DP 11 is out

[machinesworking]

I find the way Logic and Bitwig handle multi instruments to be profoundly unintuitive

In what way is Bitwig's handling of multi-timbral instruments unintuitive? Or are you still insisting your out of date knowledge is current?

One, there is no vanilla MIDI tack in Bitwig. I’m old school, so it took me a while to figure out to use an Instrument track, especially already knowing that you need a plug in to address hardware, then there was the choice between track and plug in, both pointing to a track named Kontakt and in the plug in out also named Kontakt. I don’t know when they added it as a choice in the track itself as opposed to the information panel, but when I was learning Bitwig the only video I found on it only showed how to access it from that panel.

According to you, when you have a midi (instrument) track that you want to send to a multi-timbral instrument like Kontakt, selecting Kontakt and the midi channel right on that track is profoundly unintuitive... Not sure it is even possible to exaggerate more than that.

Selecting I/O options directly on the track has always been in Bitwig. You can also select I/O in the Inspector, but that is an option, not a necessity. You obviously just don't know Bitwig very well.

Christ? we are talking about learning a program, not where I am with it now. You and others have taken the stance that DP is super hard to figure out at first, and I have been noting that when you don’t know a DAW it’s never that straight forward. Claiming I don’t know Bitwig when I’m talking about learning Bitwig vs learning DP etc. is profoundly counter productive. Of course when I started in Bitwig I didn’t know it…

[medienhexer]

In DPs case a single VEP plug in can access over 700 midi tracks compared to the CPU hit that all of those individual multi instrument tracks creates in Logic or I’m sure Bitwig.

I‘m not sure it’s a fair comparison. One feature I would love in Logic is DP’s automatic rendering of tracks to audio. My understanding is that it’s completely transparent (you don’t even know it‘s happening). So of course, with the majority of Instrument tracks not being rendered in real time but played back as audio, that frees a lot of resources.

And didn’t DP also implement for AU the feature that makes VST3 interesting (no CPU load while no audio is processed)? That’s a huge factor as well. Usually, to avoid denormalization, many plugins process low level noise all the time. So in Logic and the others, a plugin never sleeps.

As for racks - I think the basics are very similar to Track Stacks/Folders, aren’t they?

DPs PreGen as they call their buffer rendering is similar in CPU to Logic. From tests I’ve done the hit is only maybe at most 10% worse in Logic. In terms of racks, no Track Stacks are pretty unique to Logic and Reaper I believe, having folders implement master faders etc. is pretty cool, in DP folders are vanilla space saving devices.

If you meant V-Racks that’s something completely different, it’s a virtual rack of gear that exist outside of the individual Sequences, so it can address all versions of your song, or you can play guitar or a VSTi over your entire set of songs.

Yes, you’re right I was thinking of V-Racks. I understand that the implementation as a rack is different from Track Stacks. What I was wondering is - you can instantiate your Kontakt on Stack level and have sequences in sub tracks trigger notes in Kontakt, I think even including MIDI Channel.

Maybe I‘m confusing that with an Instrument track with several sub tracks, visually, they’re very similar.



But this way, you can have multiple sequences in multiple tracks triggering one instance of Kontakt, which is in a track instead of a rack, serving the same use case. But apart from the „t“, is there a big difference between those?

[pinki]

DP is not difficult to learn: you have a midi track and and an instrument track. You route your keyboard to the input of the midi track and the output of the midi track to the instrument. Er ..that's it.
Then there are audio tracks as per every other DAW.
Yes the midi tracks appear in the mixer unnecessarily, but you just use a shortcut not to have them appear.
This method has advantages and disadvantages to other methods that have their advantages and disadvantages.

The problems with DP do not derive from its topology believe me!

[xbitz]

and in the 10.1 updates, finally found the clip looping, be proud of me

groove3 videos are quite good ones and the 10.1 updates were really nice
https://www.groove3.com/tutorials/Digit ... -Explained

[jonljacobi]

It took me quite a while, and about three tries to "get" Live. DP strikes me as a two-timer. But I go back to the Atari 400 (further actually if you want to count my IMSAI), so learning a new interface is not that big a deal if I'm motivated. I may wind up with the light version as I'm seriously contemplating the Ultralite MK5 interface but I'm not incredibly motivated.

[xbitz]

btw. the prerender stuff quite important can make MUX for ex. totally useless (if I have to wait 5-10 sec after every plugin window closing)

Pre-Gen⎘
Pre-Generation

What an innocent little menu item that is, but beneath it is a lot of tech. The menu offers you the option to run a plug-in in “Real Time”, but isn’t that how playback is done anyway? Not in DP!

DP by default tries to pre-render your tracks so that it doesn’t need to do so when you click play. This means that if you have no plugin windows open, and you’re not on an aux track, when you hit ‘play’ DP is likely just playing back a pre-rendered wave file of the track.

This feature can have drastic ramifications on how much CPU power you can use in a project. It’s basically automatic and dynamic freeze. When another DAW would be sitting there idly, DP is pre-genning (freezing sorta) your tracks. I believe that DP also saves data when you playback as well.

The resulting effect is that DP can run significantly larger projects compared to some other DAWs. Quite handy when you start going crazy with chunks!

https://www.admiralbumblebee.com/music/ ... ml#pre-gen

so worth to read docs and watching videos for sure there are tons of hidden gems in this DAW

[THE INTRANCER]

The biggest let downs are no thumbnail image browser and tiny old instrument and effect GUI's. It's also far far away from being intutive to use. It feels like Reaper, Mixcraft 9 and Cakewalk Sonar had a baby. Reapers complexity, Mixcrafts switchable and poorly designed skins, Mixcrafts and Cakewalks old plugins and Cakewalks generally configurable GUI albeit being more scalable. I guess you can chuck in Nuendo and Ableton in there as well... and perhaps Blender. I'm not sure what it is.. it's a bit like Frankenstein.

Active community help forums and support seems to be pretty much non-existent.

I think at the moment, it still needs a lot of work to bring things up to date, and to make things more intuitive and flexible in modern ways. It may need a few more years to get there... but it's hard to see people buying this and particularly with instruments and effects looking like they were created back in 2005.

[machinesworking]

The biggest let downs are no thumbnail image browser and tiny old instrument and effect GUI's. It's also far far away from being intutive to use. It feels like Reaper, Mixcraft 9 and Cakewalk Sonar had a baby. Reapers complexity, Mixcrafts switchable and poorly designed skins, Mixcrafts and Cakewalks old plugins and Cakewalks generally configurable GUI albeit being more scalable. I guess you can chuck in Nuendo and Ableton in there as well... and perhaps Blender. I'm not sure what it is.. it's a bit like Frankenstein.

Active community help forums and support seems to be pretty much non-existent.

I think at the moment, it still needs a lot of work to bring things up to date, and to make things more intuitive and flexible in modern ways. It may need a few more years to get there... but it's hard to see people buying this and particularly with instruments and effects looking like they were created back in 2005.

I’ve never been one for built in instruments, only Logic has some world class embedded instruments imo. The FX are quite good though, even if they’re from 1999.

There are only a couple places for community support, Motunation and a couple active facebook groups, Motuguru and MOTU Digital Performer. Motunation gets a bad rap but if you can put up with the rabble here at KVR you can put up with the old guy yelling at clouds pros over at motunation.

personally if I wasn’t already a fan, this update gives me what I want in a DAW, Clips, Articulation management, advanced movie support, advanced midi editing features, SysEx support, score editor, and Chunks which gives it great live performance features beyond just clips. Logic is it’s direct competition in terms of feature set, and for me Chunks makes the choice obvious. Plus i like that it supports Windows, AU, VST, VST3 etc.

[dmacintyre]

Easily the worst DAW ever created just got slightly less bad. Bravo?

[syntonica]

There are only a couple places for community support, Motunation and a couple active facebook groups, Motuguru and MOTU Digital Performer. Motunation gets a bad rap but if you can put up with the rabble here at KVR you can put up with the old guy yelling at clouds pros over at motunation.

Nothing wrong with Motunation, as long as you stick to DP and plain old music production. They just have very low tolerance for rabble and shenanigans. Those old guys yelling at clouds have forgotten more than most of us remember.

[machinesworking]

Nothing wrong with Motunation, as long as you stick to DP and plain old music production. They just have very low tolerance for rabble and shenanigans. Those old guys yelling at clouds have forgotten more than most of us remember.

Yep one of the worst offenders is actually pretty cool IRL, I'm friends with him on facebook, mad crazy good piano player, sharp tounge, get of my lawn! should be his sig!

[dayjob]

motunation is not bad. sometimes a bit evangelical but dedicated forums can be that way. i'd rather seek info on motunation than the Logic User Group forum (LUG). it's awful. i complained about apple once and called apple "jerks" or something for whatever apple type thing they did in regard to an update/upgrade and my account was suspended for using "profanity" and "bad language". which was hilarious. i think they're actual pearl clutching types over there. i never went back. youtube answered my questions.

[machinesworking]

Yes, you’re right I was thinking of V-Racks. I understand that the implementation as a rack is different from Track Stacks. What I was wondering is - you can instantiate your Kontakt on Stack level and have sequences in sub tracks trigger notes in Kontakt, I think even including MIDI Channel.

Maybe I‘m confusing that with an Instrument track with several sub tracks, visually, they’re very similar.



But this way, you can have multiple sequences in multiple tracks triggering one instance of Kontakt, which is in a track instead of a rack, serving the same use case. But apart from the „t“, is there a big difference between those?

Yes there's a huge difference. So this goes back to my debates here with people about the closed or weird nature of Logic in terms of how it address's MIDI to the same instrument. In Logic you're basically showing the same track multiple times in that video, if you come from older versions of Logic, or Cubase or Live or DP, this is super strange. Live and DP have vanilla MIDI tracks, it's just MIDI, and it can be routed input and output to most anything that inputs or outputs MIDI. In the instance shown in the video DP would have an Instrument track, and you could address multiple MIDI tracks to that instrument, visually IMO far less confusing. In fact in the case shown he points out that mute and solo are not useful for individual tracks because they're all the same track really, whereas in DP or Live this isn't the case, the MIDI tracks pointing to the instrument all have their own mutes and solos etc.

Back to V-Racks, they exist outside of your open sequence. They don't show up at all in your tracks, you can point MIDI, Audio and Aux tracks at them that exist in your song. It looks like a mixer and can host instruments, aux's and master faders.

So the reason for this is in DP you can load multiple songs(sequences), in the same open Project, that all can use the same set of V-racked instruments, aux's and master faders. This can make load times between songs near zero. So say you're scoring a film, you have a theme going on, and 90 minutes of music to work on. This allows you to set up a V-Rack with all of the Instruments you're using in that 90 minutes, then work on a single 5- 10 minute etc. part of the film, without waiting to load up a new project every time, or deal with a 90 minute timeline in your linear arrangement view.

Another example, you're working on a record, you load all songs into the same project in different Chunks, then feed them through the same master fader with your mastering plug in chain on it.

So V-Racks and Chunks work together to allow you to use the same instruments and FX across multiple songs or remixes of the same song etc.

[machinesworking]

motunation is not bad. sometimes a bit evangelical but dedicated forums can be that way. i'd rather seek info on motunation than the Logic User Group forum (LUG). it's awful. i complained about apple once and called apple "jerks" or something for whatever apple type thing they did in regard to an update/upgrade and my account was suspended for using "profanity" and "bad language". which was hilarious. i think they're actual pearl clutching types over there. i never went back. youtube answered my questions.

I agree. Logic Pro Help isn't too bad for that sort of thing though.

I'm pretty certain I'm going all in on DP though, So Logic etc. will be backup.
I'll still mess around in Bitwig and collaborate with Live, but I'm pretty happy with DP11 so far. I even found a free Cubase Expression map for East West Symphonic Orchestra, Tundra, Venus, Cinebrass, etc.

[pinki]

Motunation is a joke. A graveyard. Full of grumpy old men.

And that’s the thing with DP compared to something like Studio One, it’s got this permanent feeling of deadness.

Look at the last big update: DP10. In a sad and desperate attempt to ‘get down with the kids’ they added the worst version of a clip launcher possible that nobody was asking for or wanted. Meanwhile bugs going back years were not fixed.
And then once released, they do a quick 10.01 and 10.02 update to squash a few release bugs and then….nada… for over a year complete silence. It will be exactly the same for DP 11 too, because Motu do not care. That’s the thing, they really don’t care about DP. They stopped caring around DP 5.
What they do care about is their hardware. Software..Mach Five, BPM, Ethno, all abandonware. DP, almost abandonware.

Once I went over to Studio One I realised I had been part of some bizarre sect for the last decade. Not healthy.

But I sincerely hope DP11 is the beginning of a new chapter in Motu’s history and a new young and vibrant community forms around DP, a new forum run by Motu (or here on KVR) with constant communication from the devs, regular updates squashing bugs and responding to the new community. How exciting that would be!

Likely? No. Because Motu do ..not…care.

(just my personal rant based on my experience as a former fan!)