Disadvantages of DAWs in comparison to others

[JoseC.]

Cakewalk - in my opinion this one is even worst than Cubase in that matter. Tons of windows and icons right away. Just because of that I can't recommend this one to anyone, even that this is the best free DAW on the market - feature wise.

Your opinion is 11 years obsolete. Cakewalk abandoned the "tons of windows and icons" paradigm in 2010 with Sonar X1, much to the chagrin of diehard users who then hated the change, and introduced the then called Skylight interface, that is not much different to most of the others DAWs (except, of course, Cubase).

[chk071]

Dunno. Cakewalk is still quite a feature beast. Just take a look at all the stuff in the top bar.

[Vortifex]

Edited

[megadude]

Your argument lacks...Logic.

Reason:

There is no reason, but there is a risk of going to jail for treason should you try and escape from it.

Cubase:

There is no base, no jets, helicopters, tanks, or troops provided which you can have in your back garden.

Studio One:

There is no studio, no cameras, or a hot female weather presenter provided with the package.

Pro Tools:

There are no tools like Black and Decker power drills, workbench, or hacksaws provided.

FLStudio:

There is no studio, just lots of cereal boxes provided, I'd much prefer a hamster... one which is alive.

They all lack something that the other doesn't have.

[JoseC.]

Dunno. Cakewalk is still quite a feature beast. Just take a look at all the stuff in the top bar.

I understood that the comment about "windows and icons" was about the interface, that used to be like that but changed to a single window UI by Sonar X1.

[pixel85]

Cakewalk - in my opinion this one is even worst than Cubase in that matter. Tons of windows and icons right away. Just because of that I can't recommend this one to anyone, even that this is the best free DAW on the market - feature wise.

Your opinion is 11 years obsolete. Cakewalk abandoned the "tons of windows and icons" paradigm in 2010 with Sonar X1, much to the chagrin of diehard users who then hated the change, and introduced the then called Skylight interface, that is not much different to most of the others DAWs (except, of course, Cubase).

Yeah sure. I have it installed on my laptop. The top bar/window is even more clogged than Sonar X1.
For me, it's the messiest big DAW currently available on the market. Idk. Maybe such a mess is a standard now. In recent years the only DAWs that I worked with are Cubase, PT, Live and Studio One. None of them is as clogged as Cakewalk.

No wonder that, when someone asks for a first free DAW recommendation, more often people talk about LE or another limited version of Live or StudioOne, then eventually Cakewalk.
Sonar X1 wasn't as messy as currently Cakewalk is.

[jancivil]

I actually host very little in the DAW, Cubase [Pro, 11]. If I commit something to audio for whatever reason, I will plug a couple things in to process it (largely preferring offline, which is ideal in Cubendo workflow, can keep, can discard ad libitum), but it's very light use cases on top of just being audio, unless I port it to VE Pro as though an FX rack, which isn't that great of a thing to do anyway, it's inefficient to and usually there's another way

So more important for me than most of the considerations discussed here is how well does the DAW integrate with VE Pro. Cubase or Nuendo is the undeniable preference and the closest integration. Logic's awkward multitimbral situation was mentioned above, and it's a nightmare if you want to take advantage of the possibility for more than one MIDI port (up to 48, that's 48 x 16 channels) via the Environment and the workaround plugin 'Event Input' provided for Logic (& not-Cubase et al).
It's also a poorer integration with the other DAWs, requiring similarly torturous workarounds for what is in Cubendo a pretty simple matter.

[dupont]

My bad, I taught DAW meter showed 20%...wait, that doesn't change much, DAW core utilization and meters doesn't work like OS one anyways, if you overload one core it will pretty much crackle...

nah, extra load is relocated to other cores

[vurt]

if i press "r" does it record armed tracks?
yes.
ill take it thanks.

[JoseC.]

Cakewalk - in my opinion this one is even worst than Cubase in that matter. Tons of windows and icons right away. Just because of that I can't recommend this one to anyone, even that this is the best free DAW on the market - feature wise.

Your opinion is 11 years obsolete. Cakewalk abandoned the "tons of windows and icons" paradigm in 2010 with Sonar X1, much to the chagrin of diehard users who then hated the change, and introduced the then called Skylight interface, that is not much different to most of the others DAWs (except, of course, Cubase).

Yeah sure. I have it installed on my laptop. The top bar/window is even more clogged than Sonar X1.
For me, it's the messiest big DAW currently available on the market. Idk. Maybe such a mess is a standard now. In recent years the only DAWs that I worked with are Cubase, PT, Live and Studio One. None of them is as clogged as Cakewalk.

No wonder that, when someone asks for a first free DAW recommendation, more often people talk about LE or another limited version of Live or StudioOne, then eventually Cakewalk.
Sonar X1 wasn't as messy as currently Cakewalk is.

I don´t think that it is any "messier" than any other linear DAW, but hey, you are entitled to your peeves, so no argument here.

DAW.jpg

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studio-one-gui-full.png

[machinesworking]

Cubase (i still love it but) : audioengine drop out when adding a new track

That one is a big advantage of Bitwig and Live to me. All the other DAWs I've used are likely to stutter or throw up a warning when adding a new instrument or audio tract etc. The uninterrupted audio engine that truly lives up to it, but at least in those DAWs you pay for it with higher CPU usage.

So make up your mind

Because that's the price of Bitwig being "CPU pig" (which it really isn't), i.e. a single realtime buffer, instead of a hybrid / double one.

Bitwig a cpu hog? It's probably one of the lightest.

Bitwig and Live are by far the most CPU intensive hogs on my system. The three old school DAWs loaded here: Logic, Digital Performer and Reaper all get from 25-40% more CPU overhead in tests than the two "uninterrupted audio engine" DAWs get. There's no way to deny it, both these DAWs use extra CPU overhead to make sure you don't get dropouts and glitches when heavily messing with the interface, adding VSTs etc. etc. Personally it's an apples and oranges thing, there are times when I don't want to deal with a fussy DAW and times when I don't want to deal with managing CPU in a song.

[machinesworking]

Any criticism of anything is in the end personal preference, but you can glean objective truth from it.

It's not. e.g. Criticising a Reliant Robin for being unstable in corners is a simple fact, born of it only having three wheels.

Sure you can find use cases where the statement isn't true, holes in my point, but my point wasn't to make a sweeping argument, but to make an argument about the subject at hand. Like you mention DAWs these days are all ridiculously good, there's not one out there I couldn't write in. It's the details, where the weaknesses and strong points of that DAW are that will shape your subjective opinion of the experience using that DAW. Your opinion about a DAW may not be mine, but if you share it I will get an understanding of where it shines and where it's weak. For instance DP does SysEx really really well, if that's important to you in a DAW getting Live or Bitwig is probably the wrong way to go.
Or to use your car analogy, maybe it being unstable in corners isn't the big of a deal to you and there's some part of the car you like, so you glean objective truth from the criticism, even if personally you don't think it's a deal breaker. Like how some people don't care that Reaper has a funky GUI and takes a while to tweak to your liking.

DP and Bitwig win that game with their super fast search and select feature you don't even have to remember the key command, just the name that DAW decided to call that function..

I hate that kind of stuff because it makes people lazy. I work with a generation of artists who have no idea where any effect or plug-in resides within the folder structure of After Effects. They rely 100% on the search function and to me that means they never really learn the application and, as a result, they don't think the same way as those of us who learned the software before that search function was added. Because of that they are much worse at problem solving and, for my money, our job is all about solving problems, so they are measurably worse at their jobs.

The fact you can instantly recall and fire off a command does not prevent you from learning the command, the shortcut is also shown in both those DAWs, that's how I use it. Plus there's the fact that there will be commands you use maybe once a month or less, rather than spending a couple minutes looking it up, (because at that frequency you're never learning it), it takes 4 second to type it into the run command, then fire it.

[jancivil]

It's a whinging kind of a topic, why whinge about the whinging

I didn't even know that was a word the first several times I saw it here, figured it was a misspelled whining. Which it may well be for all I'm going to notice.

I decided some years ago to ignore a lot of feature bragging or dissing or basically not follow things so closely to where you covet things you never knew about til today. It's a balancing act. It's good to know from 'Note Expression', and I do conceptualize certain things by that paradigm now, but when it was brand new I hadn't noticed a need in me to have discrete pitch bend etc per note in a part, because I'm so frequently dealing in a monophonic instrument, anyfuckingway. BUT! There is new material to be got, only this way. IE: only this way because the idea occurs 'this way'. But I did not buy Cubase 6(.5) for it (or 7 or 8 ).

So, one gets a bit addicted to things. I'm getting used to the ramp curve in controller lanes, I never cared about it before I had it in my hands as it were. As a feature request, I found 'bezier curves' annoying really.
I've got used to having the marker track and timeline nodes in Key Editor. So with these little things missing, you go 'ok this thing sucks'. it's normal. We're all ok

[MuzikFreq]

Cubase (i still love it but) : audioengine drop out when adding a new track

That one is a big advantage of Bitwig and Live to me. All the other DAWs I've used are likely to stutter or throw up a warning when adding a new instrument or audio tract etc. The uninterrupted audio engine that truly lives up to it, but at least in those DAWs you pay for it with higher CPU usage.

So make up your mind

Because that's the price of Bitwig being "CPU pig" (which it really isn't), i.e. a single realtime buffer, instead of a hybrid / double one.

Bitwig a cpu hog? It's probably one of the lightest.

Bitwig and Live are by far the most CPU intensive hogs on my system. The three old school DAWs loaded here: Logic, Digital Performer and Reaper all get from 25-40% more CPU overhead in tests than the two "uninterrupted audio engine" DAWs get. There's no way to deny it, both these DAWs use extra CPU overhead to make sure you don't get dropouts and glitches when heavily messing with the interface, adding VSTs etc. etc. Personally it's an apples and oranges thing, there are times when I don't want to deal with a fussy DAW and times when I don't want to deal with managing CPU in a song.

How old of a machine are you using and plugins are you using? My i5 laptop has 0 issues with cpu load with bitwig.
You on a stone tablet?

[machinesworking]

How old of a machine are you using and plugins are you using? My i5 laptop has 0 issues with cpu load with bitwig.
You on a stone tablet?

Christ? no offense but learn how to have a conversation. Red Herring fallacies are debate 101.
You coming back questioning my computer is nonsense. No matter what computer you use, this statement is patently false.

Bitwig a cpu hog? It's probably one of the lightest.

Bitwig and Live both use more CPU than Logic, Reaper, Cubase, Studio One, DP, etc. etc. by a noticeable amount, there's no defending what you said, it's dead wrong, the end.