Saying Good Bye To Wavefrom Pro

[JWParenteau]

I originally purchased a license for Waveform 10 Pro back in April 2019, after and extensively looking for a DAW that has a chord track and diatonic transposition.

I first purchased Cubase 10 Pro during their anniversary sale with a crossgrade for about $300 plus the dongle ($50). Long story short, the learning curve coming out of FL Studio was massive, it feels rigid, and I dislike having to keep that dongle in my laptop. The biggest take away is it's ability to align tracks and Variaudio, all the other "bells and whistles" are locked to Cubase.
I might as well just have gotten Vocalign Pro, but VariAudio is good for "bending" vocals to chords instead of just scales.

I made one track using Cubase and it's content.

After determining that Cubase wasn't for me, I turned to Waveform 10 after seeing how convenient diatonic transposition in it from this video:


Waveform's learning curve wasn't too steep, although, I had a bit of difficulty here and there and looking for things that weren't there. Specifically sequencing/programming dynamics tools, like an LFO tool in the velocity controls and strum/sweep dynamic tools to be exact.

I was really hoping Waveform was going to replace my core DAW, FL Studio; which I have about 20 years experience with.

Even after getting a bit of a workflow going in Waveform, I still found myself turning to FL Studio for Waveform's shortcomings.

Then Waveform 11 came out and some of it's tools looked promising, specifically the "Chord Companion" and some of its new MIDI FX tools. The MIDI FX Tools I was hoping allowed me to use my typing keyboard to practice and record in Waveform, specifically for drums, but Waveform only allows for one octave with no mutations and it's recording is contraversive for sequencing with the typing keys. More information on the my general woes here:
KVR Forum<Tracktion: Waveform 11 Troubles

The name of the "Chord Companion" is a bit misleading, as it's more of a "Pad Companion". A more of my comprehensive look at it here:
KVR Forum<Tracktion: Chord Companion Not What I Expected And Music Theory
If it weren't for the "Chord Companion" totally giving me a fresh perspective on chord scales relationships, I might as well have just rolled up my $50 bill and smoked it, instead of buying the Waveform 11 update.

Recently, I developed a way to perform diatonic transposition for the whole composition at once in FL. Now, there is only one thing that really stands out to me justifying my purchase of Waveform Pro and that's Collective; because it's not "locked" to Waveform. I made a few suggestions for Collective here:
KVR Forum<Tracktion: A Couple Of Suggestions For Collective
Of course, if I want to see any of these "upgrades" I'll likely have to buy an update. But hey I get it, gotta keep the lights on in the Collective lab, well, I gotta cut tracks so I can collect Youtube/Spotify pennies and pay for my music addiction.

Been looking for some expressive guitars, by expressive I mean a velocity zone in the upper 10% that's just a guitar being spanked, like break the string spank, great for "skanks" or just a loud and rude lead. Fingered and picked plus palm mutes.

This post is mostly aimed at devs for some "exit" info.

[boomt]

The biggest problem I have with Waveform is just the amount of bugs. The other problem is the features have a lack of polish as I get the feeling due to their release schedule they don't get the time to really polish and flesh out the new features they work on.

There is such uniqueness and promise with the software that isn't being fully realised due to bugs and lack of polish. I'm still using it loads and keeping an eye on what is going on.

[terrynoakes]

I too have reservations regarding their yearly version update, Obviously commenting here without knowing fully the situation at TSC.
However it seems a version is released,bugs are addressed for the 1st third of the year then attention is turned to the next version, and bugs fixes are pushed back or attempted to be incorporated into the next version release. I believe they are a small team, and the yearly version updates puts real pressure on them to try and accommodate user problems. whilst trying to add new features etc. Just my take on it.

[fromwithin]

I just finished the project I'm working on so, as promised in a previous post of mine, after nearly 20 years of Tracktion/Waveform I am going to embark on a major attempt to switch to Studio One or Bitwig. Using Waveform is just too stressful for me now and I find it horrible to use. The workflow is not smooth at all due to the bugs and poorly thought-out features, bug reports are almost never acknowledged and barely any of them get fixed across multiple major updates. It's also starting to turn into a menu-fest and I hate that.

It's a sad state of affairs. I understand that revenue has to be generated by giving people a reason to upgrade, but it's clearly reached a tipping point now where the weight of problems are so great that it's just not worth persevering with. I can't even bring myself to try new features anymore because history has shown that they'll probably be broken in some way. Even worse, with each major update now I fully expect some previously working things to have broken.

I used to pay for each update the moment it was announced, but in the last two versions, I've waited months before I could trust them to be usable. I just want to make music and I used to be able to do that. But now, the constant starting and stopping due to all manner of things across the board wrecks everything. The lack of a smooth workflow massively affects creativity and makes things take many times longer than they should.

So that's it. I don't want to switch, but I have to. The new features across the last few versions have proven themselves to be useful marketing tools for a simple demonstration video, but not fit for professional use. I really hope that a major UI overhaul is on the cards for a future version because the direction it's been going in is completely untenable. Tracktion's much-touted ease-of-use has gone and been replaced by a mish-mash of features that are spread across the UI in sometimes seemingly random ways.

I really hope that one day the program can be pulled back into line and that I can return and be happy with it again, but until then I'm done.

[JohnNoizz]

Unfortunately, I must agree with most of you people... Waveform has a lot of potential but it always stays there without advancing further and improving, In the DAW market you have to give to the customer stability, compatibility, quality and good FX's, CPU friendly, fast workflow, good and useful options and configurations, and the most important... SUPPORT, if you give that to the people they will coming for your product.

I work A LOT with Waveform and I already sold tracks made with it, and when I started to work with labels I met a lot of great artists and most of the time they ask me for the software I use to create my tracks and I always recommend Waveform and Cakewalk, and when I show my work on social networks many people ask me too and I always recommend it again but then something happens and it is that when they try it, they do not always get a good impression about Waveform.

This days I was having thinking a lot what to do because it gets hard to work with Waveform form me lately, for example, if I have many tracks in a project, like 30, it seems that it begins to choke and when I copy paste and audio track it takes 30 seconds EVERY LITTLE PIECE OF AUDIO I copy in the track, that happens when I loop an audio too, this doesn't happen with Reaper or Cakewalk, so it really gets bit difficult to recommend it like this...

I was testing Studio One and Bitwig and the truth is that I liked them a lot, Bitwig's workflow for me is very good but I don't like its update/upgrade policy, Studio one is more "professional" and I also like it a lot, the upgrade path is better and more flexible and that brings a reasonable and better cost in the end, so I'll keep testing them to see what I decide...

[chagzuki]

I was an early Tracktion user, and it was so well-designed compared to the competitors, but lacking in features in it's nascent state. The community here was great to be part of, like other young projects feature requests got implemented sometimes almost immediately. Super-exciting.
Coming back to it after such a long pause I see that many of the quirks are still present in Waveform. For instance, for some reason it seems to be random as to whether the audio engine keeps playing in the background, with that option selected. About 50% of the time it doesn't, so one has to start playback and stop again. Not a big deal, it just means pressing spacebar twice. It's a bit like living with a few minor chronic illnesses... they don't really stop you from doing things, they just make it more convoluted.

I think much of this must be to do with the audio engine, and we seem to be on the cusp of a major redesign there. I haven't tried the experimental audio engine in the latest betas, I'm waiting on the finished version. So fingers crossed the architectural problems there will have been addressed. I'm not a programmer so I don't have much sense of how big an endeavour this is, but I'm guessing it's been a very big roadblock to the general development of the project, and was a result of some decisions made at the very beginning.

[fromwithin]

For instance, for some reason it seems to be random as to whether the audio engine keeps playing in the background, with that option selected. About 50% of the time it doesn't, so one has to start playback and stop again.

I noticed this the other week and think I know what it is. If you switch off the audio engine, then it goes off. But if you then set an input on one of the tracks, it switches back on again. Just another of the never-ending usability problems.

[chagzuki]

I noticed this the other week and think I know what it is. If you switch off the audio engine, then it goes off. But if you then set an input on one of the tracks, it switches back on again.

Generally I want the audio engine on, so the setting to keep it on is always selected. And yet 50% of the time it switches off.

[fromwithin]

Generally I want the audio engine on, so the setting to keep it on is always selected. And yet 50% of the time it switches off.

Right. I've not noticed that on mine.

[chagzuki]

Another issue I found recently, undo doesn't work with 'insert space at market region/cursor'. I can't remember if it used to be different with earlier versions, but I found myself having created too many new bars, undo didn't/doesn't work, then I couldn't see any way to delete those bars. I'm assuming there must be a 'delete marked area' somewhere, but I couldn't find it. I don't think there'd be any way to drag all clips to remove the space whilst maintaining automation and time changes... I don't think that would work.

[BloodyCactus]

you also have to remember, waveform is a wrapper on top of juice, and when you find a bug, its in juice so they cant fix it half the time.

As Linux user I supported them through 7, 8, 9, 10, 11..... well now BitWig is native on Linux and without all the bugs. the choice is kinda easy imo.

[mikoatkvr]

The main Juice developer was also the person that initially developed Traction/Waveform. I'm hopeful that he still wants the software he created to blossom.
I too use other DAWs on Linux like Bitwig, Renoise, Ardour, LMMS and others .. I even have a license for FLStudio20 which runs well in wine. I think when all the major bugs are squashed Waveform will be a top contender.
Don't get me wrong, I get days where Waveform feels like a fight, but when that happens I get a bug report in and mostly they are sorted quickly with a good response from the dev team.
I think I just find myself being more creative in Waveform like for example Bitwig.

[mikoatkvr]

@BloodyCactus I by no way mean to disrespect your opinion and I do agree that Bitwig is rock solid. You have to realise tho that the Bitwig debs were major devs in Ableton Live before they decided that they needed to go on their own journey.

In my opinion there is a really small team in Traction/Waveform but yet they have a really solid framework to build on. Yes there are bugs and they do actually get to them, I know being a private Beta tester these guys take bugs seriously and work hard to fix them. I think you should stick around a while longer and you will be surprised.

[chagzuki]

I think you should stick around a while longer and you will be surprised.

Are you saying that particularly with the new audio engine in mind?

[JWParenteau]

I was expecting a bit more defense for Waveform.

Unfortunately, my FL "diatonic transposition system's" logic for chord progressions broke down. I recently discovered the system doesn't see or move the diminished degree.

FLKeySwitcher.png

It was a fair shot, the only other alternative is to generate chords by single input and that would be a more convoluted and having to "burn to MIDI" before arranging and dynamics.

The main Juice developer was also the person that initially developed Traction/Waveform.

That's interesting to know.

I see much conversation about Bitwig, from what I can tell it doesn't have a chord track or diatonic transposition. Ones that I know about off the top of my head are:
Cubase
Waveform
Studio One (looks like it's only for audio recordings)
Band in a box (Not 100% sure because there is no demo)
Reaper (Integrated through scripts)
Cakewalk by Bandlab (Diatonic transposition per track)

I'm interested in going back to school for computer science and programming. I was thinking of looking at LMMS as a starting point for a DAW.

I haven' experienced too much trouble with Waveform as far as the audio system. Then again I've had my fair share of rickety software, so I know how find work around like Spock and logic problems.

One of my biggest woes is having to save composition ideas into "Pattern Generator" presets before I can use the global key and chord map. The data is there, I don't understand why the system needs to see it as a preset. One click to "freeze" or "bounce" into something the system can read as a "Pattern Generator" preset might be fluent but the following 2 points make it a "meh" for my workflow.

Then there is getting the composition ideas into Waveform (phrases and chord rhythm patterns) through the typing keyboard. That 4 step recording is major mire.

The typing keyboard on FL can be programmed to have 4 octaves (per key row) or one octave with four chord mutations. My latest "Typing to Piano Keys" file has one octave of sus2 sus4 triad traid7th for the G# Minor progression.
Unfortunately, everything has to be programmed in a script type file; which can take half hour to an hour. That means it's "locked" to that setup and any changes have to be made in the script. So, my next target key A# Maj/Min all have to be re-scripted.
Additionally, there is no velocity per note either.

Lastly, there is only that line tool for programming dynamics and no strum/sweep.

I'm surprised this thread is so active.