New Sonic Arts Freestyle

[pk-1]

So, back to Waveform 10 after playing around with Bitwig Studio for a while. And if I miss anything since the first second, it's the ultra-convenient way in which you can build device chains in Bitwig: Adding, deleting, moving, grouping, ungrouping, parallel chains, sequential chains, ... all just a click or a mouse-drag away.

In Waveform, like in pretty much all DAWs I've looked at (except for Ableton, of course, and Studio One with its "Extended FX Chains"), life is easy as long as you have only one simple sequential chain. As soon as it gets ever so slightly more complicated, you need to use the Racks feature - very powerful, very flexible, but super-arduous to use. It's probably OK if you have a clear idea of what you want to accomplish, but if you just want to play around, every little change requires lots of rewiring, totally taking the fun out of it. In 98% of the cases, I don't want to rewire anything (and certainly not both mono cables in a stereo pair) because it's totally obvious what I want.

I've been looking around a bit and got the impression that almost all "meta-instruments" on the market are not really better than Racks in this respect. DDMF Metaplugin, Plogue Bidule, MuTools MUX, Kushview Element, ... all seem to operate in a similar fashion.

The first exception I found is Blue Cat's Patchwork, which however constrains your rack structure significantly. Too much for my purposes at least.

And then there's New Sonic Arts Freestyle. The workflow is pretty much exactly what I am looking for; easy things are easy, exotic configurations require wiring, but are possible. Plus the Snapshot feature, allowing you to quickly manage a shortlist of candidates before you settle down on a configuration. For example.

However, while I'm hearing Jim Kerr singing "So close, yet still so far" in the back of my head, I'm not really, really excited.

o I'm dearly missing a grouping/ungrouping feature. I understood some other post on KVR from NSA that this is work in progress, so it might come soon.
o No automatic latency compensation. Honestly, I don't know yet how critical this would be for me personally, given that I don't do anything live.
o One of my biggest pain points is the thumbnail view on plugins. It seems some (many?) users like it, but I would love to be able to turn this off, at least in the Structure View. First, it screws up the symmetry of the view for no better reason than some developers having chosen large, others small GUIs for their plugins. Worse, in High DPI mode, I cannot even identify some plugins (e.g. the AIR effects VSTs with their small, similar-looking GUIs).
o Another major thing I'm missing is keyboard shortcuts. At least the "delete" key should delete the selected item, as it does pretty much everywhere else.
o Routing secondary audio into Freestyle is a bit tricky. I've did some tests using NUGEN SigMod's Tap module - this seems to work very well. In fact, the advantage is that you're not restricted to track outputs e.g. for sidechaining - you can pick up audio at any point in your device chains (like with Bitwig's Audio Receiver). Really great though would be of course if Freestyle had its own tap VST, routing streams into additional audio input slots.
o No VST3 support. Again, SigMod can wrap VST3s into Freestyle - worked on what I've tested.
o Freestyle macros don't work. This is apparently a misalignment between Waveform and Freestyle (it's working correctly in Bitwig) - Waveform seems to check only at instantiation time if the plugin has parameters, and if it doesn't find any, it won't check again, and there's no way to manually force it to. Maybe this can be added to Waveform; alternatively, Freestyle could "pre-book" some macro slots even if they're not assigned initially. For now, I don't have a workaround.

Comments and suggestions very welcome!