Single DAW feature that made your jaw drop?

[antic604]

Normally I rave about Bitwig here and it's awesome, but one thing that probably stunned me the most - once I finally understood its power... - is Studio One's Track Transform paired with Play Overlaps.

So imagine I have a simple bassline sequence:

• 3x 2-bar riff (green)
• 1x 2-bar turnaround (blue)
• the synth patch I'm using has delay FX so the echoes naturally extend beyond the clip

I've transformed it to audio to save on CPU but I realised, that instead of having the turnaround as a 4th clip in sequence I want it to be 3rd. Normally I'd have to go back to MIDI, change the order and re-bounce. Not in Studio One, though! When transforming the track to audio I can enable an option to keep the tails.

So now - because Studio One can play overlapping audio clips - I can just rearange the transformed elements and they'll sound properly, incl. delay tails:

[legendCNCD]

Live 10's https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/artic ... pture-MIDI Capture MIDI has been godsent from Germany.

[antic604]

Live 10's https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/artic ... pture-MIDI Capture MIDI has been godsent from Germany.

Yeah. It also seems to be more intelligent than Studio One's or Cubase's where they simply give you a clip to edit, whereas Live tries to cleverly capture a usable loop (but still has material before & after, if you need it).

[morphex]

I remember being really bummed when I found out that Camel Audio was closing up shop. So as a longtime Logic Pro X user, I was thrilled when Apple finally started implementing their versions of Alchemy, CamelPhat and CamelSpace as native Logic plug-ins.

Now I think Logic Pro X has the best bang for the buck when you take into consideration these additions to an already incredible suite of instruments and effects.

Another creative milestone for me was when Ableton Introduced Max For Live. I’m still getting to know Ableton but I feel like a kid in a candy store with some of the most weird and sonically-sophisticated M4L devices I’ve been able to find.

Spectral, granular, additive, wavetable... it’s all available and a lot of them are free or inexpensive. It’s opened up a whole new world for me in terms of designing sounds.

[Psuper]

The first time I recorded my voice and piano on one tape and played it back. Only other thing that rivaled that feeling of AWE was my first vocoding session. Both 'analog' of course, but nothing since gave any jaw-drop moment.

[ozinga]

When I decided to change a chord from minor to major of a guitar track and had no access to the player; Studio One perfectly changed it by using the chord track. That was an awesome moment

Again Studio One, dragging midi data to audio track and back to the midi track with all edits kept intact!

That made 2

[pbognar]

Yes - Studio One's ability to have polyphonic audio follow the chord track.

Also - Cubase's Live MIDI Input Transform - snapping the MIDI data to the chord track chords or scales.

[apoclypse]

Live 10's https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/artic ... pture-MIDI Capture MIDI has been godsent from Germany.

Yeah. It also seems to be more intelligent than Studio One's or Cubase's where they simply give you a clip to edit, whereas Live tries to cleverly capture a usable loop (but still has material before & after, if you need it).

Hmm. I don't know if it's smarter or not, but S1 retro records per track. Meaning I play away on the bass track, move on to a synth track, maybe mess around with the piano and it captures all of that per track. I can just go back to the bass track hit the button and all the bass stuff is there, the synth track the same etc. I find that more powerful than Ableton's kind of all or nothing approach (where it only keeps track of retro record globally). As for the looping. S1 is a linear DAW so they don't prioritize loops. I've seen retro record in other software (Logic) and once again S1 just does it smarter. They think about the problem and give you a more versatile more complete option.

[Synthack]

.........

[voidhead23]

Live's Session View. Not obscure or new, but it totally changed how i write music and how much music i'm able to finish, and i don't even make loop-based/electronic stuff (more on the metal side of things). But being able to have a non-linear sketchpad to work on when you maybe only have a couple riffs to start with was a revelation.

Slicing and the Warp Modes in Live's Simpler was another one. Figuring out i could mangle guitar riffs in a granular way...wow.

On the negative side of things...Live's CPU use and latency/recording paradigm.

[dune_rave]

Reaper.
Flexibility, deep customization, small size.
You can install this daw within a minute!
Comes with no samples and instruments
so ideal for those who prefer using dedicated 3rd party vsti synths.

[dune_rave]

Fl Studio.
When I saw ZGameeditor visualizer, then later they have made it even better.

[sQeetz]

Ableton Live's feature of just jamming around and all of a sudden realizing: "that was nice!" and having the option to take that jamming and put it in a clip and have the right BPM guessed by it...
Don't use Live, though, anymore because of issues....

[antic604]

Ableton Live's feature of just jamming around and all of a sudden realizing: "that was nice!" and having the option to take that jamming and put it in a clip and have the right BPM guessed by it...
Don't use Live, though, anymore because of issues....

Exactly - this is what I meant by it being smart / intelligent as opposed to other DAWs that just dump last minute of MIDI on you.

[sQeetz]

Exactly - this is what I meant by it being smart / intelligent as opposed to other DAWs that just dump last minute of MIDI on you.

Yupp. Logic also has that, FL also has it, but no one does it as elegant as Live