After a long hiatus with DAW's and music making, I am getting back into it. I picked up an Asus 1215N with dual core Atom CPU mainly to watch online guitar lessons and to use as a scratch pad to play along with loops, etc. I know it's still a netbook, but I don't plan on doing anything too elaborate with it.
I've tried a few demos (currently just using onboard Realtek sound with Asio4All).
Mixcraft - The most user friendly DAW I've ever seen, but glitchy audio with dropouts and jitter when you push it. Maybe it would be better with a proper interface?
Reaper - Rock solid audio engine, even with the Realtek it runs beautifully on the netbook. Sound quality is noticeably better than Mixcraft. The interface is mainly menu driven and would be good on dual 24" displays, but not so good on a 12" netbook. Nice sounding plugins, especially the reverb. The price is stupid good.
Studio One - Also very solid. I can open more plugins in S1 than I ever thought possible on this little computer. The interface is better than Reaper, but it (Producer) is more expensive.
Anyway, I'm just wondering if there are any other hosts I should try. I was thinking about Sonar. Ease of use is a big factor for me.
Lightweight Easy to Use DAW for Netbook?
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- KVRist
- 357 posts since 5 Aug, 2006 from St. Louis
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- KVRAF
- 2158 posts since 11 Oct, 2007 from Almanya
ASIO4All + Reaper.
Reaper is NOT menu-driven, Reaper is Keyboard-/Shortcut-driven. The menus are just populated to nonsensical dimensions, so that Cubase users will feel at home.
(OK, a little harsh and global, also ignoring the fact that Cubase has keyboard shortcuts as well... but you get my point.)
Find out which of those menu items you need, bind them to key shortcuts and learn using them. That way you'll use less time, work in a far more direct way -because you just DO something, and don't have to take your mind off what it is you're doing because you need to scan the menu for what it was you wanted to do- and ... you won't need the space on your screen for the menus.
The mixer, FX browser, sample browser... you can hide and show them by simple keystrokes, or just create and use some screensets ("track view", "mixer + fx browser", etc) to switch between different screen layouts with any key or combination.
Reaper 4 doesn't look as bad as v1 up to v3 were looking, also you can download/use custom skins for free from the Reaper Stash on their website.
The plugin GUIs may still look like sh1te, but they are among the best sounding ones available, they are horrenduously light on CPU - and they're free!
Also included in Reaper is a vast number of plugins written in the JS plugin format, and again - no GUIs, but very light on CPU and there are some precious little gems in there.
Some from Stillwell, some from Schwa, MIDI effects... for FREE.
Might take some time to filter through all these and weed out the ones you'll never need, but in the end you'll be glad.
BTW, the Reaper.exe is about 5MB small. Compare that to the file sizes of some other hosts... it's extremely lightweight concerning CPU power and memory consumption.
If you fear that all the GUI stuff in Reaper may slow down your Netbook, then you can always adjust the complexity of the GUI, drop the shadows (pun intended) and that fancy stuff, raise the refresh time of the meter displays (which makes them react a little slower) etc.
Plus, it has performance meters that show you exactly which track and what plugins are taking up all the CPU power.
It'd be my DAW of choice for anything. Running it on a Win7 x64 PC, on a Win7 x86 Notebook, in native x64 on a 10.7 Lion Mac... no performance problems ever.
Reaper is NOT menu-driven, Reaper is Keyboard-/Shortcut-driven. The menus are just populated to nonsensical dimensions, so that Cubase users will feel at home.
(OK, a little harsh and global, also ignoring the fact that Cubase has keyboard shortcuts as well... but you get my point.)
Find out which of those menu items you need, bind them to key shortcuts and learn using them. That way you'll use less time, work in a far more direct way -because you just DO something, and don't have to take your mind off what it is you're doing because you need to scan the menu for what it was you wanted to do- and ... you won't need the space on your screen for the menus.
The mixer, FX browser, sample browser... you can hide and show them by simple keystrokes, or just create and use some screensets ("track view", "mixer + fx browser", etc) to switch between different screen layouts with any key or combination.
Reaper 4 doesn't look as bad as v1 up to v3 were looking, also you can download/use custom skins for free from the Reaper Stash on their website.
The plugin GUIs may still look like sh1te, but they are among the best sounding ones available, they are horrenduously light on CPU - and they're free!
Also included in Reaper is a vast number of plugins written in the JS plugin format, and again - no GUIs, but very light on CPU and there are some precious little gems in there.
Some from Stillwell, some from Schwa, MIDI effects... for FREE.
Might take some time to filter through all these and weed out the ones you'll never need, but in the end you'll be glad.
BTW, the Reaper.exe is about 5MB small. Compare that to the file sizes of some other hosts... it's extremely lightweight concerning CPU power and memory consumption.
If you fear that all the GUI stuff in Reaper may slow down your Netbook, then you can always adjust the complexity of the GUI, drop the shadows (pun intended) and that fancy stuff, raise the refresh time of the meter displays (which makes them react a little slower) etc.
Plus, it has performance meters that show you exactly which track and what plugins are taking up all the CPU power.
It'd be my DAW of choice for anything. Running it on a Win7 x64 PC, on a Win7 x86 Notebook, in native x64 on a 10.7 Lion Mac... no performance problems ever.
Reaper user? Get my free JSFX plug-ins, also available via ReaPack extension.
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- KVRer
- 11 posts since 30 Mar, 2004
I've been playing with Studio One (v2) for a bit now and have to say, it runs quite nicely on my little Acer AO257 (10.1 inch). Coming from Sonar, I don't think it's expensive at all, and for what it does, well worth it. Really intuitive.Hypertone wrote:...
Studio One - Also very solid. I can open more plugins in S1 than I ever thought possible on this little computer. The interface is better than Reaper, but it (Producer) is more expensive.
I also have Ubuntu installed on a separate partition and use Rosegarden with that. I've been able to run all my VSTs using Wineasio (only a few, but the biggies - Kontakt and Garritan PO work just fine), so I've not wasted any money by using Linux. Definitely more difficult to set up, though. Latency is crazy low on it too.
About the only gripe I've got running either setup is that Kontakt sucks on a small screen.
R.
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- KVRAF
- 24433 posts since 7 Jan, 2009 from Croatia
Reaper.
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- KVRAF
- 1629 posts since 11 Dec, 2005 from Malmö, Sweden
I don't think many people are aware of this feature but you can scale parts of the UI throughHypertone wrote:Reaper - The interface is mainly menu driven and would be good on dual 24" displays, but not so good on a 12" netbook.
"Preferences -> General -> Advanced UI/system tweaks (button) -> Scale UI elements of track/mixer panels, transport, etc"
I had a netbook with quite low screen resolution so I used that feature.