Disadvantages of DAWs in comparison to others

[MuzikFreq]

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.

The thing with reaper is that it skimps on a few things that stabilize the engine. I find I get sound issues easily with reaper even though it uses less cpu.
Also in my extensive testing, studio one and ableton are the same, bitwig is lower than ableton and studio one.
Also I don't use Mac so I have no idea on what Logic uses.

Also I don't know how any daw works on a mac.
At least on PC bitwig is super light

[ghettosynth]

Reaper is amazeballs!

[machinesworking]

The thing with reaper is that it skimps on a few things that stabilize the engine. I find I get sound issues easily with reaper even though it uses less cpu.
Also in my extensive testing, studio one and ableton are the same, bitwig is lower than ableton and studio one.
Also I don't use Mac so I have no idea on what Logic uses.

Also I don't know how any daw works on a mac.
At least on PC bitwig is super light

Thanks for not following down the path you were going in debate style wise. I truly appreciate it.

Some things IMO can't ring true with what you're reporting here though. I don't use Studio One, but most people report it as being right up there track count wise. It flatly sounds like Reaper isn't set up the way it should be on your system, which is more Reapers fault than yours IMO.

Over the years it's pretty straightforward though: DAWs specifically Live and Bitwig do not use the traditional method of getting higher track counts, which is (and I'm sure I'm butchering the actual science of it, but that's not the point), essentially a playback engine and a record enabled or "play" engine. So your reported latency setting of 64 say is actually closer to 256 or so in any track in Reaper, DP, Studio One, Logic, Cubase etc. etc. What this does is allow the DAW to render the soft synth ahead of time in I dunno? probably an insignificant amount of RAM. You get typically 25-40% higher track counts in projects with this method, the caveat is that anything done to the system during this can spike or mess with a high track count project. The best example is Reaper, the difference in track count between having the record armed on and off is night and day. Reaper on Windows or Mac will typically have slightly higher track counts than the other DAWs, but start turning on the record button on tracks with soft synths and it plummets, it in that scenario on tests I've done fares worse than the rest. If you're looking to play three or four soft synths at the same time all ELP prog rock style Reaper will not be for you.
Contrast this with Live and Bitwig, there's almost no difference between record enabled tracks and ones with it turned off in terms of track count, neither do an adjustable buffer or pre render audio to give back to the system and one way that shows is a higher CPU usage and much much lower incidence of spikes, crackles etc. when editing audio or adding soft synths etc. while the sequencer is playing.

Take a beast like Repro-5 and you can test this yourself. The only caveat is the oddity of various optimizations that DAW and plug in developers can do that make for sometimes some happy pairings. Bitwig for instance gets great performance out of the combination of the Xeon chips, and Diva in 'great' mode. It's the only plug in that routinly performs just as good or better in Bitwig than the other DAWs, but in contrast Reaktor kill Bitwig in no time whereas Reaper can host an ungodly amount of Reaktor instances.

[MuzikFreq]

The thing with reaper is that it skimps on a few things that stabilize the engine. I find I get sound issues easily with reaper even though it uses less cpu.
Also in my extensive testing, studio one and ableton are the same, bitwig is lower than ableton and studio one.
Also I don't use Mac so I have no idea on what Logic uses.

Also I don't know how any daw works on a mac.
At least on PC bitwig is super light

Thanks for not following down the path you were going in debate style wise. I truly appreciate it.

Some things IMO can't ring true with what you're reporting here though. I don't use Studio One, but most people report it as being right up there track count wise. It flatly sounds like Reaper isn't set up the way it should be on your system, which is more Reapers fault than yours IMO.

Over the years it's pretty straightforward though: DAWs specifically Live and Bitwig do not use the traditional method of getting higher track counts, which is (and I'm sure I'm butchering the actual science of it, but that's not the point), essentially a playback engine and a record enabled or "play" engine. So your reported latency setting of 64 say is actually closer to 256 or so in any track in Reaper, DP, Studio One, Logic, Cubase etc. etc. What this does is allow the DAW to render the soft synth ahead of time in I dunno? probably an insignificant amount of RAM. You get typically 25-40% higher track counts in projects with this method, the caveat is that anything done to the system during this can spike or mess with a high track count project. The best example is Reaper, the difference in track count between having the record armed on and off is night and day. Reaper on Windows or Mac will typically have slightly higher track counts than the other DAWs, but start turning on the record button on tracks with soft synths and it plummets, it in that scenario on tests I've done fares worse than the rest. If you're looking to play three or four soft synths at the same time all ELP prog rock style Reaper will not be for you.
Contrast this with Live and Bitwig, there's almost no difference between record enabled tracks and ones with it turned off in terms of track count, neither do an adjustable buffer or pre render audio to give back to the system and one way that shows is a higher CPU usage and much much lower incidence of spikes, crackles etc. when editing audio or adding soft synths etc. while the sequencer is playing.

Take a beast like Repro-5 and you can test this yourself. The only caveat is the oddity of various optimizations that DAW and plug in developers can do that make for sometimes some happy pairings. Bitwig for instance gets great performance out of the combination of the Xeon chips, and Diva in 'great' mode. It's the only plug in that routinly performs just as good or better in Bitwig than the other DAWs, but in contrast Reaktor kill Bitwig in no time whereas Reaper can host an ungodly amount of Reaktor instances.

The Thing is though if you look into my history, I have been testing multiple DAWS
I have had
Ableton
FL Studio
Reaper
Bitwig
Reason
Studio One
And out of my testing I found that yes Reaper appears low on CPU use but it starts to cut at the same amount of tracks and gets unstable moreso than the others.

FL Studio uses a ton of CPU from the smallest of things. A patch from Reason Rack in FL can spike it to 30-40% usage depending what you make.

Ableton has a pretty high usage but it's not all that it looks. You can keep stacking onto it and it will stop spiking in usage. CPU readout on Ableton is goofy and isn't really representing it well.

Studio One works like Ableton in that it shows it spike but ends up stabilizing.
THOUGH, Studio One does win in the linear phase department as it's ProEQ doesn't really use much cpu at all.

Reason.... It's a powerhouse and underrated. When in its own DAW, it can have the best performance of them all using their native plugins. Though using their native plugins takes some time to learn them as they're extremely deep for sound design and needs more work than VST synths.
But this is because the extensions are optimized to no end for their DAW

Bitwig I have been using a lot lately and the CPU usage on it for most anything isn't that high. It only starts spiking when you use VERY demanding synths like Thorn when making pads.

[BONES]

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.

You can see the problem right here, in the language you use to describe small things. "Strong points" immediately makes me think of absolute deal-breakers, not small things that make the experience a little bit better. Take Live, for example. For many people it's strength is in the tools it has for creating live arrangements on the fly. That's a huge feature for a lot of people but completely irrelevant to me. That's a "strong point", a pro in some people's eyes but a con in others. It stops some from considering other DAWs but, at the same time, it stops people like me from even looking at Live. Whether or not you can middle-click and drag to pan the timeline, OTOH, is not going to be anyone's deal-breaker but it will make some DAWs feel a bit more like home than others.

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.

Don't get me started on shortcuts, either. You've missed my point but it's not worth trying to restate, beyond the fact that I would consider a DAW that forced me to rely on search as inferior to one that makes it easy for me to find things on my own. Studio One seems to have search built into a few different areas but it doesn't make me feel like I need to use it to find things, so I can easily ignore it and it's not a pro or a con to me.

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.

That's an excellent example of what I meant - you never get around to learning those commands because you don't have to, which ultimately guide you into a rut, where you always do the same thing. OTOH, if you go to the trouble of looking it up, who knows what else you might discover while you are doing it?

[machinesworking]

The Thing is though if you look into my history, I have been testing multiple DAWS
I have had
Ableton
FL Studio
Reaper
Bitwig
Reason
Studio One
And out of my testing I found that yes Reaper appears low on CPU use but it starts to cut at the same amount of tracks and gets unstable moreso than the others.

FL Studio uses a ton of CPU from the smallest of things. A patch from Reason Rack in FL can spike it to 30-40% usage depending what you make.

Ableton has a pretty high usage but it's not all that it looks. You can keep stacking onto it and it will stop spiking in usage. CPU readout on Ableton is goofy and isn't really representing it well.

Studio One works like Ableton in that it shows it spike but ends up stabilizing.
THOUGH, Studio One does win in the linear phase department as it's ProEQ doesn't really use much cpu at all.

Reason.... It's a powerhouse and underrated. When in its own DAW, it can have the best performance of them all using their native plugins. Though using their native plugins takes some time to learn them as they're extremely deep for sound design and needs more work than VST synths.
But this is because the extensions are optimized to no end for their DAW

Bitwig I have been using a lot lately and the CPU usage on it for most anything isn't that high. It only starts spiking when you use VERY demanding synths like Thorn when making pads.

So Studio One and Reaper should easily pull out ahead of the others in any test really. FL Studio and Reason, like Bitwig and Live are not as concerned with CPU as performance in everyday use. To the point. Studio One and Reaper are far more likely to be choices of people doing 128 tracks of orchestral libraries etc. and the whole buffering thing is useful there. I'm not sure why Reaper has issues on your system? but I remember when I tested it before getting into the weeds of setting up the buffering etc. it was kinda wonky as well. Mostly anticipative FX processing should be checked.

The other caveat is spiking VSTs, which can affect any DAW, and then not so much in another. Mostly though, if you have reason to use Reaper, look into optimization etc. there are way too many videos and it really should be very stable on your system.

[machinesworking]

You can see the problem right here, in the language you use to describe small things. "Strong points" immediately makes me think of absolute deal-breakers, not small things that make the experience a little bit better. Take Live, for example. For many people it's strength is in the tools it has for creating live arrangements on the fly. That's a huge feature for a lot of people but completely irrelevant to me. That's a "strong point", a pro in some people's eyes but a con in others. It stops some from considering other DAWs but, at the same time, it stops people like me from even looking at Live. Whether or not you can middle-click and drag to pan the timeline, OTOH, is not going to be anyone's deal-breaker but it will make some DAWs feel a bit more like home than others.

There's no disagreement or debate here. My point is knowing others opinions on why they like a DAW isn't a bad thing, and small points can be large points to some. I think you're not explaining your intent well here.

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.

Don't get me started on shortcuts, either. You've missed my point but it's not worth trying to restate, beyond the fact that I would consider a DAW that forced me to rely on search as inferior to one that makes it easy for me to find things on my own. Studio One seems to have search built into a few different areas but it doesn't make me feel like I need to use it to find things, so I can easily ignore it and it's not a pro or a con to me.

Again, you're not being clear, are you against key commands for various parts of the DAW or are you confused because I used Bitwigs term for key commands? (Shortcuts)

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.

That's an excellent example of what I meant - you never get around to learning those commands because you don't have to, which ultimately guide you into a rut, where you always do the same thing. OTOH, if you go to the trouble of looking it up, who knows what else you might discover while you are doing it?

There's no rut to firing a command you rarely if ever use from a search function, especially if you bother to make the attempt to memorize it while doing so. Plus in terms of any commands list I've seen, you search in there as well, the same populated list of relevant to your search commands shows up, the only difference is one is faster, and offers you the choice to fire it at once.

[TribeOfHǫfuð]

Only disadvantage with Reason to me is that there are too many advantages. Less is more, and more is chaos, but what a wonderful chaos it is

[MuzikFreq]

The Thing is though if you look into my history, I have been testing multiple DAWS
I have had
Ableton
FL Studio
Reaper
Bitwig
Reason
Studio One
And out of my testing I found that yes Reaper appears low on CPU use but it starts to cut at the same amount of tracks and gets unstable moreso than the others.

FL Studio uses a ton of CPU from the smallest of things. A patch from Reason Rack in FL can spike it to 30-40% usage depending what you make.

Ableton has a pretty high usage but it's not all that it looks. You can keep stacking onto it and it will stop spiking in usage. CPU readout on Ableton is goofy and isn't really representing it well.

Studio One works like Ableton in that it shows it spike but ends up stabilizing.
THOUGH, Studio One does win in the linear phase department as it's ProEQ doesn't really use much cpu at all.

Reason.... It's a powerhouse and underrated. When in its own DAW, it can have the best performance of them all using their native plugins. Though using their native plugins takes some time to learn them as they're extremely deep for sound design and needs more work than VST synths.
But this is because the extensions are optimized to no end for their DAW

Bitwig I have been using a lot lately and the CPU usage on it for most anything isn't that high. It only starts spiking when you use VERY demanding synths like Thorn when making pads.

So Studio One and Reaper should easily pull out ahead of the others in any test really. FL Studio and Reason, like Bitwig and Live are not as concerned with CPU as performance in everyday use. To the point. Studio One and Reaper are far more likely to be choices of people doing 128 tracks of orchestral libraries etc. and the whole buffering thing is useful there. I'm not sure why Reaper has issues on your system? but I remember when I tested it before getting into the weeds of setting up the buffering etc. it was kinda wonky as well. Mostly anticipative FX processing should be checked.

The other caveat is spiking VSTs, which can affect any DAW, and then not so much in another. Mostly though, if you have reason to use Reaper, look into optimization etc. there are way too many videos and it really should be very stable on your system.

First of all... What are you going on about?
I have tested them all
Reason and Bitwig show DSP and not CPU. CPU readouts are very misleading and dont show everything. Bitwig's readouts actually go into detail as to what is going on with the audio in terms of latency and such.

Also
Orchestral Libraries? Sure if you're needing super beefy ones it can eat up processing, but I think most people using those would probably gravitate to the likes of Cuebase, Studio One, Reaper, Protools, that all have more tools for orchestral music.

But here's the question, what DAWs have you bought and tested? vs what you hear somewhere random? Most people I talk to say that Bitwig is solid, stable, and low CPU usage.
I watched Psytrance artists with over 100 tracks in Ableton with 0 issues, seen Huge massive FL Studio projects play on cheap hardware.

Stop dwelling on CPU usage really and use what you like for workflow. If something is eating CPU, find it and bounce it to audio, problem solved.
I used to dwell on cpu usage and when I stopped caring about it, it wasnt a problem anymore and I just work on making music with the software I like.

[Passing Bye]

But here's the question, what DAWs have you bought and tested? vs what you hear somewhere random?

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=542406

[BONES]

There's no disagreement or debate here. My point is knowing others opinions on why they like a DAW isn't a bad thing, and small points can be large points to some. I think you're not explaining your intent well here.

I don't think small points can be big things, it's just that every DAW is so good, that we are so spoiled, we perceive any slight issue as a big thing. It is all blown out of proportion and it's not helpful at all. I'm not sure if you've noticed but there are plenty of people around here to take every word posted here at face value so it's more helpful to be a little more objective. e.g. Your point about SYSEX is perfectly valid. It doesn't bother me because I can barely remember those days but it is definitely something that could be a deal-breaker. But most of the rest of it isn't even worth mentioning.

Again, you're not being clear, are you against key commands for various parts of the DAW or are you confused because I used Bitwigs term for key commands? (Shortcuts)

I knew what you meant, I think "hotkeys" is probably the least confusing term, but I rarely use them, either at work or for music. Mostly that's because when I am doing music my computer keyboard is not often in a convenient spot but I also feel that using the menus or whatever increases my chances of finding a better way to do things. So I'll use hotkeys to move the play head back to the start, I use them to change the cursor tool and I always use the spacebar for start/stop but I'd never even think to use a hotkey to add an instrument or effect or do anything like that. I use a lot of right-click contextual menus. Of all the ways of working with any application, I always find those the best, assuming they've been comprehensively implemented. That's why I love GIMP and hate Photoshop. I find Studio one particularly strong in this area and when I'm working, I don't see any advantage at all in using a hotkey over a right-click menu. e.g. CTRL+R to place random notes into a MIDI clip doesn't feel like it's any quicker than right-click>Fill with notes and right-clicking might lead me to think, "no, this time I think I'll do this other thing on the menu instead". Those kinds of random things that your subconscious mind is really good at serving up, if you give it the chance. It's proven invaluable to me on many occasions, both in my music and my work.

[BONES]

I have tested them all

When you say "tested", how long did you spend using each as your primary DAW? Because I'd suggest that it would take you at least a year to really work out whether or not one DAW was as good as another. Any less time than that and all you are really doing is seeing if this DAW is good at pretending to be the DAW you usually use.

I used to dwell on cpu usage and when I stopped caring about it, it wasnt a problem anymore and I just work on making music with the software I like.

I stopped worrying when I switched from hardware to software. It required such careful planning and design to work within the limitations of hardware but with software you can go crazy with voices, polyphony, unison, and especially effects, and not have to worry. I am still conscious of not letting my projects get out of control but if I need 16 voices of SEM, I can get it from one instance of bx_oberhausen, I don't need to go out and buy 15 extra SEMs.

[MuzikFreq]

But here's the question, what DAWs have you bought and tested? vs what you hear somewhere random?

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=542406

This proves my point about their claims of Studio One being sooo much better though.
Right now on both my systems I have Reason, Bitwig, FL Studio, and Studio One 5 installed.
Also in that thread someone blasted him about the coding of Reaper.

Also, I said I don't know how Apple handles DAWs as I don't have one. So hardware is very different as well as how vsts and AUs are handled. Of course Logic will work great on Apple... It's an apple product

[Passing Bye]

But here's the question, what DAWs have you bought and tested? vs what you hear somewhere random?

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=542406

This proves my point about their claims of Studio One being sooo much better though.

This proves machinesworking point actually and answers your question, he indeed knows very well what's he talking about, but he is respectful and humble enough to not be condescending about it...

[juno987654321]

This proves machinesworking point actually and answers your question, he indeed knows very well what's he talking about, but he is respectful and humble enough to not be condescending about it...

...and this is also something I appreciate very much in people in general but it's really difficult to reach such calm and positive character! It exudes and transfers to others like the right vibes in music.

This was just a side note, a bit off-topic, but I felt compelled to add something like this again.