Reaper vs. Studio One?

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Does it really come down to what your "comfortable" with?

:borg:

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It always does.

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The masochist is comfortable with the uncomfortable.

Happy Musiking!
dsan
My DAW System:
W7, i5, x64, 8Gb Ram, Edirol FA-101

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The masochist is comfortable with the uncomfortable...

I wish to be a masochistic.

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If you have a lot of hardware instruments, Studio One might be easier to set up.

If you mainly work in-da-box and want to customize your templates and your workflow as much as possible, REAPER might be better.

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Tricky-Loops wrote:If you mainly work in-da-box and want to customize your templates and your workflow as much as possible, REAPER might be better.
Reaper isn't great for in the box work, really. MIDI editing in Reaper is still not great compared to other DAWs. Its strength is more to do with recording and editing audio. Although, based on my limited exposure to Studio One, I think of the two Reaper does handle MIDI better.

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dsan@mail.com wrote:The masochist is comfortable with the uncomfortable.
And the never-satisfied is uncomfortable with the comfortable.
DarkStar, ... Interesting, if true
Inspired by ...

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I've been using Reaper since 2007 and it has met all my MIDI needs whether I need to work with hardware or software synths. I've had my own problems with Reaper's MIDI which most of was related to either dealing with the MIDI jitter or missing notes. I wouldn't say it's not great unless you really depend on some rarely needed features. Sure it misses things like staff view but most people don't need it these days. I most certainly don't need it but I understand it's really important feature for some people. I don't like Reaper for transferring sysex banks but I use MIDI-OX as a sidekick to solve this problem. I got only one thing I wish to see improved with the midi, and that is the ability to have multiple hardware MIDI outputs from a single track. I wouldn't mind if Cockos copied chordtrack from Cubase though. Implementing more built in music theory stuff would be nice, but lack of these haven't stopped me from accomplishing what I want to do.

I am wondering what are the things that make Reaper "not so great" with MIDI? I hear this all the time and the common thing with people who say this is that they usually don't bother to explain why. I am honestly interested to hear this.

One of my friend disliked Reaper's MIDI because he thought that it can't stretch midi clips automatically if you change the project tempo. He also thought that "DAW-X" had a better sound engine than Reaper because he was having some problems with synthedit plugins that didn't have multicore support. I often wonder how well people really know the DAW's they are talking about?

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My impression is that REAPER is rather surgical than intuitive. Especially for people who are learning to compose. For composing & arranging there are better programs, Rapid Composer for example or Sundog Scale Studio...

The MIDI editing isn't bad but some advanced tools, for example for extracting or applying grooves (like in Ableton Live), would be great - at least there is some half-baked stuff in the SWS extensions but it's a bit scattered...

I'm thinking about buying Rapid Composer at the moment because trying to compose with REAPER ain't fun at all...mixing & mastering is fun in REAPER but composing is not...

(And the older I get, the more I intend to concentrate on melodies & harmonies and less on how many synths can be layered to sound like a car engine... :P)

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Gnomebe wrote:Does it really come down to what your "comfortable" with?

:borg:
Depends. Are you comfortable with a DAW that offers one way to do something or 245 different ways? They are very different animals and if you're prone to wasting time tweaking and fiddling then I would avoid Reaper like the plague - you will be pouring over the actions window like a kid in a candy shop only to find that many years have passed since you last wrote a piece of music... And don't get me started on the themes lol! Seriously, just demo the hell out of both. Make small projects and big projects. See how easily you can max your cpu, see how low you can get your latency, see how they get on with your soundcard, see how easily you can get it to crash, see how fast you actually GET WORK DONE in both. Only then will you be a little closer to making a choice.
Mastering from £30 per track \\\
Facebook \\\ #masteredbyloz

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If I had one wish for Reaper, it would be for it to receive midi clock (not MTC) and slave to an external hardware sequencer/instrument. Of the DAWs I've demoed so far, only Ableton can do this successfully.

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There is no perfect host. I've been painfully reminded of this (yet again) while going through cubase viddys of late. Just when you think "oh wow, this would really be handy" you find 2 other things that are like "ewwwwwwwww, I don't like that"

Point? They both have their strengths and weaknesses. Reaper is hyper efficient on the CPU usage. Only host I know of that is optimized. It does virtually anything you could want it too, but you may spend more time trying to learn how to do it than actually making music :hihi: It's stable, it's cheap and despite some peoples ill will towards it, it's the real deal.

Studio one is easier to use imho, has a smoother flow and is quite stable here. I particularly like the way you can select every clip (audio and midi) and hit "Q" and the whole project will quantize to your setting. Groove extraction is lovely, and bouncing is mostly a joy to use. But it doesn't handle low latency/cpu/certain plugs very well, is a mess when it comes to mixer/arranger integration and foldered tracks can be wacky as well :shrug:

It's always a dice throw.......

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hibidy wrote:There is no perfect host. I've been painfully reminded of this (yet again) while going through cubase viddys of late. Just when you think "oh wow, this would really be handy" you find 2 other things that are like "ewwwwwwwww, I don't like that"

Point? They both have their strengths and weaknesses. Reaper is hyper efficient on the CPU usage. Only host I know of that is optimized. It does virtually anything you could want it too, but you may spend more time trying to learn how to do it than actually making music :hihi: It's stable, it's cheap and despite some peoples ill will towards it, it's the real deal.

Studio one is easier to use imho, has a smoother flow and is quite stable here. I particularly like the way you can select every clip (audio and midi) and hit "Q" and the whole project will quantize to your setting. Groove extraction is lovely, and bouncing is mostly a joy to use. But it doesn't handle low latency/cpu/certain plugs very well, is a mess when it comes to mixer/arranger integration and foldered tracks can be wacky as well :shrug:

It's always a dice throw.......
You should try digital performer. It's the perfect host.

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For beginners i can highly recommend Synapse Audio's Orion.
Its very comfortable for composing and a nice mix of slim and intuitive features. And once u know how to do high level production in general, it is very capable of that aswell !

i am using it myself since 2006 and it has improved vastly over the time. And its such a fun host to use compared to everything else ive seen.
Its abit like fruity loops for grown ups !

edit: the demo is not available at the moment since it just upgraded to a new version today.
I think it should be available soon though.

greetings

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HobbyCore wrote:
hibidy wrote:There is no perfect host. I've been painfully reminded of this (yet again) while going through cubase viddys of late. Just when you think "oh wow, this would really be handy" you find 2 other things that are like "ewwwwwwwww, I don't like that"

Point? They both have their strengths and weaknesses. Reaper is hyper efficient on the CPU usage. Only host I know of that is optimized. It does virtually anything you could want it too, but you may spend more time trying to learn how to do it than actually making music :hihi: It's stable, it's cheap and despite some peoples ill will towards it, it's the real deal.

Studio one is easier to use imho, has a smoother flow and is quite stable here. I particularly like the way you can select every clip (audio and midi) and hit "Q" and the whole project will quantize to your setting. Groove extraction is lovely, and bouncing is mostly a joy to use. But it doesn't handle low latency/cpu/certain plugs very well, is a mess when it comes to mixer/arranger integration and foldered tracks can be wacky as well :shrug:

It's always a dice throw.......
You should try digital performer. It's the perfect host.
I don't have a mac ;)

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