Worst DAW with a bad workflow is who?

[funky lime]

Mario Paint for the SNES was my first DAW. The dongle (the mouse-controller) was a pain, as I simply couldn't use any other software while it was plugged in. Also it had all this unnecessary bloat in the form of "features" such as painting tools, animation, clip art, and a rather distracting fly-swatting minigame that lacked any sort of distinct ending other than one's own eventual crushing defeat at the hands of an obnoxious cartoon insect. Also the distinct lack of properly multi-sampled, round-robin Yoshi noises always kind of peeved me. And absolutely ZERO(!) keyboard shortcuts? Come on!

The fact that to "export" a song I had to involve a seperate cassette recorder and external microphone or line-out from the RCA of the TV was kind of a mixed blessing... it was a hassle to pull off, but it pretty much guaranteed that analog tape "warmth" in a way that no modern DAW can really do.


Also, REAPER. It's simply too easy to use, and offers WAAAAY too much control over every aspect of its interface. I'd rather be locked into one person's (potentially-crappy) idea of a useable interface than have the option to have the software work exactly in the way I want it to work. Whoever came up with WALTER should be beaten, how DARE you give total control of useability and layout to an incredibly talented and devoted user base? Also I can't stand the fact that I only need to use one track for both MIDI and its corresponding VSTi audio output. And who in their right mind wants to be able to side-chain any signal to any other signal and control any parameter with any number of modulation options? Gosh, what tomfoolery.

FL Studio? Man, that piano roll is atrocious to work with. I hate using incredibly powerful tools that just make sense right away without even having to look at a manual.

[hibidy]

Reaper is both pretty awful and okay.....

I know what you mean. I had issues where copying regions would produce less than desirable results (usually one random note at the beginning) and it was time consuming fixing it. NEVER could I just fix the one note, it always required deleting that clip, starting over and THEN copying that region and hope for the best.

That's not people being idiots, but then again, there's always going to be a handful of people that think they are so special.

Reaper has a very old school / tech oriented design that sits well outside modern UX design practice. It always will I think, and some people love that approach.

I love reaper. I'm not currently using it as my Riker, but I'm glad I own it. It's getting midi love now, really cool. Good times for host users (as opposed to 6 months ago which was STAGNANT!! )

[hibidy]

FL Studio? Man, that piano roll is atrocious to work with. I hate using incredibly powerful tools that just make sense right away without even having to look at a manual.

I'm not sure if I see what you did there or not, but I can't stand FL studio! It's the only host I know of that is totally WTF (and yes, I've owned it since forever )

[ksandvik]

Have all the existing DAWs been listed so far? If not you better work on it.

[funky lime]

FL Studio? Man, that piano roll is atrocious to work with. I hate using incredibly powerful tools that just make sense right away without even having to look at a manual.

I'm not sure if I see what you did there or not, but I can't stand FL studio! It's the only host I know of that is totally WTF (and yes, I've owned it since forever )

i broke cohesion in my irony from the beginning of the post to the end.
but breaking cohesion is a good way to know you had it in the first place. or not. what does that even mean?

i actually don't really care for FL studio, but it was my first PC-based music composition system (from the days of FruityLoops) and at a relatively young age it ingrained into my mind (for the first few years anyway) how music was composed on a computer. then I bought a guitar and a copy of Cubasis and that kind of changed everything.

my point was basically echoing that of many others... we all like silly things for silly reasons.

[tooneba]

Live's arrangement view is not sufficient for the arrangement... I know they don't much care about the traditional way of use but actually it's more related to the realtime tweaking. It lacks the fundamental feature to record notes on the track after the automations are recorded with controllers. The work-around is to make one more MIDI trakcs for every instrument tracks. Yea... traditional, sweet

[Nabokov]

I think people allow their using and liking of a DAW to get in the way of being able to make any useful assessment of its workflow. I recently tried out Studio One 2 which has an awesome workflow, very little is in my way and I can get ideas down very easily BUT I came back to Reaper, which has a very poor workflow. I love it though and I was so happy to be back using it. Its an arse ache because its incredibly malleable and that malleability comes with a price. Once you've used Reaper a lot (and I mean A LOT) you get to flow but before that....

[BASSDRIVE]

I wouldn't really say I completely dislike the workflow, but FL Studio has one of the most cluttered and outdated looking GUIs I've seen from modern DAWs. I absolutely love FL, but that clutter and dark colors un-motivate me to proceed sometimes. I have a wide 1080p display also and seems way more cluttered when compared to something like S1.

[dredd i knight]

I have Sonar X1
Ableton Live
Studio One v2 Pro
Project 5
I recently got a MBP to caryy out my portable needs so got
Logic 9
Out of them I don't use Project 5 (no longer supported) and Sonar X1 much anymore, so I suppose they might count as the worst....
BUT
I've tried
Reaper
Fruity &
Reason and what they had in common is that I didn't click with them quickly enough to get to like them. I still prefer Sonar to them, and actually think if Cakewalk get their audio engine gapless, and keep going in the direction that X2 seems to be, I might be using it again sometime in the future...
I know that if I had a friend that used one of the ones I didnt click with that I would probably get along with them better than I do, through learning from them...

That's the point really; they're all bad depending how your brain works, and if you have people to show you the tricks and quirks of the daw.

I also have Maschine and think it has the best workflow of the bunch , BUT it has a lot of missing features and can't really be described as a DAW
2 pence
and merry xmas if you're that way inclined...

[CTStump]

I have Sonar X1
Ableton Live
Studio One v2 Pro
Project 5
I recently got a MBP to caryy out my portable needs so got
Logic 9
Out of them I don't use Project 5 (no longer supported) and Sonar X1 much anymore, so I suppose they might count as the worst....
BUT
I've tried
Reaper
Fruity &
Reason and what they had in common is that I didn't click with them quickly enough to get to like them. I still prefer Sonar to them, and actually think if Cakewalk get their audio engine gapless, and keep going in the direction that X2 seems to be, I might be using it again sometime in the future...
I know that if I had a friend that used one of the ones I didnt click with that I would probably get along with them better than I do, through learning from them...

That's the point really; they're all bad depending how your brain works, and if you have people to show you the tricks and quirks of the daw.

I also have Maschine and think it has the best workflow of the bunch , BUT it has a lot of missing features and can't really be described as a DAW
2 pence
and merry xmas if you're that way inclined...

Still my go to scratch pad, It lives in Sonar X2 but I still use it as it is.Long live Project 5.2.

I'm surprised this thread is still going, kudo's to the mod's.

[KTlin]

I'm surprised this thread is still going, kudo's to the mod's.

Hehe...so it looks like Chopper was right:

I strongly advise you to seat comfortably, put your feet up, and prepare some popcorn... it's gonna be one of those threads...

[dredd i knight]

This this thread is surprisingly free of vitriol, that's why I felt I could dip my toe in and not get flamed (nice mixed metaphor there)...

I think it's a shame Cake stopped with Project 5, I think it's an excellent program, with a strange hybrid crossover between Reason and Live. Pretty rock solid too, with some good effects and instruments.

CT do you mean its general paradigm lives in X2 or you use it there rewired? I haven't put it back on my current pc since I went totally 64 bit, but still get the urge to every now and then.... I stop take a deep breath and decide which of my current tools will do the job... The answer is usually Maschine because it too is a great scratch pad.

[hibidy]

Maybe it's time for someone to do something about that?

[dredd i knight]

Maybe it's time for someone to do something about that?

You're a baaad man!

[hibidy]

Maybe it's time for someone to do something about that?

You're a baaad man!

Especially the mood I'm in.

BTW, I love the screen name!!!!!