Considering Waveform as my first DAW

[dupont]

Best way to get things sorted is to go through the actual support. You will almost certainly need to be able to report a step-by-step process to repeat the problem. It still might not be a problem on anyone else's system, including whichever dev at TSC tried to help.

I have one synth that I reported to the plugin developer. They gave me a beta that fixed the problem... for about 4 hours. I contacted TSC and they suggested a solution that worked... for about 4 days. I swear it's possessed by the devil and have given up on it. By the way, it also crashed FL Studio... a couple of times at first and then mysteriously never again. It also crashed a few of the small testing hosts. Sometimes. It might only be a problem on my particular system and it looks like it might be related to antivirus or malware software - so not even to do with either the plugin developer or Waveform. Who knows? It's impossible for them to track down problems they can't recreate.

Point is, this stuff is tricky and all the folks without problems are silent. So "there is a stability issue" is also true of your solid, dependable DAWS (just not for you) and going through the appropriate channels for bug fixes will give you a much better chance to become one of the silent majority.

most of the time, bugs are not reproducible and happens at random so it's impossible to send detailed instructions.
3 months trial period is near to the end so no more testing possible.

[chico.co.uk]

Just to clarify, nobody has been able to reproduce the bugs dupont has, with the information he's provided about them.

[dupont]

Just to clarify, nobody has been able to reproduce the bugs dupont has, with the information he's provided about them.

All the bugs ? even the kernel panic which happens when you thick plugin sandboxing ?
Nobody ? how many testers ?
other exemples taken from the beginning of this post :

I've used Mac exclusively since the Mac Plus. I tried to love Tracktion from version 1 up to, perhaps, version 6 and finally tired of bugs and crashes and lack of proper documentation and incompatibility with many plug-ins. I won't touch it again, now that I use Live 10 and Logic that virtuality never crash and will swallow most, if not all, of the quirkiest plug-ins.

The truth is... It crashes a lot! More than any other DAW I have. But I'm still returning to W11 as my main DAW for the reasons I have described earlier. For example – Cubase is rock solid on my computer. Also with many advanced production techniques and a ton of plugins. Which is all worthless because it's 30 years old UX

[dynamo]

May I ask why you've decided to stay with 10.13 on your Mac Pro when you have a Metal capable card?

Legacy software, not necessarily related to 32-bit... plus not worth the hassle given how much I've tossed things all over the place while I'm running out of disk space myself.

Ah! That makes sense, and I can relate.
I've been reluctant to upgrade myself since I still run some 32-bit legacy apps that are no longer upgradeable and have been happily running 10.9 Mavericks until I bought a new iPad recently and it couldn't sync with my version of iTunes, so I upgraded to 10.11 El Capitan (I feel the newer OSX/MacOS versions tend to remove useful features and "dumb down" the OS to make it more "consumer friendly", or at best hide them very well).

Now I've learnt that 10.11 doesn't support USB 3 (I've bought a USB 3.1 PCIe card which I can't use with it) so I need to go beyond 10.11 anyway, and fortunately I've also found out that my 32-bit legacy apps still work with 10.12 and 10.13 as long as they're already installed from before (the installer fails under 10.13)

10.14 might even work, but for now I'm not going there because of the need for a new graphic card, unless I find out that it'll actually improve my system even though I'm not doing any video-editing work (and when I do it won't be the inteisive and heavy 4K type etc.).

Which graphic card did you put in your Mac Pro? Did you go for an RX-580 which I understand is a good solution without paying unnecessary much despite you don't get the boot screen.

Do you feel it's enough for Waveform? I suppose it depends on how you use it... I'm guessing soft-synths and soft-samplers demand a lot of RAM.

Depends on how many samples you are using. If you are using a lot of instruments backed by many large samples they may start to chew up memory rather quickly.

Synths which are not based on samples, not so much as they don't need to juggle samples, and much of the memory they use can be shared between multiple instances of the synth.

That makes sense. I'm still at the stage of being ignorant to how most of this stuff (DAWs, software instruments and effects etc.) works, but I suppose that with long samples that aren't to be played on the keyboard but only triggered (i.e. environmental sounds, loops, vocal recordings etc.) it's really just a matter of copy/paste into a DAW track, right?
Whereas musical samples that are to be played on a keyboard (melodies, chords) are another matter and have to reside in RAM? I'm coming from the old-school ("stone age" to many people ) way of doing all this, meaning hardware samplers.

I've been lookin at 3rd party reverb plugins lately and see that many descriptions tell about "low CPU usage". Provided that information is true it's probably a good idea to go for those instead of sloppy written memory and CPU hungry plugins

It depends on the nature of the reverb itself. Some types of reverbs actually attempt to model real acoustic spaces, which involves a lot of math. Others are more algorithmic in nature - still math, but not quite as much. The reverbs that model acoustic spaces will chew up more CPU time but can also give a very different (often much more natural) sound compared to the ones that are lighter-weight.

Interesting! I need to look into that, but I have a feeling my initial needs will be quite modest as I'm mostly into 80's R&B/funk/Electro and so on, and most hardware gear back was (as far as I know) nothing like what can be done in software today. I assume most of that music was made with quite limited processing gear compared to now.

I see a lot of free plugins, but it seems the "classic" pro gear of that era still tends to cost quite a bit in terms of plugins, like the AMS-RMX "nonlin" gated reverb (only runs with Universal Audio (UAD) audio interfaces which I don't have) or other hardware emulations of Lexicon 480 or 224, PCM-70 etc, Yamaha REV1 or 7, Roland SRV-2000 and so on.
Many of those hardware devices are still quite expensive on the used market, take up a lot of space (I'm trying to "slim down" my hardware gear and demand a lot of expensive servicing so that's not an option.

[jules]

even the kernel panic which happens when you thick plugin sandboxing ?

Just for the record here:

It's literally *impossible* for Waveform to directly cause a kernel panic. Only drivers and privileged system tasks can do that.

Waveform is a normal app. We don't supply any drivers. So whatever this is, it's a bug in someone else's code, and not something we can or should deal with ourselves.

Even if some aspect of Waveform's (or any other app's) behaviour happens to trigger an otherwise rare bug in a driver, then the buck still stops with the driver manufacturer. No matter what kind of insane nonsense an app throws at a driver, it's absolutely unforgivable for it to cause a kernel panic, under any circumstances at all - to do so is a huge security flaw.

Most likely it's an audio or graphics driver at fault, but you'd need to dig through system logs to figure that out. And even if we had the same flakey driver, on exactly the same hardware you've got, with the same OS version etc etc so that we could reproduce it, we'd still have very little chance of figuring out why the thing is crashing, or being able to confidently change the app's behaviour so not to trigger their bug.

[fde101]

Which graphic card did you put in your Mac Pro? Did you go for an RX-580 which I understand is a good solution without paying unnecessary much despite you don't get the boot screen.

AMD Radeon HD 7950

That makes sense. I'm still at the stage of being ignorant to how most of this stuff (DAWs, software instruments and effects etc.) works, but I suppose that with long samples that aren't to be played on the keyboard but only triggered (i.e. environmental sounds, loops, vocal recordings etc.) it's really just a matter of copy/paste into a DAW track, right?
Whereas musical samples that are to be played on a keyboard (melodies, chords) are another matter and have to reside in RAM? I'm coming from the old-school ("stone age" to many people ) way of doing all this, meaning hardware samplers.

It all needs to be in RAM while it is being played. Whether or not a full sample needs to be in RAM depends on how a specific sampler plugin is written. In most cases even remotely modern ones should be able to stream them from the hard drive or SSD during playback as long as there are not too many of them active at the same time. I would expect a clip on a DAW track to follow that same logic.

My Korg Kronos keyboard actually does this as well: it requires only the first part of each sample to be in RAM constantly, so that it can start playing the sample immediately when a key is pressed on the keyboard - the rest of the sample is then transparently streamed from its internal SSD. This allows individual instruments on the Kronos to be based on much larger sets of sample data than can fit into memory at the same time, while still providing immediacy of playback.

Even a laptop hard drive should be able to keep up with a fair number of tracks/samples playing simultaneously, but if you start working with an extremely large track/sample count, that is one place where an SSD might start to become helpful.

Many of those hardware devices are still quite expensive on the used market, take up a lot of space (I'm trying to "slim down" my hardware gear and demand a lot of expensive servicing so that's not an option.

An advantage of plugins is that you pay for one and can use it on multiple tracks at the same time, each with different settings and accurate recall of those settings.

With hardware, you pay for one and can use it on one track at a time. You can then record the output of that and move on to another track, but if you decide the settings need to change, you need to manually re-create the ones you had before and wanted to keep, then re-record the track with them.

[dynamo]

That's really cool (that the DAW will only load part of the sample and stream the rest). Hopefully my 24 GB of RAM will do (provided I quit all non-related apps while using the DAW), or else upgrading up to 64 GB is an option (4x 16GB memory modules after having done the X5690 CPU upgrade).

I never really thought about those advantages of having multiple instances of a plugin as opposed to buying multiple hardware effects, but that's a good point! I really need to spend some serious time with the DAW (as opposed to short trial/error sessions) but one thing I'm trying to figure out for now is how to set up Waveform Pro as a virtual recoding/mixing environment -much like having a 24-track (or more) virtual analog multitrack studio in front of me. I was hoping I'd get access to the familiar things like EQ pots, send/return controls, pre/post options and so on, but find that I have to open loads of different plugins for absolutely everything which in turn requires (seemingly) deep knowledge into which controls to adjust (such as an EQ with its graphic representation of the frequency area). I'm probably just old fashioned, but find all that confusing.

[astey]

That's really cool (that the DAW will only load part of the sample and stream the rest). Hopefully my 24 GB of RAM will do (provided I quit all non-related apps while using the DAW), or else upgrading up to 64 GB is an option (4x 16GB memory modules after having done the X5690 CPU upgrade).

I never really thought about those advantages of having multiple instances of a plugin as opposed to buying multiple hardware effects, but that's a good point! I really need to spend some serious time with the DAW (as opposed to short trial/error sessions) but one thing I'm trying to figure out for now is how to set up Waveform Pro as a virtual recoding/mixing environment -much like having a 24-track (or more) virtual analog multitrack studio in front of me. I was hoping I'd get access to the familiar things like EQ pots, send/return controls, pre/post options and so on, but find that I have to open loads of different plugins for absolutely everything which in turn requires (seemingly) deep knowledge into which controls to adjust (such as an EQ with its graphic representation of the frequency area). I'm probably just old fashioned, but find all that confusing.

There are (too) many tutorials out there. Excellent free tutorials. For example, you can check out Fabfilter's YouTube channel and you will learn all about graphic EQs/compression in no time. 99% of people liked their videos.

[fde101]

I was hoping I'd get access to the familiar things like EQ pots, send/return controls, pre/post options and so on

That is more like the way Harrison Mixbus works (different DAW)... Cubase and Reason can do something similar to this also.

Mixbus provides a great mixing interface (I have the 32c version), but I find it a bit less comfortable for doing basic track/clip manipulation (which Waveform handles in a much nicer way).

but find that I have to open loads of different plugins for absolutely everything which in turn requires (seemingly) deep knowledge into which controls to adjust

This is how most DAWs work. Consider using a channel strip plugin which combines those so that at least it is one plugin per track for the basic controls. Waves has a few of theirs on sale right now:

https://www.waves.com/plugins/channel-strips

[dynamo]

Now we're talking!
Purely looking at the screenshots of something like this SSL G-channel gives the feeling of sitting in front of a "real" studio desk.


I see they're mostly about the EQ and some with compression/gate built in, but how about effect send/return? Is that done elsewhere in the DAW?
Among the many choices there I have no idea which one is stuitable or not -or if it's mainly a matter of finding the user interface you're most comfortable with. I'm going to download the demo and see.
Pricewise they're no problem (especially considering that I only need to buy one regardless of how many recording channels I'll be using as pointed out earlier!)

Regarding Waves plugins -I see they rely on an installation program/app which goes online to download and authorize. Is an online connection needed every single time you start the DAW and use their plugins? And how about Waveform: I see (via Little Snitch on my Mac) that it goes online every time I start it, but haven't yet tried to deny its connections to check if it'll still work or not.

[Watchful]

Sends and returns are done in the DAW. Look in the Waveform plugins folder, and you'll see plugins for Send and Return. These are pretty self-explanatory, but check out the descriptions in the manual which give you a better sense of how to route them and use them in clever ways.

[fde101]

Yes, about the only way you will be able to get the sends/returns integrated into the "console" appearance is to use a DAW that has that form of mixer designed into it - the ones I am aware of which offer that are Mixbus, Mixbus 32c, Cubase and Reason.

Harrison, who makes the Mixbus DAWs, has a history of making real analog studio mixing desks. The DAW is basically a modified version of the open-source Ardour DAW, but with its mixing features replaced with an analog-modeled mixer interface based on the Harrison consoles. The one in 32c looks like this:

Screen Shot 2020-06-09 at 5.46.20 PM.png

One of the major limitations of Mixbus is that ALL of the processing goes through that same analog-modeled mixer, so you don't have the option of leaving some of the channels "clean" or using the sound of different channel strips or plugin chains on each channel like you can with other DAWs... there is also a fixed number of busses, just as there would be on an analog desk, which can be a bit limiting with very large sessions.


Cubase is one of the major players in the DAW industry, and one of the oldest. In the more recent versions it offers a semi-modular mixer interface which allows the choice of three different compressors, three different saturation effects, a deesser or an envelope shaper, etc... so you can match the filters to the channel. It is probably one of the most flexible and feature-packed DAWs on the market right now, at least in the Pro version, but has the price tag to match...

The individual parts of the channel strips in Cubase can be collapsed when you don't need them, which is nice because when they are fully expanded there is no way to fit them all on the screen at the same time:

Screen Shot 2020-06-09 at 5.43.30 PM.png

Screen Shot 2020-06-09 at 5.55.24 PM.png

Reason is more of a musician's DAW than an engineer's DAW; it has a "rack" of devices that you can see the front and the back of and rewire it in somewhat arbitrary ways. To me the rack is the main feature of Reason and with the newest version of Reason you can actually insert that rack as a plugin into other DAWs, including Waveform.

When using Reason on its own, however, there is a built-in mixing console as well. It is similar to Mixbus in that some of its attributes (such as the number of busses) are fixed, but the nature of how the rack gets wired up makes it a bit easier to bypass the processing if you want to do that for any particular "reason"...

The channel strips, like those in Cubase, are so large that if you are showing all of the sections you need to scroll to see them - the sections in Cubase can be collapsed, the ones in Reason can be separately hidden if needed:

Screen Shot 2020-06-09 at 5.53.40 PM.png

Screen Shot 2020-06-09 at 5.53.51 PM.png

One of the benefits of NOT having that mixer interface is greater flexibility to mix and match the plugins that work best for a particular track. This does bring with it the need to juggle more than one type of interface depending on the plugins being used, but that is part of the reality of having that added flexibility.

Even with the channel strip or "mixer-DAW" approach you will probably eventually find plugins to insert into the chain to get the unique sounds and behaviors of different types of compressors, equalizers, etc... in which case you might start to wonder, "why am I doubling up by having all of these equalizers and compressors on every channel strip if I am just going to insert these other ones and use those anyway?..." and that is kind of the premise that most of the major DAWs right now (and many of the lesser-known ones) are based around.

Waveform takes that latter approach of not putting all of the extra processing on each channel when it may or may not end up being used, but rather allows the engineer/musician to determine what each individual track actually needs. If you are just stepping into that world, a good channel strip plugin combined with such a DAW is likely a good place to start, since it provides some of the familiarity, while still giving you the flexibility to cut the channel strip out of the mix when you have tracks that don't need it, or once you reach the point where you start using alternatives for some of the tracks as your comfort level with it grows...

There is a time and place for each of these approaches, and benefits and drawbacks to each as well.

[HansP]

Purely looking at the screenshots of something like this SSL G-channel gives the feeling of sitting in front of a "real" studio desk.

I'm glad to see how you embrace these systems.
Just as another case study to compare:
I grew up with analog gear and played with bands, though never really as a profession.
I have an engineering education that is a lot about pure abstraction.
So it was very easy to me to switch to the Tracktion family, because almost nothing is really predefined, and I can wire together ad-hoc whatever I need.

My thought process is, that I place all things where _I_ want them, and I can remember this quickly.
I know where everything is, because I put it there on my own, and not without meaning and purpose.
The great thing is, we can copy-paste practically everything, or create a preset from a whole "device" that I put together, as complex it may be, and paste it in or repeat that structure anytime later, any project later.

I'm the maker of the mix, and of all its technical structures -- which I put together from basic or atomic tools like a compressor, an exciter, a little fader only (as many faders as I want), or a whole complex "rack" that contains a wired structure of plugins, including faders again.
I am responsible for my pools of plugins, to know why I bought or got them (many legally free), and thus what to do with these. I am always learning more about certain plugins, and about the new ones.
The track can hold 16 such plugins or racks mixed, and I can chain it to another track, if this is not enough.
And regularly I put together all these tracks in a tree structure of busses, as complex as I want.
With racks, I can also cross-wire a number of tracks, for a complex ducking strategy, or for a multi-sound MIDI player system.
Sends/returns are possible with the dedicated meta-plugins (means they don't process, they are symbolic or wires), or with using racks, and be more versatile and distinct in the routing and preparation of effect-processed sound.
If something makes no sense in my concept, the DAW will likely fail to understand my construction, and do some nonesense. There are some limitations to complexity, e.g. regarding latency compensation.

Since "WaveForm", we have also a more classic and general user interface and workflow.
The main factor is that there can be never a comparison between a desk 5 meters wide, and e.g. a notebook screen used in the train or airplane. Therefor abstraction is required.
The concept of these "do-almost-everything" channel strip plugins may be helpful, but depends very much on personal preferences, and it is not perfect because they need space on screen and have to be opened and placed there. They are not waiting as a landscape like the huge desk.
If we want to work this way, the WaveForm user interface has some benefit and at least the basic faders are there in a linear order, and a number of switches and control buttons to each.

I use channel strips for certain instruments only, after listening what to do with these.
For some others, a stock EQ or a Pultec insert might be sufficient, and then perhaps a Haas delay (I use a certain AirWindows preset), and a compressor.
With purpose, I tend to use different plugins for different tracks (within same class, as EQ or exciter), because I found the sound to become richer with this strategy.

[dynamo]

I love these discussions because I learn new things all the time and get some great new insight from

HansP: that's a good point about DAWs needing to become an abstract version of a real physical hardware studio mixer because of the more limited space. I hadn't thought of that, but it makes sense

Fde101: thanks for the awesome screenshots and giving me more insight in how channel strips work! They look fantastic and very inviting to fiddle with, just like the real thing. I hadn't considered what you say about channel strips taking CPU power, but of course all features do when I think about it and Waveform's approach seems to be a good one!
In conclusion I understand it's a matter of different approaches -what works for some people doesn't work for others. Myself, I'm in the lucky/unlucky situation of not having enough experience with these things to have gotten accustomed to a certain workflow (so it's easier to learn whatever works best) while not having much experience it takes a while to learn and understand all this to begin with.
Are there any free channel strip plugins? At this stage I'm mostly trying to find a workflow that fits, not trying to spend money on specific sounding plugins. Maybe later... if I find I need them.

Watchful: Thanks Aux sends/returns. I spent some time with this while finding a video on the subject, managing to record multiple tracks, then adding multiple sends and finally additional effect tracks so I could mix and match a variety of effects

[Watchful]

Crazy, isn't it? Coming from a hardware-only mindset decades ago to something like Waveform can easily be overwhelming. But as HansP says, the beauty is that the old rules don't need to apply: you can work, lay out, route, and organize things how you need to them, differently even by project.

I like Waveform's ability to handle dozens of traditional and modern approaches, even combining techniques as you please.

All DAWs pretty much are the same, but for me Waveform's ability to totally rework itself to suit my needs is a major selling point. Well, that and the community of geniuses here!