So, what DAW did it for you?

[zenophilix]

Can we just accept that some people have different preferences and move on? I never really bothered with the utility, the default looked fine to my eyes on my monitor. I'm not forcing you to look at it, it's just what works best for me.

It's a generally-accepted fact that the default font antialiasing looks worse than previous versions - nobody's sure why that call was made - *shrug* - but it's not worth getting up in arms over either - I was just commenting on it...

Honestly, I never noticed... I just assumed it was about the same as 7/8.

[Jace-BeOS]

I was a big fan of S1 before I got burned by the mods on facebook. They were having a paid raffle for a copy of S1, which is illegal under US law unless you're a non-profit organization. I pointed it out. I wasn't rude or attacking anyone. I pointed it out because I didn't want facebook to pull the group for doing something stupid, and I've had other groups bet banned for this reason. The regular forums suck, and I did get great info from the group. Their response was to immediately ban me from the group. Day in and day out, there were people who constantly spammed the group, people attacking other people in the forum on a daily basis, etc., and those people were never kicked. I contacted Presonus about getting kicked, and they told me that they had "no control" over the group, which is BS. It left such a bad taste that I bought Cubase and use that as my main daw now.

Reminds me of the people selling products with stolen/unlicensed art on Facebook. They block you if you ask about their licensing, or point out that, for example. Bill Watterson does NOT license any Calvin and Hobbes materials. Report it to Facebook and you face a "talk to the hand" wall, because you're not the IP owner. All you can do is tell the IP owner to check it out themselves. But the arrogance of kicking people for pointing out they're breaking the law, and Facebook's utter lack of involvement...

[camplo]

I started out with Ableton, the clip based view is the future. I'd other daws but the clip based view is requirement for me so I've only recently moved on to BitWig which I enjoy because of its stream line work flow. Ableton is more powerful/capable but BitWig is still new so....

[andrei.tuduran]

Started with FL Studio since I was a kid.
Between Studio One 3 and Reaper, chose Reaper. Best investment ever! Now it's my go-to DAW.

[jclosed]

Well - I started with Cakewalk Sonar 6, but as an mostly MIDI user I got a bit frustrated with the MIDI implementation Sonar had. I tried some other DAW's like Ableton Live, FLStudio and Studio One, and finally settled with Cubase. This DAW just fits in my workflow, and I really love the MIDI implementation. I liked Studio One, but their MIDI implementation is just not enough for me. Cubase simply is far ahead if you compare it to Studio One. Ableton Live and FLStudio are great to do some fast "sketching" and play around with clips, so they stay on my DAW computer (I use a dedicated computer for music only along my "main" computer).

However, the latest standard Ableton Live 10 update was definitely underwhelming for me, so I probably will "jump ship" to Bitwig. As said, those DAW's are mainly used by me to make some fast "sketches" for music pieces, but I use Cubase for my main work (although I like to use Wavelab Lite to do the final master).

So - for me Cubase did it.

[DuX]

I started off with Steinberg Pro-24 and then Cubase a couple of years ago [1988] and was really impressed with how the linear timeline jived with my vision of looking at a song and editing it in a detailed manner. A pattern based DAW can never be like that. A "piano roll" based DAW is like a painting and you can work on these small details between the patterns that make a song flow better.

However, Cubase on PC was not progressing very well in the 00's and I found its audio mixing part very lacking, so I looked around and discovered Reaper and EnergyXT 1. EXT1 was a really great modular MIDI DAW for making MIDI "sketches" of a song and I'd record tracks from it into Reaper through ReaRoute ASIO and play with them there.

Nowadays I don't use EXT1 much any more, but do it all in Reaper. For me, it is the DAW of all DAWs because of the incredible routing freedom, incredible connectivity with other computers [ReaMote, ReaStream], ReaRoute ASIO driver that connects ASIO apps together, efficiency and its stability. Not to mention - the price. So there's more money left for the plugins. I like it also because it is incredibly fast to start and light on resources. I hope it will stay that way.

[BONES]

I started off with Steinberg Pro-24 and then Cubase a couple of years ago [1988] and was really impressed with how the linear timeline jived with my vision of looking at a song and editing it in a detailed manner. A pattern based DAW can never be like that. A "piano roll" based DAW is like a painting and you can work on these small details between the patterns that make a song flow better.

Maybe to an extent but the advantage of a pattern based workflow is that you can make a change in one phrase and have it propagate through the whole song automatically. I find that makes me much more likely to try different things, where using a linear workflow tends to lock me in much earlier. That's actually what drew me to Bitwig - it combines the advantages of each into a unified system. Of course, Korg were doing the same as far back as the M1, so its' nothing new.

[ChemicalBear]

I'm still on Cubase after decades. First started using it on the Atari ST (the first home PC with MIDI inputs/outputs I believe..?).

Haven't bothered upgrading from 7.5 though. Steinberg have a habit of concentrating on making things look "pretty" before ironing out previous bugs. And their customer support is "patchy".

I have tried Ableton and like the look of it but I'm so used to the workflow in Cubase that I don't have the time to "learn" a new DAW right now.

My Dad has Reason but finds it complicated. I've never tried it.

Regards

Adam
ChemicalBear

[THE INTRANCER]

A quick revisit summery on how I've viewed daws in the past 18 years.

Cubase - Full flagship versions (too expensive and I couldn't justify upgrade costs).

Cakewalk Sonar - Pretty much a unstable and therefor unusable program, not worth a dime.

Reaper - Shareware budget product with an idiosyncratic approach, whilst resembling something from a 1998 era Frankenstein movie.

Fruityloops - Too limiting, weird workflow that seemed reserved for those who couldn't play an instrument properly.

Renoise - Understood it with years of experience with trackers in the 1990's, fonts too small, cluttered gui to make use of it however.

Reason - Creative and pretty deep modular environment, but could be frustrating with lack of step time recording on the timeline, forcing you to learn to play an instrument. Being modular meant it could slow you down, often leading you to pre prepare and program everything before sequencing. Slow workflow.

Storm - Pretty cool alternative to Reason... could have gone somewhere if it was given the chance.

Orion - Had potential, but fell short of what I was looking for in a daw.

Magic Midi Studio Generation 6 - Very cheap, but virtually a clone of Logic that was several hundred more pounds. Cons, too demanding on typical home PC hardware of the time.

Project 5 - Touted very highly on release by magazines of the time, there was a time limited trial I think.. but it's future was short, it imploded prematurely. Interesting but a quite a skewed approach to sequencing from how I remember.

[sjm]

First "real" DAW that clicked was FL Studio. Coming from a tracker background (albeit with experience with notation software and traditional linear DAWs too), the pattern-based approach made immediate sense to me. If seems to confuse a lot of other people, but I like the paradigm.

ScreamTracker 3, Impulse Tracker and Buzz were big favourites back in the day, but not really DAWs as I understand the term (ditto for MeD and OctaMeD, which I also used). I dabbled with Magix and Cubase way back in 98 or so, but they were just tools that did stuff. FL Studio actually clicked.

[andrei.tuduran]

First "real" DAW that clicked was FL Studio. Coming from a tracker background (albeit with experience with notation software and traditional linear DAWs too), the pattern-based approach made immediate sense to me. If seems to confuse a lot of other people, but I like the paradigm.

ScreamTracker 3, Impulse Tracker and Buzz were big favourites back in the day, but not really DAWs as I understand the term (ditto for MeD and OctaMeD, which I also used). I dabbled with Magix and Cubase way back in 98 or so, but they were just tools that did stuff. FL Studio actually clicked.

ModPlug Tracker was my first "DAW" in where I made some good tracks for that time .
After that I used FL Studio for many years in which I did mainly trance music with some good releases.
Now I'm using Reaper 5 as my main DAW for production & arrangement and Presonus Studio One 3 Professional for mixing & mastering duties. Works like a charm!

[LeVzi]

I started out with Ableton, the clip based view is the future. I'd other daws but the clip based view is requirement for me so I've only recently moved on to BitWig which I enjoy because of its stream line work flow. Ableton is more powerful/capable but BitWig is still new so....

See, this is the exact reason I hate Ableton. The clip feature just does zero for me. I went to a couple of seminars from a well known DnB producer in the UK who is nuts about Ableton and it's clip feature, and I stood (Yes stood, no chairs at this workshop) and watched how it was preached to me how it's the future.

I even won a copy of Ableton in a raffle, and spent hours with it, ended up deleting it. I was hoping for that point to come where there is an audiable click and suddenly the clip view makes sense. Alas no, and the midi editing etc in Ableton is awful , so /uninstall.

[EnGee]

I'm in the way from Cubase to Reason as my main DAW. I hope it'll do it for me
Still have Reaper for fast exprementaions while FL Studio when I want something different.

[jonljacobi]

Logic.

[BONES]

Do you understand the difference between a discussion and a poll? Or do you literally have absolutely nothing to share as to why you use Logic?