Studio One and Notion for Orchestral?

[Some Guy]

Anyone here used these products for composition? Interested in using something with better MIDI scoring capabilities, and I see this recommended in other places. 

Want to get some feedback wherever possible. 

[TheMaartian]

I recommend going to the PreSonus forums and looking through the Notion sub-forum. Surf Whammy is a great contributor for tips connecting Notion and Studio One, and other things. Michael Myers (michaelmyers1) is an orchestral composer with many good posts.

https://forums.presonus.com/viewforum.php?f=167

[David Baay]

I'm not an orchestral composer, and I don't know Studio One well at all, though I took advantage of the discounted cross-grade price when Cakewalk went dark for a while, so take the following with a grain of salt. Just my $.02:

I think the main advantage Studio One has over Cakewalk in integrating with Notion is that it can now export directly to Notion without having to go through the intermediate step of exporting to MIDI or MusicXML file. And it does a couple other tricks like automatically exporting a MIDI piano track to a grand staff.

But for real-time integration using Rewire (and a virtual MIDI cable for some purposes), I don't think there's a significant workflow difference between using Cakewalk and Studio One with Notion . Given Cakewalk's generally superior MIDI recording and editing capabilities , if you're already familiar with Cakewalk, I wouldn't think migrating to Studio One  just to integrate with Notion would be worth the trouble.

Presonus continues to improve the integration between Studio One and Notion, but the pace of development of Notion itself has been pretty uninspiring with  the last major release two years ago, and minor release 7 months ago.

Which way you go might depend on whether you plan to compose primarily in Notion and then export to the DAW for final production,or compose in the DAW and export to Notion to generate a score.

[mettelus]

It would also help if the OP could shed some light on your expectations and what exactly you are trying to achieve. Notion is essentially a stand-alone DAW, but is not MIDI as much as it is a scoring tool. I want to clarify that point, since you cannot dig into the MIDI information like you can in Studio One or CbB. Depending on what you want to achieve, it can be convenient in that you can score to VSTs (Notion is a DAW host) then port that information into Studio One (for MIDI editing), and it will also port in the VSTs/presets as it does. If you are hoping to drill into MIDI information on a staff view, you will probably be disappointed.

When you said "MIDI scoring" I just wanted to clarify the above for you. If your purpose is to compose via staff view, it is worth doing a trial of both Studio One and Notion to understand it better. You can also download the user manuals prior to the trial, so you can maximize the trial period for evaluation (both can be complex, so this will allow you to focus your trial time without fumbling around too much).

Also, if you have SONAR X2 or better, there is a standing cross-grade to Studio One, and that goes on sale during the holidays (sometimes with Notion included), so can "usually" pick them both up for somewhere around $200-225ish if you wait for that sale.

Quick Edit: Notion is also hard-coded to tap into Garritan Personal Orchestra, but was done for version 4, if you have GPO5, you need to actually insert the ARIA Player to score with it (same VST addition you need to make for everything else). BUT... Notion actually has a very robust stock set of sounds native to it that you can quickly score with (no VST addition required)... you can do this, port to Studio One, then feed those MIDI tracks into other soft synths within Studio One. If you trial Notion, there are some demo (classical) scores you can download that rely on the stock sound bank.

Edited August 28, 2019 by mettelus