Disadvantages of DAWs in comparison to others

[SHall1000]

You can’t route midi out of a track in Ableton Live on separate midi channels to multiple other tracks.

[EnochLight]

Reason: lacks VST3

Agreed! As a Reason DAW user, this irritates the hell out of me. It's been years since 9.5 dropped and still no VST 3 support - despite the fact that RRP is a VST 3!

and Midi out.

Wait.. what? Reason has MIDI out via the MIDI Instrument device.

F8 window is annoying.

F8 window works great. I'd be curious to understand what annoys you, though?

Reason Sound (just kidding!)

[Michael L]

https://www.admiralbumblebee.com/DAW-Chart.html
and other topics on his legendary website

Frankly, his stuff is a tad sensationalist. And, most of the time what he criticizes and says won't make any difference to me using the DAW he talks about (e.g. that all DAW's suck at timing).

No one else has ever gone into such OCD detail with so many DAWs. That chart is a very efficient way to see his POV. Give him credit for finding a way to measure timing beyond any human's ability

[zoidkirb]

Reason: lacks VST3

Agreed! As a Reason DAW user, this irritates the hell out of me. It's been years since 9.5 dropped and still no VST 3 support - despite the fact that RRP is a VST 3!

and Midi out.

Wait.. what? Reason has MIDI out via the MIDI Instrument device.

F8 window is annoying.

F8 window works great. I'd be curious to understand what annoys you, though?

Reason Sound (just kidding!)

I meant Midi out of VST's in Reason. E.g. BlueArp.
I don't like having to have the separate F8 for basic tasks like transpose, quantize, legato etc etc. Live and Cubase have all this covered right there in their sequencer areas for convenience. F8 in itself is functional, but to improve it I'd like an option to "only show one tab at a time" .

[machinesworking]

https://www.admiralbumblebee.com/DAW-Chart.html
and other topics on his legendary website

Frankly, his stuff is a tad sensationalist. And, most of the time what he criticizes and says won't make any difference to me using the DAW he talks about (e.g. that all DAW's suck at timing).

No one else has ever gone into such OCD detail with so many DAWs. That chart is a very efficient way to see his POV. Give him credit for finding a way to measure timing beyond any human's ability

For sure. I think it's important to remember that it's his perspective though. He rates DAWs based on what's important to him, and we all have slightly different needs in a DAW. Some things in DP that bother me, he never mentions because he doesn't use the DAW the way I do. Same with others. He absolutely can't stand Live, and Logic is a close second, and he loves SAW Studio. So that explains a lot.

[machinesworking]

Reason: lacks VST3

Agreed! As a Reason DAW user, this irritates the hell out of me. It's been years since 9.5 dropped and still no VST 3 support - despite the fact that RRP is a VST 3!

Hopefully that changes with the upcoming GUI improvements.

[THE INTRANCER]

Reason:

There is no reason, but there is a risk of going to jail for treason should you try and escape from it.

Cubase:

There is no base, no jets, helicopters, tanks, or troops provided which you can have in your back garden.

Studio One:

There is no studio, no cameras, or a hot female weather presenter provided with the package.

Pro Tools:

There are no tools like Black and Decker power drills, workbench, or hacksaws provided.

FLStudio:

There is no studio, just lots of cereal boxes provided, I'd much prefer a hamster... one which is alive.

They all lack something that the other doesn't have.

[DrFolder]

For me, Reaper is the best one for my work style. The main reasons are CPU efficiency, drag and drop modulation (and copying between tracks), and universal tracks that can be anything I want. I used Logic for over a decade but got sick of waiting for midi out to be added to audiounits( Has this been added?).
I tried Ableton but from memory it bussed external midi channels to channel 1? and editing everything along a small strip on the bottom of the interface was frustrating, to say the least. Ableton wasn't very efficient with CPU and I could only open about a quarter of what I can with Reaper.
Cubase was a little better with cpu efficiency than Ableton but they removed AOT for the mixer so I got annoyed having to constantly use a keyboard shortcut to access the mixer every time I did anything.
I always read about Reaper needing a lot of time to set up but I never have needed to tinker around with it very much.

[MuzikFreq]

Reason: lacks VST3

Agreed! As a Reason DAW user, this irritates the hell out of me. It's been years since 9.5 dropped and still no VST 3 support - despite the fact that RRP is a VST 3!

Though the funny thing is that when run as a plugin it uses far more cpu than in the reason DAW

[BONES]

You hated Reaper and DP10, so your point is kinda lost right there.

I have not tried either. Reaper doesn't appeal to me but DP actually looks like something I could easily get to like. But that's all about personal preference, I don't doubt for a minute that I could be equally productive in either of them as I have been in Orion, Cubase or Studio One. Even Bitwig, which I bought but never got to grips with, is undoubtedly a very competent DAW, it just didn't suit the way I like to work. Again, that's about personal preference, not about anything lacking in the application.

You actually could give a pretty decent breakdown of why you ended up on Studio One (I believe?) after trying a few before that, but instead you choose to complain about the posts before you.

But that would just be personal preference, not anything to do with features that are lacking or anything factual. The reality is I could make music to the standard I require in any DAW. Objectively, they all have the features I'd need and are all capable of producing high quality results. I settled for Studio One based on personal preference, nothing more. My band mate is still not convinced and he's still using Cubase. It is, therefore, likely I'll have to go back to Cubase when we start work on our next album. The experience will be more painful but I'll manage. At least the process of sharing projects will be less painful - Studio One is not very good at saving VST settings within a project. They always work OK on the machine you save them on but if you try to open them on a different computer, some VSTis open with the default preset. I spent several weeks going back and forth with Presonus about it but I got bored with their uninsightful, rote responses and gave up.

Personally I like the track icons in Reaper and Logic simply because it's quicker to look for an image than to read a name or look for your particular color coding of tracks. I get why someone would not have a use for them though, since there are other ways to differentiate tracks from each other.

Exactly and having them visible means keeping the tracks themselves much bigger than I like them to be. When I first got Cubase, I spent an afternoon just going through and screen-shotting all my plugins for the browser but I almost immediately realised how much harder than made it to browse the list, so I turned them off the next day.

I organise my tracks in a particular order, so I don't have to think about where things are. The top track is always drums, then percussion, then voice samples, then basslines, etc. I spend so long with a song, though, that I know exactly where everything is anyway, and my projects are simple enough that it's easy to keep on top of everything.

Reaper is like an ugly girlfriend with a great personality. She doesn't get your attention in the bar, but after some period of time, you really come to appreciate all of the subtlety of her ways and the genuine gifts that she possesses.

Still ugly, though, and that's a deal-breaker for anyone with a shred of self-respect.

I think it's important to remember that it's his perspective though. He rates DAWs based on what's important to him, and we all have slightly different needs in a DAW. Some things in DP that bother me, he never mentions because he doesn't use the DAW the way I do. Same with others. He absolutely can't stand Live, and Logic is a close second, and he loves SAW Studio. So that explains a lot.

This is exactly my point. A discussion like this will always be about personal preference.

[ghettosynth]

Reaper is like an ugly girlfriend with a great personality. She doesn't get your attention in the bar, but after some period of time, you really come to appreciate all of the subtlety of her ways and the genuine gifts that she possesses.

Still ugly, though, and that's a deal-breaker for anyone with a shred of self-respect.

Well BONES, if anyone knows ugly like the back of their hand.

[machinesworking]

This is exactly my point. A discussion like this will always be about personal preference.

Any criticism of anything is in the end personal preference, but you can glean objective truth from it.

The perfect example of what I'm talking about is Maschine, had I known that it could only do one time signature in it's timeline for a song, I wouldn't have bought it. Had I known that it often falls apart when instantiated as a VSTi when a time signature happens I would have left it alone. Other examples are plenty, Logic sums all MIDI ports on input, so you deal with 16 MIDI channels, unlike Cubase etc. etc. That can be an issue to some. Bitwig and Live don't record SysEx, for hardware synths that can dump their patch, it's pretty cool to have that stored in a song like software so that can influence your choice.
The blogger with the DAW weighing chart is using his own standards, so you as a consumer of that information should be aware that's the case.

You not caring for icons in a DAW and your reasons for it potentially can help someone decide if that matters to them, same with Reapers GUI etc. Also good to know about Studio One's issues with saving VST states when porting to a new computer, IMO those are the things that make my choices. A lot more so than GUI, or embedded plug ins. I don't think you suffer from indecision but some people do.

Also, yes, they're all amazing. I really don't get people who hate on any of the DAWs these days? Most everything is solid as hell, it's just details at this point. I don't find any of them that hard to use, so it's mostly just remembering my most used key commands. DP and Bitwig win that game with their super fast search and select feature you don't even have to remember the key command, just the name that DAW decided to call that function..

[Michael L]

DP and Bitwig win that game with their super fast search and select feature you don't even have to remember the key command, just the name that DAW decided to call that function.

For the other daws, an iconic prosthesis: https://www.metasystem.io/

[TribeOfHǫfuð]

In my decade of software, I demoed FL Studio several times, but figured you had to be into it from the start not to think of it as the clusterfuck of the millenium. I stick to Reason. Better the Devil you know.

[antic604]

Cubase (i still love it but) : audioengine drop out when adding a new track

That one is a big advantage of Bitwig and Live to me. All the other DAWs I've used are likely to stutter or throw up a warning when adding a new instrument or audio tract etc. The uninterrupted audio engine that truly lives up to it, but at least in those DAWs you pay for it with higher CPU usage.

So make up your mind

Because that's the price of Bitwig being "CPU pig" (which it really isn't), i.e. a single realtime buffer, instead of a hybrid / double one.