Which DAW is MIDI king?

[digitalboytn]

Like Hans Zimmer said - "The best DAW is the one that you know"

They've all got their strengths and weaknesses...

You just have to pick your poison and learn to deal with it

Hans knows Cubase real well as does Harry Gregson Williams and numerous other top composers.

I know Sonar X3e "real" well and that's all that matters to me...

I'm walking in my own shoes here

[Bathrobe]

I´ve found that only Live and Renoise slave to external midi clock.
But only Renoise has a Midi Clock Slave Offset slider.

That´s why it´s king for me.
But Bitwig is my queen, S1 my rook, Logic my bishop, Cirklon my knight, Pyramid my pawn and Live my opponent.

[kelldammit]

For Midi and Audio Cubase is the leading DAW in the market..

I'm not sure who paid you for writing this. I agree that Cubase is top notch regarding MIDI, but definitely not audio.

This is a bit the same with audio, no DAW has such audio manipulation features including this "melodyne style" pitch correction stuff.

That's simply wrong. Samplitude Pro X(2), for example, has similar (if not the same, or even more) features for manipulating audio, including a pitch correction for single notes.

Correct, and DP has had "clip gain" style automation, and inline pitch correction since 2006.

Nitpicking aside, depending on what i'm doing, midi-wise, i prefer either Cubase (quick sketches) or DP (more intensive arrangement). Each have specific features to help facilitate either purpose, both could handle either, too. Back in my mac days, i used DP and Logic similarly.

[LawrenceF]

[Cue Platitude] The one you like best and/or most productive with. [/Platitude]

[ObsoleteAcc99]

[DELETED]

[LawrenceF]

That's the only way it can *ever* be king for anyone

Yep. You start to wonder why questions like that get asked so often, especially when almost nobody is really fluent in them all to even know.

What's the "best" car? The one I like most that also fits with my wallet. Jeep FTW!

[inkwarp]

for sheer rapidity and options for me it is fl studio for midi. even if only just for that it is worth having and it runs as rewire or plugin also so you can have your cake and eat it

[Robmobius]

For moi it's Ableton. I can even hum my bass lines and have them ported to midi.

[murnau]

Have we all DAWs mentioned now?

[fmr]

For moi it's Ableton. I can even hum my bass lines and have them ported to midi.

And how does that make Live the MIDI king? It's not even a MIDI feature, but an audio feature (Audio to MIDI, which Vision, from Opcode, already had many many years ago).

[NystagmusE]

I've noticed that in Reaper, the first midi note tends to be laggy when playing a project.

Just shift the content of the project a measure later so that when you press play nothing happens for a measure. That usually fixes it. Then, after you render the finished WAV trim it in Audacity or OcenAudio or Wavosaur or whatever you use. Or just leave the first few seconds as silence if you like.

[D-Fusion]

Cakewalk Sonar is my Midi Queen
I love the midi Step recording for quickly adding parts with my keyboard.
You can set up notes and rests so they will be recorded the way you want in step record mode instead of one note after the other like many hosts only do.

[jancivil]

The way I work, I have to have all of the MIDI tracks in one piano roll (with edit as solo enabled) with typically a lot of controller lanes and presets for those defined and named according to instrument. So I never get started with Logic. Single 'hyperedit' controller lanes, this would add a lot of pointless time to get anything done. I'm not a really sophisticated MIDI person, I don't do any cute operations, I have a very simple straightforward workflow with nothing quantized, throughcompose/linear m.o. But I need the whole group in the one editor. Creating the illusion of a real performance, one realizes that not everybody lands in time the same way. A big fat instrument speaks slower, most everybody speaks slower than the crisp hits from a drum kit, so every part has to be in the one editor.

The other strength of Cubase which means I'm not trying to find out about other hosts is, the approach to time. I don't start out guessing my tempo. I get in there and improvise, or maybe it's drum part as a basis and I do the thing. Then via Time Warp (tracks all set to linear time) I drag a barline to a meaningful downbeat and discover tempi here. And the tempo track suits me. I like the high resolution of 4000 pulses per quarter note, as a huge part of my 'writing' is editing. I'm not exactly doing warts and all, but I absolutely require human timing and I do a lot of nudging, I'm not going to nail everything in real time. (The one other host that does this particular trick, warp the timeline to the music by this m.o., is Samplitude.)

When I first got my own computer and some software, I was clueless. The only thing I'd done was work in notation, and cabled MIDI out through a serial port to hardware. So honestly any/all of hosts intimidated me. I had lite versions of Live, FL, Cubasis and the first thing I bought was Reason (2.5). That didn't seem to be it, so I shopped some more at guitar center, and another customer told me - a kind of involved conversation I wasn't having with any salesperson - what I wanted was Cubase. I read too much about it really, but once I got in there it was quite intuitive. I've only looked to the manual for the cuter things, my real workflow is very obvious. Yrs later I bought DP and Logic, first of all wanting better latency than Cubase under OSX. DP is kind of peculiar, Logic the basic things are not hard to sort. But VSL came out with VE Pro; so this issue of Cubase (Core Audio ≠ ASIO = way too much latency) is more or less solved through the plugins enjoying priority in the separate process from Cubase. Then it turns out there are various idiosyncrasies (some of them addressed a little later) as per DP's and Logic's communication with VE Pro, meaning VE Pro (VSL really) is geared towards Cubendo.

[Robmobius]

For moi it's Ableton. I can even hum my bass lines and have them ported to midi.

And how does that make Live the MIDI king? It's not even a MIDI feature, but an audio feature (Audio to MIDI, which Vision, from Opcode, already had many many years ago).

What are you jabbering about? I said 'for me' not you... jog on.

[LawrenceF]

Then via Time Warp (tracks all set to linear time) I drag a barline to a meaningful downbeat and discover tempi here.

That is indeed a nice function. It's also interesting to me that as much as these products occasionally rip good ideas from each other, I've yet to see anyone rip that one.

If I had a "10 things to rip from Cubase" list, that one would be on there somewhere.