Why do people use multiple DAWs?

[dellboy]

The people in the Hobbyist/Prosumer market are more apt to waste tons of time "DAW Jumping" and buying different DAWs/Synths/Plugins than those who make money doing this.

And the end result is that tons of time passes and they still haven't produced anything worth listening to, in many cases.

Very true.

But the journey to nowhere was still good fun.

[anttimaatteri]

nothing special or extraordinary about it. it just happens.

short story:
at the end its basicallyone old love 64bit daw and one old love daw with a 32bit plugins possibility to work with and theyre even working together without any probs. nothing special

long story:
starting with a daw, renoise in my case, cos it was low cost, knowing ableton from years ago, but never got the chance to use it, so i tried out the basic version. then getting bitwig bundled, testing it, liking it.
inbetween of course the usual info hunting, but never got caught the hoarding virus on daws (for what tbh?..). installed a bunch of other daws, but deinstalled them very fast. last thing was reason. almost same like ableton, an old curiosity of mine - after using rebirth338 -
and their latest move to make it a vst plugin even in the basic version was good enough to finally test it. i still use them, but as a daw its just the gui made it almost impossible to even try it more often with my sore eyes, plus the track section is not my cup of coffee. they really should work out a scalable version , im sure they had a lot more impact. but looks like they really like their own stubborn 6p font nerdiness or tipping their screens with their noses.

so i still love renoise for what it still is and the nerd factor and i stopped bitwig for its upgrade policy, ableton was an old crush of mine and i upgraded pretty fast and they got the ingenious capture function and so...

[AaronBalakay]

Using Ableton for anything MIDI or composition related but Pro Tools is my go-to with recording, mixing, mastering, etc.

[GRUMP]

8% vote Fish.

[niltonbvfilho]

I use it to produce and play live. use 2 daw

[Monsum]

A few reasons in my case.

For creativity and inspiration - changing a DAW is like changing a physical environment.
For fun.
Continual quest for an ideal DAW - still there is that naive belief that one program perfectly suits my approach to music creation.
To keep software companies in business.

[functionform]

I love Reaper for performance and plugin compatibility, but lately I feel hampered by not having something like ableton racks (audio effect/drum etc). The workflow is just much faster. Playing with Bitwig lately because Ableton performance on my comp is pretty bad after a track gets close to completion.

[Element9]

I love Reaper for performance and plugin compatibility, but lately I feel hampered by not having something like ableton racks (audio effect/drum etc). The workflow is just much faster. Playing with Bitwig lately because Ableton performance on my comp is pretty bad after a track gets close to completion.

Do Ableton Racks provide something you can't get with VSTs in Reaper? I wonder if I too am missing that in Reaper and not realizing.

[WatchTheGuitar]

I love Reaper for performance and plugin compatibility, but lately I feel hampered by not having something like ableton racks (audio effect/drum etc). The workflow is just much faster. Playing with Bitwig lately because Ableton performance on my comp is pretty bad after a track gets close to completion.

Do Ableton Racks provide something you can't get with VSTs in Reaper? I wonder if I too am missing that in Reaper and not realizing.

Basically a chain of things like effects you can drag onto a track as a preset e.g. you may have a vocal rack you can use on an audio track that adds in a heap of related vocal effects like your favourite reverb or it uses a gate to bring in a delay after the track volume drops. It is handy as a workflow starting point even if you will inevitably tweak it more after dragging it in.
The drum racks are a sampler and the presets have it prepopulated with certain related samples.

[Element9]

Reaper certainly doesn't have built in presets like that, but if you create your own combination of, let's say, effect for vocals, you can save it as a track template and apply it quickly whenever you need it. You may know that already - I am writing just in case.

[WatchTheGuitar]

Reaper certainly doesn't have built in presets like that, but if you create your own combination of, let's say, effect for vocals, you can save it as a track template and apply it quickly whenever you need it. You may know that already - I am writing just in case.

True, think it was more saying you don’t get any out of the box. Unless that’s changed recently and I haven’t noticed.

[Element9]

Yeah, I don't there's anything out of the box.

[functionform]

Reaper certainly doesn't have built in presets like that, but if you create your own combination of, let's say, effect for vocals, you can save it as a track template and apply it quickly whenever you need it. You may know that already - I am writing just in case.

I did exactly that, but either you end up staring at dozens of tracks (at least I do) when there are only a handful of parts. For example I usually end up with 30-40 tracks which I'm discovering is about 8-9 in Ableton. Being able to hide routing and not think about it makes my workflow way faster and cleaner. If Reaper had drum and audio racks, I'd ditch ableton again probably.

[machinesworking]

Reaper certainly doesn't have built in presets like that, but if you create your own combination of, let's say, effect for vocals, you can save it as a track template and apply it quickly whenever you need it. You may know that already - I am writing just in case.

I did exactly that, but either you end up staring at dozens of tracks (at least I do) when there are only a handful of parts. For example I usually end up with 30-40 tracks which I'm discovering is about 8-9 in Ableton. Being able to hide routing and not think about it makes my workflow way faster and cleaner. If Reaper had drum and audio racks, I'd ditch ableton again probably.

I'm not getting why a combination of folders and track templates is that much different? I used Live first and immediately got the gist of using Reaper that way. My reasons for ditching Reaper have more to do with not liking the MIDI editing, and spending way too much time trying to tame it to my way of thinking. Bitwig is pretty great for Racks etc. as well.

[antic604]

I love Reaper for performance and plugin compatibility, but lately I feel hampered by not having something like ableton racks (audio effect/drum etc). The workflow is just much faster. Playing with Bitwig lately because Ableton performance on my comp is pretty bad after a track gets close to completion.

Do Ableton Racks provide something you can't get with VSTs in Reaper? I wonder if I too am missing that in Reaper and not realizing.

Basically a chain of things like effects you can drag onto a track as a preset e.g. you may have a vocal rack you can use on an audio track that adds in a heap of related vocal effects like your favourite reverb or it uses a gate to bring in a delay after the track volume drops. It is handy as a workflow starting point even if you will inevitably tweak it more after dragging it in.
The drum racks are a sampler and the presets have it prepopulated with certain related samples.

No, this is just the tip of the iceberg. The best thing is you can have things working in parallel, be split be frequency bands, mid/side. This idea is taken much further in Bitwig, where layers can have their own MIDI FX, MIDI goes throughut the chain uninterrupted so you can have it trigger various things along the way, devices can be nested in feedback paths of FX and obviously there's also the modulation that goes throgh all of the levels, that can go up to audio-rate (so FM, AM, etc.) and can be sidechained from elsewhere.

It's NOT that those things can't be achieved in Reaper (or most DAWs). It's the fact that this would require several tracks, complex routing, sometimes even going out and back in to the DAW. It's about speed & convenience, that in the end translates in fun and freedom to try things. Which, of course, can be a blessing and a curse