Which higher end hosts do not use dongles or pace

[tetraplan]

http://ardour.org

Yeah, but if you use Ardour, you have to give all the money you ever make to Richard Stallman so he can go put on a dress and sing 'The Free Software Song' at groups of sniggering students.

/me does "sudo apt-get install ardour" (without the quotes)
Then again, maybe he'll just play recorder (although appearently, his recorder playing scares Spanish mountain goats).

Groet, Erik

[headquest]

Do any of these "alternate" hosts play video tracks for sequencing like SX and sonar?

Tracktion can run QuickTime movies, but according to the Sound on Sound review this feature is buggy within Tracktion.

Audition can run movies and has a thumb nail view of it, so it is an excellent choice for this.

As is Sonar, of course

[musiclinks]

I need more than quicktime movies, so that knocks tracktion out for now. it looks like it's down to sx and sonar, unless I want to look at Pro Tools and that wonderful 48 khz sample rate

[dougsyo]

IMHO FLStudio qualifies as a high-end host, as does Project5 V2 - but these are more "soft studios" than "sequencers", so they have a different workflow.

FLStudio has a keyfile (that gets loaded into your registry) and only monitors downloads of the regcode. P5V2 only uses serial number, I suspect that P5V3 will use the same serial-number-plus-forced-registration that Sonar5 uses. Both come with a decent set of bundled synths as well as hosting VSTI and DXI.

Doug, with Sonar 5, P5V2, and FLStudio

[machinesworking]

DP is mac and BTW there are other reasons why without a legit copy of DP you're f**ked. Just in case that was the raison d'etre of this of this ...er...slightly 'poisson-y' thread...

Don't really get that? but DP is pretty dammed cool if you have mac, I'm on my way back to it after years of using Logic. The feature set is great, and I own Komplete, so the Logic instruments are just reminders of things I can't use in Live when performing.

[BFDrummer]

DP can run multiple QT movies and bounce a project directly to a QT movie and run at 48khz 24bit (don't all these days?) and loads of other poncy features like in built audio pitch detection/correction with audio to midi convertion feature, audio beat detection and tempo analysis of any rhythmic audio with audio quantisation and adjustable beat velocities. Can apply grooves direct to recorded audio or extract groove from audio. Snap edits to the beats instead of tempo grid .... and so on....

... if you're into that kind of thing ...

[hvaring]

It would be near perfect if not for the limited rewire implementation (wish they'd improve that).

Just out of curiosity: what's wrong with ReWire in Sonar? I don't own Sonar but I've been tempted for a while now.

[BFDrummer]

BTW I just meant asking what hosts aren't very well copy protected sounds a bit fishy, that's all. But I wasn't accusing or nowt, just saying what occured to me etc

[musiclinks]

I'm not asking which hosts are well copy protected, but which don't use pace or a dongle, as they can interfere with your system and if they stop working can take weeks to get a replacement...

[rbet]

BTW I just meant asking what hosts aren't very well copy protected sounds a bit fishy, that's all. But I wasn't accusing or nowt, just saying what occured to me etc

What's so fishy? He can have any hosts he wants by starting any P2P program, without even asking. =| I assume he knows that PACE is a PITA, so he's trying to avoid it.

[BFDrummer]

OK fine - like I said not accusing, and trying to be helpful too with my DP info. The only dongle near DP is for mach5 - which is a bit of a disappointing sampler anyway and K2 works like a dream in DP so all's cool. i don't know why i bother no one ever uses DP anyway ...

[machinesworking]

i don't know why i bother no one ever uses DP anyway ...

Well not around here, KVR is primarily windows users, but I'll be back into DP soon.... as soon as I get new monitors, the Fireface 800, and a new set of headphones......
Everything ends up in Live in the end for me, but DP is much more suited for using with Live than Logic so..... Hopefully they won't take as long to port DP to x86 macs as they did to port to OSX!

[MojoChopper]

Just out of curiosity: what's wrong with ReWire in Sonar? I don't own Sonar but I've been tempted for a while now.

Although Sonar supports receiving 64 audio channels from a rewire slave, it only provides 16 channels of midi to drive the any slave. In the case of Reason, the first midi channel is devoted to Reason's hardware interface, so that leaves 15 channels to work with. Cakewalk's Project 5 suffers from the same limitation. AFAIK, these are the only hosts with such a low limit on the number of rewire midi channels.

For years, users have asked for Cakewalk to expand the number of midi channels, but so far it gets about the same response as asking for VSTi support in Reason .


Mojo Chopper

[diverdee]

It's probably better now that there are combinators in reason - but it still means one must plan ahead carefully when rewiring reason & sonar.
Personally I hate all that planning ahead bumpf - i'd rather just noodle around & whack shit together until something 'magical' happens (or not).
If I was to reccomend an 'all in one' quality host to someone on pc i'd tell them to get sonar though - the included fx & synths (now with pentagon) - can't argue with it really - the included stuff blows sx out of the water quality wise (imo).