How do you like Tracktion?

[Watto]

Hey morelia,

You live in my town!

[Lunch Money]

Just for the record, bchamp's experiences (while unfortunate ) aren't representative.

[morelia]

Hey morelia,

You live in my town!

I think I can see your house from here.

[Watto]

Oh, shit - I'll put some clothes on.

[Rock]

I have mixed feelings about Tracktion at the moment. I like the simplicity of the interface and the feature set. I don't like the numerous bugs I keep encountering. Also, I wish the program included more Mackie designed plugins, especially a decent reverb. The included reverb is too metallic sounding for my taste.

Seems like I read somewhere that there was a good free reverb posted on the internet (a large collection of interconnected computers)

I'm sure the bugs will get resolved in a future release, but I think I'm going to switch back to Logic until they do. I prefer the general workflow of Tracktion so I'm going to keep an eye on updates. Tracktion has lots of potential but Logic is very stable and does exactly what I tell it to do...always.

Gotta admit Tracktion doesn't ALWAYS do what I tell it to. I hate bugs and I've run into a couple, but very few and I love Tracktion in general.

[flanneljammies]

Lunch vs everyone else

Not "everyone" else, but "anyone" else. An important distinction.

FWIW I almost always agree with Lunch.
But yeah. The workflow is superb. I spent half an hour with the the T1 demo before ponying up to register. I resisted T2 (even after dling) but now I'm all about the automation mapping and getting more and more into racks. (Though you won't be getting that "smug get-a-rack attitude" with me anytime soon.) Oh yeah, I LOVE the fact that Tracktion has no mixer.

[dabb]

Love traktion, except the midi editor! Still a bit rough around the edges. Hopefully future versions will bring this up to par.

dabb

[SuitcaseOfLizards]

I find Tracktions workflow to be superb! I mostly play my tracks in live and then bounce to audio at this point, so the MIDI editor doesn't see much use here.. when I do use it, it's acceptable enough.

I've had it blow up on me about three times total, twice I could point to a misbehaving VSTi that also blew up Orion Platinum and energyXT so that's not Ts fault. The third time, I have no clue, I just suddenly found myself at the desktop again!

I keep trying to switch sequencers but I come back to T2 again and again, I can just sit down and Make Music Right Away instead of fiddling about for ages before I can get started.

There's no sequencer that's perfect, everything I've used has some annoyances, but T2 has the least for me.

[original flipper]

HI

You should give the midi side of things a close look - you say that you only use midi for drum's; that is an intricate enough operation to be important, if you do lot's of variations to your beats you might (or not) find the midi side of things fiddly?

People know my opinion of the current state of working in the piano-roll: so I will not repeat them ...... again!

Flipper.

[SuitcaseOfLizards]

I find that using a nice plugin like SonicBytes ERA for programming drums beats hacking drum tracks in any MIDI editor. Stepchild is also good for that sort of thing as well...

[IIRs]

I earn my living programming MIDI with Cubase: Tracktion's piano roll takes a little adjusting to, but does all the important things just fine. All I really need are more key-bindings, and I will be just as fast in both..

[rpc9943]

cant people just get ext, stepchild, or osmething and program midi stuff in there? thats not too far from how programming in FruityLoops is like or something, right?

for me im just waiting for newer releases of revisit
thats how i naturally program the best

RonC

[rockstar_not]

Sorry to most of the earlier posts in this thread - many have referred to subjective qualities that they like about Tracktion: "The workflow is great; I make music faster; etc." but perhaps the original poster wants some details?

Some details about why Tracktion is great for the money:

1. Rack filters - the modular routing that you can do with MIDI and Audio in Tracktion's Rack filters is kind of mind boggling, but can save your rear-end many times over. For examples of some nice things to do with rack filters check out this recent thread on side-chain compression; look HERE for an example on beat-boxing using a cool rack-filter, and other rack related threads. There are other modular routing based programs out there, but I've found none easier to use than Tracktion - and Tracktions connnectors have these cool curvy lines as opposed to the rather pedestrian straight lines most other programs with similar features use.

2. Everything on one screen: Once you begin to use Tracktion with the demo, you will quickly realize how much time you used to spend 'window mining'; searching through the stacks of windows on your display to find your mixer applet, or your midi editor, or the GUI for the VSTi on track 9, etc. Not so with Tracktion. You can lock VST/VSTi GUIs so that they are always on screen, but one of my favorite aspects of Tracktion is that it has weaned me off of looking at so much fluff/GUIs and instead relying on mostly my ears to tell me what to work on in my mix. Because it forces itself into this one-screen paradigm, for me, Tracktion is the ultimate host in 'context sensitive' audio/midi manipulation.

3. Well, at least this used to be true - there was an aspect of Tracktion's 'one man programming team' that made me want to cheer for it. The very fact that it was this sort of rogue program attracted me to it. Kind of like how I like Mozilla Firefox just for the sake that it thumbs it's nose at IE. But since Mackie have taken over Tracktion, there is less of that sense and esprit de corps that used to be a natural
part of the program for me.

Okay, so that last one was pretty subjective. The first two points are what keep me working in Tracktion for my mostly audio work.

-Scott

[aldi]

Just for the record, bchamp's experiences (while unfortunate ) aren't representative.

Just for the record, gregs experiences aren't representative.

i love the concept of tracktion but encountered some bugs and missing features (discussed here often enough, slow gui on high resolution display or many tracks (no, it's not my pci latency setting), missing ofsetsnap, vst plugins not clickable at the first click,....do a search here). you should test it very well if it runs on your machine and does everything you want. don't count on updates that might come or not.

and just for the record, my experiences aren't representative.

[Rock]

I must agree with rockstar_not the rack filters are amazingly powerful.