Disadvantages of DAWs in comparison to others

[machinesworking]

To be fair Reaper pre v6 was just dog shit automation wise, especially editing, it's leaps and bounds better in 6. Still has a long way to go though. That and comping are what killed my enthusiasm with Reaper, beyond that I pimped it out in a way that really appeals to me. Plus, the other old school DAWs I own Logic and Digital Performer have Clip views, Reapers is a piss poor script.

Maybe I've missed something in v6 but wasn't aware of major changes to the automation, I'll have a google (in my defence, only upgraded a couple of weeks back )

I've tried some scripts for clip functionality but ultimately if I intended heavy loop/clip action (rare for me) I fire up Live, much simpler.

It was literally only point automation pre v6, and I really hated the way they implemented reshaping those points, too easy to have it go south unless you wen point by point. V6 is much better.

[wuworld]

if I'm more of a modern music producer I would look at-FL, Logic X, and Ableton. These seem to be the top three. For mixing/mastering Pro Tools.

But depends on what you are doing.

For "modern" (read electronic) music I would put Bitwig and Logic at the top, and include Reason in your list as well.

For mixing/mastering the old school DAWs in general: PT, DP, Cubase, Logic, Reaper, and Studio One.

For film: Cubase, DP, Logic. (Live sort of in there for video DJ work, PT sort of in there for ingrained in the process reasons.)

Live performance: Live, DP, Bitwig.

For production work (i.e. templates for TV shows, VEP set ups etc.): DP, Nuendo/Cubase, Reaper, Logic.

I don't know Sonar well enough to evaluate it's place, and Studio One could be misrepresented as well. The other ones I feel familiar enough with to be comfortable with this layout.

Studio One needs to figure out what it wants to do. When a pro producer you interview tells you that the engineers/producers in the industry don't know what Studio One is that's a problem. If you their were to be a survey on what daw's currently are used for most of the hits or the industry in general it would be logic, fl, and ableton. No modern music producer in the biggest genre's (electronic/hip hop) use cubase, DP, and others like that. Some do of course, but not as much as the three DAW's I mentioned.

[machinesworking]

if I'm more of a modern music producer I would look at-FL, Logic X, and Ableton. These seem to be the top three. For mixing/mastering Pro Tools.

But depends on what you are doing.

For "modern" (read electronic) music I would put Bitwig and Logic at the top, and include Reason in your list as well.

For mixing/mastering the old school DAWs in general: PT, DP, Cubase, Logic, Reaper, and Studio One.

For film: Cubase, DP, Logic. (Live sort of in there for video DJ work, PT sort of in there for ingrained in the process reasons.)

Live performance: Live, DP, Bitwig.

For production work (i.e. templates for TV shows, VEP set ups etc.): DP, Nuendo/Cubase, Reaper, Logic.

I don't know Sonar well enough to evaluate it's place, and Studio One could be misrepresented as well. The other ones I feel familiar enough with to be comfortable with this layout.

Studio One needs to figure out what it wants to do. When a pro producer you interview tells you that the engineers/producers in the industry don't know what Studio One is that's a problem. If you their were to be a survey on what daw's currently are used for most of the hits or the industry in general it would be logic, fl, and ableton. No modern music producer in the biggest genre's (electronic/hip hop) use cubase, DP, and others like that. Some do of course, but not as much as the three DAW's I mentioned.

You're making an assumption that all DAWs are going for the same market. DP for instance targets film, TV, and studio work. Pro Tools clearly targets big recording studios. Neither need to, or express any desire to corner the electronic and hip hop market and frankly they don't have to. Cubase is the same, it targets recording studios and film, TV.

Logic, Bitwig, Live, FL all target electronic and hip hop. People like you that drop terms like "pro producer". I would be surprised if half the people visiting this site use the term producer to describe themselves even. I'm not pointing this out in any derogatory way, I'm saying the target audience for various DAWs is vastly different.

I'm on the Bitwig, DP, Logic and Reaper facebook pages and it's night and day:

Reaper is mostly people who think of themselves as musicians first, rock, reggae etc. Home recording enthusiasts.

Logic is mostly hip hop Producers, film people.

Bitwig- Producers and electronic music nerds.

DP- mostly jazz, classicaly trained people, and people doing TV jingles and film music. A lot of trained musicians, older crowd etc.

Live is almost entirely electronic laptop producers.

These are just anecdotal, but the point is the audience is clearly different for each enough to where I don't feel unsafe using mostly DP and Bitwig, sure they have a smaller audience but it's rabidly loyal, and fills some specific niches.

It's an observation anyway, but people involved in popular music often come across like there's no other forms of music, or that DAWs can be used for them. The at home DAW using hip hop and electronic music producer is a huge market share for sure, but IMO it's not the most loyal or long term user, those genres don't tend to create life long musicians who still produce in their 60's.

[jancivil]

Steinberg has been making particular moves in adding features designed to flatter and bring in the 'producer' of 'electronic music' sort of customer.
I kvetched about one of them on their forum, it used to be double-clicking a note brought the Note Expression editor up. Now it deletes the note, and to get to NE means a menu. And someone quickly producersplained it, it's because the laptop producer has to be able to do it all *live* and the delete button is apparently too inconvenient, as one's hands are otherwise occupied.

So the OG customer base there is being disprespected in favor of attracting new customers. It's not just the one thing, either.

[blafarm]

Agree with previous comments regarding Studio One's position in the market. While it serves a segment of the market that is looking for (relative) low cost and (relative) simplicity, the dev team is clearly aiming high. For example, the lack of support for any permutation of surround, and the lack of interest expressed for said support from the dev team, speaks volumes (pun intended).

[jonljacobi]

In re: Machinesworking. I do nothing but traditional play/record and I use Ableton Live simply because I find it the most efficient workflow. And fixing a couple of off-time notes doesn't get any easier. I find most of the others massive overkill. All the DAWs are so close in abilities that I pretty much go with what gets me from point a to point b the quickest.

Jancivil, I haven't used Cubase since 10, but I have noticed all sorts of features cropping up in the DAWs aimed at button pushers and note painters who show up in the forums requesting these features. Companies need to make money, so...

At some point, I hope that the DAW vendors realize that one-size-can't-fit-all, and start working more towards full customization. Anyone else remember when you could edit Cubase's menus? Reaper still allows this, but I can't think of any others.

[machinesworking]

In re: Machinesworking. I do nothing but traditional play/record and I use Ableton Live simply because I find it the most efficient workflow.

Just to be clear I wasn't saying that any of the DAWs can't be used for a particular kind of music because xyz is the main audience, mostly pointing out that a DAW not catering to pop and hip hop is not an indication of it's immanent demise.

I do a combination of traditional recording and hard quantizing, sound design in terms of how I write so any DAW will do really. I bounce between Bitwig and DP mostly.

[machinesworking]

Steinberg has been making particular moves in adding features designed to flatter and bring in the 'producer' of 'electronic music' sort of customer.
I kvetched about one of them on their forum, it used to be double-clicking a note brought the Note Expression editor up. Now it deletes the note, and to get to NE means a menu. And someone quickly producersplained it, it's because the laptop producer has to be able to do it all *live* and the delete button is apparently too inconvenient, as one's hands are otherwise occupied.

So the OG customer base there is being disprespected in favor of attracting new customers. It's not just the one thing, either.

That's more or less what made me go back to DP from Logic. It was even less useful of a switch, they decided that hidden tracks should be the same for the mixing and arrangement windows and hardwired them, so an aux track you never automate must be visible in the Arrange if you want be able to see the track in the Mixer. "Upgrading" from 8 to X they decided to make a mess of the Tools pallet as well, it's just weird now, doesn't seem to be any way to access them by a separate key command, you either call up the pallet with T then fire a contextual command, or set up a secondary cursor with the one you use the most...

There's a little of this in DP now, but I feel like they're being cautious about it at least. They added in a Clip feature like Live which takes over looping functions which has a lot of older customers mad, but looping was really really bad in DP before, just an ancient cumbersome method.

Also "producersplained", brilliant!

[rageix]

Steinberg has been making particular moves in adding features designed to flatter and bring in the 'producer' of 'electronic music' sort of customer.
I kvetched about one of them on their forum, it used to be double-clicking a note brought the Note Expression editor up. Now it deletes the note, and to get to NE means a menu. And someone quickly producersplained it, it's because the laptop producer has to be able to do it all *live* and the delete button is apparently too inconvenient, as one's hands are otherwise occupied.

So the OG customer base there is being disprespected in favor of attracting new customers. It's not just the one thing, either.

I appreciate the changes they've made. Because of the changes in Cubase 11, I picked up a copy.

It's funny the talk of disrespecting the OG customer base, same stuff was happening with Studio One where people were not happy they were adding more features in 4 and 5 that favored electronic and hip hop producers. But you know those kind of features sell copies, and the more people that use the software the more it can be developed and really it's a win win for everyone I think.

[machinesworking]

I appreciate the changes they've made. Because of the changes in Cubase 11, I picked up a copy.

It's funny the talk of disrespecting the OG customer base, same stuff was happening with Studio One where people were not happy they were adding more features in 4 and 5 that favored electronic and hip hop producers. But you know those kind of features sell copies, and the more people that use the software the more it can be developed and really it's a win win for everyone I think.

I think she described perfectly why it matters to her, and it's not really at all relevant what you said about the situation. If a DAWs workflow is changed for the worse for you and your needs, then no, more customers for the DAW developer, and new features (that you may or may not need, or want), is not win win for you, so conversely it's not win win for everyone.

[ghettosynth]

I appreciate the changes they've made. Because of the changes in Cubase 11, I picked up a copy.

It's funny the talk of disrespecting the OG customer base, same stuff was happening with Studio One where people were not happy they were adding more features in 4 and 5 that favored electronic and hip hop producers. But you know those kind of features sell copies, and the more people that use the software the more it can be developed and really it's a win win for everyone I think.

I think she described perfectly why it matters to her, and it's not really at all relevant what you said about the situation. If a DAWs workflow is changed for the worse for you and your needs, then no, more customers for the DAW developer, and new features (that you may or may not need, or want), is not win win for you, so conversely it's not win win for everyone.

I think that he was saying that the long term viability of the product is a win-win for everyone, despite the fact that all features may not be to their liking, even his.

You really can't disagree with that. Cakewalk got lucky, luckier than, for example, Logic for PC users. I still have the serial port dongle and the manual somewhere.

I wasn't that happy when Reaktor 5.5 went to the more contemporary SDI U/I, but I'm happy for the further development of the product.

[machinesworking]

I think that he was saying that the long term viability of the product is a win-win for everyone, despite the fact that all features may not be to their liking, even his.

You really can't disagree with that. Cakewalk got lucky, luckier than, for example, Logic for PC users. I still have the serial port dongle and the manual somewhere.

I wasn't that happy when Reaktor 5.5 went to the more contemporary SDI U/I, but I'm happy for the further development of the product.

In your examples is your answer though. Logic is developing at a fast rate, the AI in it is not to be matched by any DAW out there, but it's ascension has casualties, namely full ownership by a single platform developer with deep pockets, so either buckle and get a mac, or move on. There are people that think that's a choice so win win since it's just money, a computer and your time learning a new OS. <- I'm sure you would disagree and rightly so. The same thing applies to any drastic change to a DAW that you used all the time. A while ago Finale cut movie support for various other improvements that leave people going to a new score app.

I sincerely doubt Cubase is gaining massive amounts of customers by complying to FL Studio users demands though. I mean it's possible, but IMO Cubase, Pro Tools and DP all are going to be thought of as super old school complicated DAWs, no matter how many loops they attach to a purchase. In the case of Cubase and DP I personally think they just need to cement their place as total package DAWs, no need to look elsewhere etc.

Plus, let's be fair here, Gibson ruins everything they buy, Cakewalk basically got shanghaied. Compared to Steinberg getting with Yamaha right?

[jancivil]

The development of Cubase has produced broken features which were broken in making the new features, definitely no winning here to be experienced.
So for some producah to have that convenience, since they're so incredibly busy they can't quite get to a delete button, it slows me down, concretely, and cumulatively, such a win goes strictly the one way.

The bezier curve concept in Key Editor (piano roll). Nice feature. At "maintenance update" .1 immediately I began seeing an error tellling me that this feature wasn't available in tracks set to channel = Any. When I wasn't in a track set to Any. When I wasn't in Key Editor at all. Doing any edit whatsoever.
Currently (well, before I set it back to .0), I have it set to establish a new node as Ramp, and half the time (no exag) it fails to. The bizarro world error mostly has abated (this is something I deleted preferences behind countless times).
NB: they broke this in a Maintenance Update. This is not maintenance.

minimize extended rant
This is brave new world stuff, I'm not obsessing on minutia, they're breaking things hastefully. They've redesigned the one internal plugin I've relied on, Frequency so majorly I need to extensively read the manual (if it's documented). To do no-brainer moves, you can't just playback and manipulate a knob to automate it after instantiating it. Certainly a more powerful tool but I don't see these kind of changes will have been adopted by people who have a concept of its use like at all.

[jancivil]

'the long term viability' is improved by breaking features in favor of idiotic features - double click to delete note, which was producersplained well enough to me, alright - not an argument I'm falling for in the least. They're going to go broke unless they pander as hard as they can to what to me coulda just been a stereotype (but not even a joke) of lameness... sure, ok, whatever

At this juncture I feel I cannot update it, I'm not going to be interested in the .5 for 99 bucks, not going to be looking at 12 should I live so long, their development can stall and 11.0.0 be as viable as it gets for me, because pragmatism.

[ghettosynth]

I think that he was saying that the long term viability of the product is a win-win for everyone, despite the fact that all features may not be to their liking, even his.

You really can't disagree with that. Cakewalk got lucky, luckier than, for example, Logic for PC users. I still have the serial port dongle and the manual somewhere.

I wasn't that happy when Reaktor 5.5 went to the more contemporary SDI U/I, but I'm happy for the further development of the product.

In your examples is your answer though. Logic is developing at a fast rate,

They're just examples. It is a win for Reaktor to have more popularity, even though I don't like it as much as the antiquated and unpopular MDI interface.

I sincerely doubt Cubase is gaining massive amounts of customers by complying to FL Studio users demands though.

Well, you know of one in this thread, you responded to them. You also don't know that is the reason that they made the change. I doubt that it is, I suspect that, like my Reaktor MDI example, the changed behavior is appreciated by a majority of users and is just viewed as better and more contemporary U/X design.

I personally think they just need to cement their place as total package DAWs, no need to look elsewhere etc.

Perhaps that is what they're doing. Perhaps by adopting a more contemporary workflow change that they're trying to avoid being seen as outdated. Reaktor is a great example here. I couldn't give two shits about front panel cables, but that's what you need to do to seem like a modern modular environment.

In any case, it's a strategy, and they're betting that it's going to win and, if it does, and they stay in business, that is a win-win, just like it is with Reaktor.