressive sales tactics of some companies that limit certain features, or new features only to the subs version when there's a perpetual equivalent of that product.

If they only have subs and no perpetual, I'd either not start using them, or stop using them too.

Not a fan of subs either. It seems this is what the world is coming to now. I have said this before too, but I fully expect Cubase to go to this as an alternative in the future. Might be a few generations away from it.

Presonus offer a pretty good package with their sub which translates to a value for many who would never have bought other programs and libraries, but like having them around. Cubase could come close in offering several of their full software programs in a sub.

I personally won't buy an S-1 sub so long as I can get a upgrades to successive generations for a decent price. If they offered ONLY a sub I doubt I would continue to upgrade since I don't use the DAW as much. I like having a serial number on file that says I own it perpetually.

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Shane_B.

Shane_B.

Posted
Posted
On 3/28/2022 at 11:56 PM, John Maar said:

The only real reason I got into SONAR was the forum. The Studio One forum was, and continues to be, of little use to me.

The old Studio One forum was great. Then they started having members of the forum become admin and ever since then it became a ghost town. They drove everyone off. But it did use to be as good a forum as the old Sonar forum. They even had a 'Coffee House' type area that was just as active. Then they hid it and set it to where you could only view or participate if you logged in when they transitioned to their new forum. Then they set it to where the threads auto deleted after so many days. Then they removed the link on their main page to the forum. Now the OT section has been removed completely and their mega threads that kept going like Ed's and a few others here have been deleted. They pretty much kicked everyone out and wanted it business period. It's pretty rare that I go over there any more. Nothing is the same at all. Not even remotely close and I want no part of it. They can't even get their song forum right. They added the ability to embed SoundCloud links but crippled them so you can't post private songs from your SoundCloud page like you can here. It's like they took every step they could possibly think of to make the forum as miserable as they possibly could to drive people away. It's really weird.

7 hours ago, Tony Carpenter said:

I went Sphere because I learned with Izotope too, subs overall are cheaper.  And yes I know I won’t own passed my last full purchase, but that’s not bothering me anymore.

There is a lot of bloatware in Sphere. I signed up for a while but I ended up not using 99% of it. In my case it was actually cheaper just to pay for the upgrades. Then again, if you bought outright the stuff you did use, over time, it would be cheaper to just buy it outright. If you use every single thing they ever release all the time, then yeah, I guess Sphere would be a good deal, but who does that? And of course we're talking about home users. Pro studio's don't actually pay for any of it so signing up for Sphere makes sense to have all those samples and loops at your disposal. I cancelled Sphere and I more than likely won't upgrade to version 6. I skipped from 3 to 5 and it was fine.

I've been using Studio One over 10 years now and I can honestly say I can't remember a single crash that was caused by Studio One. I was running it off digital camera SD cards for a while because I had 2 HDD's die on me and not once did I have a problem doing that. I still have the SD cards with the songs on them that I recorded. Probably should transfer those before they die. True story, I even washed them when I forgot them in my shirt pocket one time. I freaked out. Popped them in to the reader after they came out of the dryer and they still worked.

I know I have had a few VST's hiccup a few times, but I could probably count on 1 hand the amount of times that has happened. S1 certainly is worth every penny of whatever anyone is willing to pay for it, that's for sure.

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