Let's discuss the DAW market right now (Logic, Studio One, FL Studio etc)

[Trancit]

Well, perhaps "technically" is a wrong word.

Agreed...

I mean they cover all the relevant functionality in an exhausting manner, unlike "creative" DAWs that were designed to be quick and easy doing specified, limited set of things.

No offense but what/who defines what is relevant and what not???

Again...: all I can tell is that they´ve got different feature sets and different main emphasises...
But I cannot judge what is relevant to the mass and what not... everybody is different, likes different music and different tools...

What one can tell for sure is that the majority of people taking part on such polls seem to like the feature sets/looks/marketing better of in this case FL Studio than the DAWs with "all the relevant functionality in an exhausting manner"

FL Studio was and is still one of the most (if not the most) popular/sucessful DAW(s) out there so they seem to do something the right way...

[Passing Bye]

Apparently Bitwig is 32 bit only (unless that's changed) so I'm going to try to do some blind tests of whether Cubase at 64 bit sounds noticeably better. So far I've just been using Cubase for Groove Agent SE, which only works in Cubase (they don't even offer Cubase owners a discount to upgrade to the full version of Groove Agent...).

You mean mixing at 32/64 bit floating point precision? Yeah, Cubase introduced 64 bit recently.

Dunno, take this with grain of salt, but if environment suits me and I'm productive, I might do really great job faster and different, inspiration is tricky thing.

Long story short, when I transitioned entirely to Biwig, someone I'm making bunch of music for quite some time now, actually noticed that something changed in a good way about my music and mixes, won't go into detail, but it did influence quite a lot of my old habits and workflow, outcome spoken for itself.

So instead of going strictly for numbers, see does one thing actually get's best out of you, especially if you are starting your music from ground up, plenty of people who are influencing our audio world aren't actually doing that, so their needs and habits kinda differ from ours, which is whole another topic by itself.

[antic604]

Well, perhaps "technically" is a wrong word.

Agreed...

I mean they cover all the relevant functionality in an exhausting manner, unlike "creative" DAWs that were designed to be quick and easy doing specified, limited set of things.

No offense but what/who defines what is relevant and what not???

Again...: all I can tell is that they´ve got different feature sets and different main emphasises...
But I cannot judge what is relevant to the mass and what not... everybody is different, likes different music and different tools...

What one can tell for sure is that the majority of people taking part on such polls seem to like the feature sets/looks/marketing better of in this case FL Studio than the DAWs with "all the relevant functionality in an exhausting manner"

FL Studio was and is still one of the most (if not the most) popular/sucessful DAW(s) out there so they seem to do something the right way...

You're trying way too hard to analyze my casual comment

Imagine there's Hanz Zimmer and 5x me, i.e. total hobbyists using Bitwig. An internet poll would tell you Bitwig is the best DAW ever, when in reality Cubase would be the one that's most relevant in context of music world: most people would've heard music produced with it, it would've grossed the most money, ALL the professionals would use it, etc. This is what I clumsily referred to as "technical".

Obviously you can look at the above from the point of view of how much joy and fun the software gives to the user, irrespectful of whether or not using it generates any professional, monetise-able product and then the experience of 1x Hans Zimmer and each of 5x of myself is equal, thus Bitwig really is the king of DAWs.

Which of those perspectives is more "true"? My original point was that the market moved in recent years from the latter to the former, therefore "old" DAWs are trying to make up the distance and become more "cool" to appeal to those "me"-s because it's not Hans Zimmers who drive the market (perception) anymore.

Are we good?

[antic604]

Long story short, when I transitioned entirely to Biwig, someone I'm making bunch of music for quite some time now, actually noticed that something changed in a good way about my music and mixes, won't go into detail, but it did influence quite a lot of my old habits and workflow, outcome spoken for itself.

THIS is the most important thing, ever.

Which made me realize that my projects in Reason sound better than anything I ever started in other DAWs, incl. Bitwig... Hmmmm...

[Crossinger]

Which made me realize that my projects in Reason sound better than anything I ever started in other DAWs, incl. Bitwig... Hmmmm...

It think it is the mix of inspiration(al tool) and the number of features. And not everyone needs the same features, or even more sophisticated features at all.

I personally learned that the "inspiring" Reason was not for me - after 8 years (bought it back in 2012) I barely finished 2 or 3 tracks with it - and didn't like their sound. Then I bought Studio One 4 last year and since then (~1,5 years) I finished about 15 tracks including unfinished tracks from Reason which I rendered and moved as stems to Studio One.

Is Reason a bad tool? Certainly not - but not my way of inspiration. Lesson learned.

[Trancit]

You're trying way too hard to analyze my casual comment

I know... please don´t take my comments too serious...

Are we good?

From my side it was never any different!!

[chk071]

Regarding Reason's "sound", I must admit that the included devices never really inspired me, as, to me, they just sound bland and boring, like... software really. Actually, I even know a artist which is a bit more popular who does everything in Reason, and, IMO, you really hear that. The sounds are just... pretty average. Nothing special. Nothing outstanding. Unless you really practice magic on the instruments and the mix, I think you really hear the difference between good instruments, and average ones.

Of course, if you feel like you make better music with it, then there's nothing you should really care about. It's just something I noticed, not only fiddling with such instruments myself, but also by listening to others who fiddle with them.

There's really stuff in the good soft synths these days which may appear subtle, but really adds to a organic and more realistic feel to the instruments, as I have described here, with Massive X: viewtopic.php?p=7879844#p7879844

[Crossinger]

Regarding Reason's "sound", I must admit that the included devices never really inspired me, as, to me, they just sound bland and boring, like... software really.

Uh, I hope I didn't start (yet another) "Reason Sound" discussion.

All I wanted to say: I wasn't able to achieve the intended sound with the given tool. This very well could also be related to my (lack of) skills which might be better hidden by Studio One.

[chk071]

IMO, no, surely not. Nobody is best with stuff that doesn't inspire.

[fese]

So, anyone here uses SAWstudio?

[machinesworking]

Regarding Reason's "sound", I must admit that the included devices never really inspired me, as, to me, they just sound bland and boring, like... software really. Actually, I even know a artist which is a bit more popular who does everything in Reason, and, IMO, you really hear that. The sounds are just... pretty average. Nothing special. Nothing outstanding. Unless you really practice magic on the instruments and the mix, I think you really hear the difference between good instruments, and average ones.

Of course, if you feel like you make better music with it, then there's nothing you should really care about. It's just something I noticed, not only fiddling with such instruments myself, but also by listening to others who fiddle with them.

There's really stuff in the good soft synths these days which may appear subtle, but really adds to a organic and more realistic feel to the instruments, as I have described here, with Massive X: viewtopic.php?p=7879844#p7879844

I did a shoot out with Repro-5 and Prophet V, they both include the factory presets so this is possible. What was interesting to me is how small of a percentage of the factory sounds at least, benefited from the vastly bigger CPU hit of Repro-5. On 90% of the sounds I could not tell any real or meaningful difference. Years ago with less powerful computers and my desire to just work on a laptop, it really hit home that every synth in a song being modeled to sound amazing mostly ended up with bigger CPU hits and muddy mixes.

Europa, Thor, both sound pretty solid to me. The older synths are "thin", but there are reasons for thin synths IMO. More than them not being "quality" which is mostly, (barring aliasing), a matter of opinion, I find Reasons synths and even samplers have a "sound". Or to put it more distinctly, I own two monster 80's poly analogs, and way too many soft synths, all of U-He, NI, Arturia, Xils, etc. etc. I recently bought Reason specifically for it's Rack ability and it's synths. I reach for them all the time.

Ableton Live and Reason were, along with FL Studio, the first three vastly successful DAWs that weren't old school DAWs made at first to be MIDI sequencers, or to be front ends in recording studios, rather they're more electronic music oriented. They all get tagged as being lower quality in sound, from the summing engines to the included synths.

IMO anyway a big CPU synth like Pigments, Massive X, Repro-5 etc. it better deliver in terms of sounds that demand that CPU. I can always use a decent sounding synth with a low CPU hit.

[chk071]

I definitely get your point about muddying the mixes, and about thin synths, which don't fill the spectrum too much. It's just that I tend to use fx to make up for it then, while, on other synths, I really don't need to work much to get them to sound the way I want.

Not that I'd be in any way knowledged about these kind of things, the best I managed was a 2 minute loop so far (even though, to my defense, I must say that I just don't attend enough to this hobby... at best, I boot up my DAW and play an hour or so once in a week).

[antic604]

Regarding Reason's "sound"...

By "sound better" I meant they're more fun, adventurous, playful, varied. I don't care about professional sound, because I'm not a professional and also with purely electronic music it's not really relevant to sound 'genuine' or 'authentic' because it's all made up anyway. Also there are countless REs that sound increadibly, easily on par with the best VSTs out there: Vk2, Expanse, Zero, Complex-1, Parsec, FM4, Friktion, native Monotone, Grain & Europa.

But other than (or in addition to) that I find Reason's GUI and workflow super inspiring - I love the Rack, Mixer, even the otherwise pretty dated Sequencer has it's brilliant points (blocks, automation clips, patterns, etc.) and it's getting increasingly better with each update.

Whenever I launch Reason I'll end up with something worth saving at least, which is rarely the case with Bitwig or Studio One. So I hope they'll really turn the DAW around soon(ish): GPU accelerated high-res GUI, folders, track freezing, tighter integration of VSTs into the Rack, etc.

[chk071]

Fair enough.

For some time, Reason was very attractive for me, because I liked the in-the-box approach, with no need to delve into endless plugin hunting. I quickly realized though that I just find some plugins to be better sounding, and to have more character, and the stuff I'm actually looking for. Took me quite a while to find exactly what I'm looking for though, but, eventually, I got there...

[machinesworking]

I'm somewhere in the middle with Reason. I used it al the time from 1.0 to 2.5, forgot I even owned it, (thought I sold it actually), then jumped back in when they made a plug in out of it.

I can't say I ever got used to the sequencer, DP and Logic are so much more advanced that way I never bothered quite honestly, but the synths and samplers have a sound, it's a fantastic pad machine as a plug in, instant heavy layering etc. In general I look back and realize I got the most done in Logic or DP, limitations drive me nuts rather than inspire me.

I'm torn currently between Bitwig and Logic. Bitwig will probably win, but we will see.