Mark Of The UNICORN - D1G1TAL PEFORMER 11

[machinesworking]

How is DP for hardware synth/external MIDI integration? The reason I’m asking is because MOTU is one of the few companies still making MIDI interfaces, and probably the most widely used.

Just to be clear I can't vouch for the PC side, different MIDI protocol on the OS level etc. but I have zero issues with my hardware synths. DP even includes MIDI commands for autotunning them. One advantage of Chunks (sequences in the same project), is you can send SysEx to your hardware synths in a separate sequence to permanently save patches in a project.

If you're thinking about the sort of thing that other DAWs do with "hardware instrument" tracks or plug ins, DP doesn't do that, but personally every single one of those I've used has some MIDI limitation or another that makes me have to create a separate MIDI track anyway.

MIDI wise in general it's rock solid.

[machinesworking]

I was a solid DP and PT user up through maybe mid 2000s. Stopped upgrading DP mainly due to cost vs time using, working with a partner who was a DP user and spending most of the time happily in PT even for midi. Got into Reaper on a lark in mid 2010s when I left the PT studio I was working at and couldn't rationalize the hefty cost of using PT as my home studio DAW. So it's been Reaper for a while. A great business model and very cost effective. Some obvious other good points. But a recent purchase of an Ultralite mk5 got me a license for Performer Lite and good lord am I thrilled to be back doing midi in Motu land and out of the ridiculous mess that Reaper midi is for tracking and editing. I could care less about how Reaper can shoot you to the moon and back if it takes 8 hours to edit piano performances that I can do in P Lite in 90 minutes. I'll probably keep upgrading Reaper for audio, but, and I've been all around the barn 100 times with posters in the Cockos Reaper board, I have no idea how anyone can do fine tuned performance editing in Reaper without wanting to shoot themselves in an hour. Beg as I have to be shown examples of it, all I'm ever directed to are videos where the music sounds like pushing the start button on a 1980 Casio keyboard, and the editing is substituting one echoing hh for another, and ironically on a 42" monitor. After mucking around in the midi paradigm in Reaper for years I'm happier than a pig in #### to be dancing through midi editing in P Lite! It is beyond most other DAWs in terms of intuitiveness and making sense. It's worth buying one of Motu's lowest level interfaces that is bundled with it just to have it, if one can deal with its audio restrictions. I may eventually end up getting back on the full DP train (at literally ten times the cost of a Reaper license) but after a month I have yet to hit up against the limitations of PL as far as midi work. I either export as midi when finished and import into Reaper or print the damn instruments as audio and import.

You pretty much nailed it. I spent about a year learning and using Reaper because I got into MPE instruments, and my DAWs DP and Live were lagging there. I think I spent more time reconfiguring every last dammed thing about the MIDI editor in Reaper than anything else, hands down the lamest least intuitive, and productive MIDI editor of any DAW I've used, and I'm not a fan of how Live does it either, but it's not as busted. Reaper is beyond fantastic with rendering options, and it's about as customizable as it gets, but MIDI editing in Reaper is just nasty, the other area where it's just terrible is comping, and people absolutely refuse to accept that as a fact.

IMO for what it's worth, DP is the great all in one DAW, yes there are areas where it could improve, but what DAW out there offers, Clips, decent comping, MIDI editing, articulation maps, SysEx, MPE, large template control, All three plug in formats on Mac, extended film scoring support etc. etc.

[Spitfire31]

I have used Performer/Digital Performer since the beginning of computers in the late 80s. I've tried other platforms over the years, including Protools, Logic, Cubase, Live.. and never found anything that I liked as much as DP. I use DP constantly every day to create all different kinds of music. I just released a track yesterday that shows the latest version of DP in action:

Nice one, Babz!

[EvilDragon]

but MIDI editing in Reaper is just nasty

Hmmm dunno. I agree the default setup is terrible, but it doesn't take much to adapt the mouse modifiers for a pretty smooth operation (can even reach FL Studio levels of editing smoothness in piano roll if one tries a bit).

and I'm not a fan of how Live does it either, but it's not as busted

Live's MIDI editor is just super severely limited by comparison. WTF are MIDI channels? WTF is sysex and 14-bit CCs? Event list? Notation? And it's just excruciatingly slow to edit in (for me), and no way to adapt it to how you want to work with it. But sure, Reaper does bias you towards "if it doesn't work how I want to, I can tell it how I want to work" so of course that's what it did to me, fully aware of that.

the other area where it's just terrible is comping, and people absolutely refuse to accept that as a fact

They actually relatively recently did a whole lot of work in that area, basically repurposing Free Item Positioning mode to give you takes as lanes as it usually is in many other DAWs. Should be pretty nice for swipe comping now!



As for DP, I remember trying out v10 and it was an absolute batshit unstable mess on Windows. And I don't trust them enough that they would sort it out since they were Mac-only for so long. It is really difficult to be more stable than Reaper... Also did they finally update those velocity bars being 1 px wide? That's insane.


I will say that it does have really nice features for orchestral composing. Chunks are pretty cool (basically similar to patterns+sequencer methodology of FL Studio, which is great for non-linear composing, which is a pretty important thing when you're writing to picture... which also explains why DP seems to be quite well regarded in heavy orchestral composing circles). But stability should be #1 priority IMO.

[spigmu]

But stability should be #1 priority IMO.

DP has had well documented stability issues with Windows, very true. But as a Mac user I've never found it less stable than anything else. They did make a commitment to crossing over to PC users after ages of OS X only, and clearly didn't do it well enough. But no stability issues for me on Macs over many versions, OSs and computers.

[dayjob]

DP can do all the thing s a DAW needs to do. it doesn't give it up easy but it's very powerful and if you enjoy a challenge it has a lot under the hood. it's very customizable.

it's kinda traditional in its layout in some ways and isn't going to give you anything like the grid in bitwig or max for live in ableton.. that being said it's very flexible when it comes to midi and audio editing.

it benefits from making templates of your most common workflows.

when Logic is $200 w/seemingly forever updates it's hard to look anywhere else if you're in the market for a DAW like that. still, i have and use DP and Logic.

[cryophonik]

How is DP for hardware synth/external MIDI integration? The reason I’m asking is because MOTU is one of the few companies still making MIDI interfaces, and probably the most widely used.

Just to be clear I can't vouch for the PC side, different MIDI protocol on the OS level etc. but I have zero issues with my hardware synths. DP even includes MIDI commands for autotunning them. One advantage of Chunks (sequences in the same project), is you can send SysEx to your hardware synths in a separate sequence to permanently save patches in a project.

If you're thinking about the sort of thing that other DAWs do with "hardware instrument" tracks or plug ins, DP doesn't do that, but personally every single one of those I've used has some MIDI limitation or another that makes me have to create a separate MIDI track anyway.

MIDI wise in general it's rock solid.

Seems like MOTU is missing opportunities to really set themselves apart from other DAWs. If you look at the way Presonus has integrated Studio One with their Quantum interfaces, it's pretty slick. MOTU should do something similar with DP and their line of audio and MIDI interfaces - i.e., integrate the control software for these devices right into the DAW itself and allow full control of the interfaces and connected devices at the track level. That could be very appealing to a lot of people.

[masterhiggins]

Not sure what their plan is with their instruments though. Machfive is no longer being developed as far as I’m aware yet they’re still selling it. If they haven’t addressed their plans then that’s a bit disturbing.

[cryophonik]

Not sure what their plan is with their instruments though. Machfive is no longer being developed as far as I’m aware yet they’re still selling it. If they haven’t addressed their plans then that’s a bit disturbing.

Yeah, they've always been horrendously slow with updates to their software instruments, not to mention that they're terrible at marketing them. It's funny, this reminded me that I still have a license for Ethno 2, but haven't installed it in years because it never worked right and rarely/never got updates. I wonder what the odds are that it works with my 2019 Mac?

[syntonica]

Not sure what their plan is with their instruments though. Machfive is no longer being developed as far as I’m aware yet they’re still selling it. If they haven’t addressed their plans then that’s a bit disturbing.

All of their instruments were developed by UVI, I believe. The version of Mach integrated into DP isn't bad, it just isn't really good either. They've also integrated a lot of the sample content from their other instruments. Just get Falcon instead.

[syntonica]

I wonder what the odds are that it works with my 2019 Mac?

Anything Big Sur or newer is right out! I'm sure their old instruments will be sent off to the cornfield to join Unisys soon enough.

[EvilDragon]

DP has had well documented stability issues with Windows, very true. But as a Mac user I've never found it less stable than anything else. They did make a commitment to crossing over to PC users after ages of OS X only, and clearly didn't do it well enough. But no stability issues for me on Macs over many versions, OSs and computers.

Yep, I'm fully aware that it's quite likely working solidly on Mac. But since I'm not a Mac user, I only care about how stable something is on Windows.

[machinesworking]

Hmmm dunno. I agree the default setup is terrible, but it doesn't take much to adapt the mouse modifiers for a pretty smooth operation (can even reach FL Studio levels of editing smoothness in piano roll if one tries a bit).

It took me a lot longer than your description to get Reaper to be anything like DP or Logic MIDI editing wise. There were still a few things that I wasn't able to change in it's implementation. I haven't messed with it in a while but I'm not much of a fan of the way it presents "items" when multi item MIDI editing either. There's lots to love about Reapers MIDI implementation, don't get me wrong, but out of the box, and for certain things it's kludgy compared to DP.

Live's MIDI editor is just super severely limited by comparison. WTF are MIDI channels? WTF is sysex and 14-bit CCs? Event list? Notation? And it's just excruciatingly slow to edit in (for me), and no way to adapt it to how you want to work with it. But sure, Reaper does bias you towards "if it doesn't work how I want to, I can tell it how I want to work" so of course that's what it did to me, fully aware of that.

Live and all the more "workflow" oriented DAWs give you the basics in a really thought out way usually, but that's all you get, the basics.

As for DP, I remember trying out v10 and it was an absolute batshit unstable mess on Windows. And I don't trust them enough that they would sort it out since they were Mac-only for so long. It is really difficult to be more stable than Reaper... Also did they finally update those velocity bars being 1 px wide? That's insane.

I will say that it does have really nice features for orchestral composing. Chunks are pretty cool (basically similar to patterns+sequencer methodology of FL Studio, which is great for non-linear composing, which is a pretty important thing when you're writing to picture... which also explains why DP seems to be quite well regarded in heavy orchestral composing circles). But stability should be #1 priority IMO.

Velocity bars got updated a few years ago. As for stability on Windows, IMO it's probably a matter of third party VSTs, even on Mac most of the time that's the issue. A major improvement IMO for DP would be to develop Bitwig's plug in sandboxing. In this case definitely not Reapers version. They recently decided to not make it universal and something you implement in the plug in window itself, which doesn't make any sense. When a plug in has a crash that takes out your system while you're using the GUI, you're probably going to want to just disable it completely from that DAW or OS, and when a plug in crashes randomly simply by being present in the DAW you're going to have to disable one by one all the plug ins in that session, plus the bonus of having crashes while you do this. To be fair to MOTU, I regularly talk with a few dozen DP Windows users and they're genuinely surprised that people think it's less stable than other Windows DAWs, which again points to plug ins. It's possible it's hardware, but that seems more likely to be sorted out etc.

In terms of them being Mac only to begin with, this is a red herring of sorts, nearly every plug in was developed first on Windows, barring Absynth, Altiverb, Zebra and a few others. NI is a good example, I did struggle for a few years with crashes in Mac OS with Reaktor and Kontakt, (not Abysnth obviously), but now they're as stable as any other plug in on Mac OS. I don't know if it is true on Windows, but I've found for the most part VST 3 to be the least stable format. The Mac version of DP allows VST 2, 3 and AU. I use all three because stability wise in various DAWs it will be a toss up sort of which is working the best, with VST 3 being the lest likely to be stable and used.

This brings up by proxy CLAP, IMO DP should be an early adopter, it didn't sound like it was more than being observed by them when I brought it up in a Zoom session with the MOTU guys, but I'm more than willing to push it with them. They were early adopters of AU for many of the same reasons that the Emagic team was even previous to their buyout, their own plug in standard didn't really take off, and VSTs on Mac at the time were badly ported and crash prone.

[machinesworking]

Not sure what their plan is with their instruments though. Machfive is no longer being developed as far as I’m aware yet they’re still selling it. If they haven’t addressed their plans then that’s a bit disturbing.

Yeah, they've always been horrendously slow with updates to their software instruments, not to mention that they're terrible at marketing them. It's funny, this reminded me that I still have a license for Ethno 2, but haven't installed it in years because it never worked right and rarely/never got updates. I wonder what the odds are that it works with my 2019 Mac?

To you and all of you mentioning MOTU instruments, yeah I agree, MOTU should be letting us know that they're deprecated, it's not a logical thing to do it the way they do it, where the product gets ignored then drops out of site, my least favorite thing about them.

In terms of using your libraries, UVI workstation will load them, get the oldest version they have on their site. Specifically the MachFive 3 libraries are all attached to an older version of the iLok license and will not work in the latest version of UVI workstation. They do work in the old version though, even in AU Rosetta on a Apple Silicon Mac.

[the latest version of the iLok License Manager works just fine, it's the versions of UVI Workstation that must be the older version]

[EvilDragon]

As for stability on Windows, IMO it's probably a matter of third party VSTs, even on Mac most of the time that's the issue.

I'm not so sure. So every other DAW (for reference: Bitwig, FL20, S1v4, S1v5, Live 10/11, Maschine 2, Reason 11) I have had no problems with the same plugins I tested in DP? Suspicious. There were tons of things, from improperly drawn GUIs, to black screens, to outright crashes when breathing on the thing. Just not confidence-instilling...

They recently decided to not make it universal and something you implement in the plug in window itself, which doesn't make any sense.

?

You always have the option to "Run as" when you right-click the plugin in the FX browser, without even loading the plugin. It also works on a multi-selection, too...