If you had to stick to one DAW, which one would it be?

[vurt]

don't hear much country around here...

unless i put some on.
we had a bad experience when you sent us the original cyrus with the weird hair.
i think after that and the line dancing craze that swept the nation, we agreed to not go there again.

[chk071]

Fedora WS, so workflow wise the vanilla Gnome desktop experience.

I think Fedora has the nicest desktop. I hated their "open source first" approach in the past though, which, thankfully, they don't have anymore to that degree. It was really very strict in that regard in the past, compared to Ubuntu and the other big distros.

I'm definitely done with Linux though. It never worked as well as Windows or Mac OS for me, plus there's a total lack of the software I frequently used under Windows. No point in trying it anymore.

Where were we? Oh, right, DAW's.

[EnochLight]

don't hear much country around here...

unless i put some on.
we had a bad experience when you sent us the original cyrus with the weird hair.
i think after that and the line dancing craze that swept the nation, we agreed to not go there again.

This should help:

[Jac459]

it seems it depends on which statistics you want to believe...
my first google search result showed this for instance:

- Apple Mac shipments fell 40.5% in the first quarter of 2023, compared with the same time the prior year, market intelligence provider IDC said.

- Apple's worldwide PC market share dropped between the first quarter of 2022 and the first quarter of 2023, from 8.6% to 7.2%, according to IDC data.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/10/apples- ... s-idc.html

It is true actually, I found IDC saying 7% market share, Computer world 31%... That's funny....

(I am not passionate enough about the subject to find more research though ).

[Jac459]

Typical thing with the press these days. You even find completely contradictory news side by side.

Anyway, I have no doubts that Apple will always sell well in the near future. They do a good job with marketing, and placing their products correctly.

it doesn't even matter much

my favorite OS that i just found out about recently will probably will have a marketshare of like 0.1% or so

Let me guess. It's a Linux.

yes, one small portion of the like 2.1% or so that the whole Linux infrastructure possesses.

Linux is great for devs and tweakers.... I could not imagine a Raspberry without linux ...

[syntonica]

it seems it depends on which statistics you want to believe...
my first google search result showed this for instance:

- Apple Mac shipments fell 40.5% in the first quarter of 2023, compared with the same time the prior year, market intelligence provider IDC said.

- Apple's worldwide PC market share dropped between the first quarter of 2022 and the first quarter of 2023, from 8.6% to 7.2%, according to IDC data.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/10/apples- ... s-idc.html

It is true actually, I found IDC saying 7% market share, Computer world 31%... That's funny....

(I am not passionate enough about the subject to find more research though ).

It depends on how you count the numbers. There's a buttload of systems (e.g. ATMs, POS, etc.) that use embedded OSes, like Android or Windows, that have a single purpose and you never see the underlying OS. I doubt you could get a ever true count of which OSes people use for their daily driver and which sit mouldering in the closet.

[vurt]

Typical thing with the press these days. You even find completely contradictory news side by side.

Anyway, I have no doubts that Apple will always sell well in the near future. They do a good job with marketing, and placing their products correctly.

it doesn't even matter much

my favorite OS that i just found out about recently will probably will have a marketshare of like 0.1% or so

Let me guess. It's a Linux.

yes, one small portion of the like 2.1% or so that the whole Linux infrastructure possesses.

Linux is great for devs and tweakers.... I could not imagine a Raspberry without linux ...

try them with cream instead, your mind will be blown! taste sensation!

[Jac459]

try them with cream instead, your mind will be blown! taste sensation!

Agreed .

[BONES]

I invite you to do a bit of data mining here, it is quite funny....

It depends where you look because these stats seems far more realistic to me -
https://www.statista.com/statistics/268 ... ince-2009/
In any event, even your 21% share is anything but "ubiquitous", so it still works in favour of the point I was making.

wow, that's something I was totally unaware of and did not expect, especially considering I've been seeing every other person I know, buying a Mac.

It goes the other way where I work. In my last job, when I started there I was one of only two (out of a dozen or so) who used a PC at home but after 4 or 5 years the stat had flipped and only 3 of those people still used Macs at home. Then, about three years ago, we even ditched the Mac Pros for HP Z Series workstations at the office, as has pretty much everyone since Apple priced the new Mac Pro beyond the ability for even the most diehard Applyte to justify. What HP sell us for around $7k would cost more than $12k to match on a Mac Pro and, even then, you wouldn't get the same graphics performance you can get on the PC side with nVidia Quadro.

Where I work now it's much the same. In both places it seems mostly driven by gaming but also by the amount of 3D modelling/animation some of my colleagues do. When you think about how much more price competitive Apple have become lately, it's surprising they aren't growing their marketshare more strongly. The entry level MB Air is actually a pretty good deal for less demanding users who aren't too fussy about what software they use.

[Jac459]

I invite you to do a bit of data mining here, it is quite funny....

It depends where you look because these stats seems far more realistic to me -
https://www.statista.com/statistics/268 ... ince-2009/
In any event, even your 21% share is anything but "ubiquitous", so it still works in favour of the point I was making.

Yes I agree. Apple is far less ubiquitous than some think, especially outside of US. In Europe or Asia, almost nobody knows the "blue bubble" messaging stuffs... Everybody uses WhatsApp, like everybody... And in Asia, if you are very much in the Chinese community, you can use WeChat or Telegram but WhatsApp will always be there.

Yet, for the specific case of the "Apple Silicon", I still think it is a superbly smart move from Apple on the M1 and overall this move helped them to gain market share.
In 2020 to 2022 it has been a winning move, like this article taking Data from IDC is showing:
https://www.makeuseof.com/why-apple-is- ... -pc-sales/
"According to data released by IDC, Apple's Mac supply grew by 40.2%. As per the same source, Lenovo saw a year-on-year decline of 16%, and Dell's annual growth fell by 21.2%."

Then the M2 was a bit disappointing and they lost momentum but overall I still think ARM is the way to go in particular for laptop.

Then the question is "can Apple continue to win market share ?", I am not very sure. The "you are in my ecosystem or f**k you" pattern is a bit hard to swallow if you are not a die hard fan.
But from the 2 years I am using it, I must admit that I haven't been limited as I was afraid in my use cases (I am also doing development). On the contrary, macOS, being an Unix-like (POSIX) is in fact a joy for developers.

Now I think it depends if they chose to keep their "big bully" attitude or try to be the "good guys" like Microsoft and their move to open source.
It is not very known to general public but the image of Microsoft in the development circle has totally changed these last 10 years with free awesome open products like VS.Code or .NET Core.

[syntonica]

But from the 2 years I am using it, I must admit that I haven't been limited as I was afraid in my use cases (I am also doing development). On the contrary, macOS, being an Unix-like (POSIX) is in fact a joy for developers.

Now I think it depends if they chose to keep their "big bully" attitude or try to be the "good guys" like Microsoft and their move to open source.
It is not very known to general public but the image of Microsoft in the development circle has totally changed these last 10 years with free awesome open products like VS.Code or .NET Core.

I have to say, as primarily a Mac developer, I have very mixed feelings about the Apple ecosystem. Basically, if it's not XCode/Swift/iOS, they don't care. I understand their desire to move forward, but it's always shark-like: vicious.

They've gone from 68K->PPC->Intel->ARM and have dropped the older systems as quickly as possible. They've also done Pascal->ObjC->Swift with a bit of dabbling in Java and C++. However, it's very much Swift as a first-class citizen and everything else rides in back in the baggage car.

I should like Swift more, considering who's on their dev team, but I don't. Like ObjC, it started out simple and then just got more cluttered and bloated.

Anyway, this is all horribly off-topic, so...

I took a quick peek at Ardour today. I'm impressed that it looks like an actual application now and not the usual Linux too-many-cooks Frankenstein's monster thing that most Linux apps usually resemble. It's come a long way as a basic, bare-ish bones DAW.

Oh, and I use MuLab. These days, everything else only gets used for plug-in testing.

[musicproducerdee]

As I was saying before, if you take a step back, macos market share has been multiplied by 3 in 10 years.

Don't be fooled by contextual events, apple has super performed in 2020 because of m1. So people are buying less in 2022 because they changed 1-2 years before.


The fact to remember is 7% in 2013, 21% in 2023.

Yeah, Apple has performed quite well since the release of M1. What about PC though, how does that compare to Apple during that time period?

It goes the other way where I work. In my last job, when I started there I was one of only two (out of a dozen or so) who used a PC at home but after 4 or 5 years the stat had flipped and only 3 of those people still used Macs at home. Then, about three years ago, we even ditched the Mac Pros for HP Z Series workstations at the office, as has pretty much everyone since Apple priced the new Mac Pro beyond the ability for even the most diehard Applyte to justify. What HP sell us for around $7k would cost more than $12k to match on a Mac Pro and, even then, you wouldn't get the same graphics performance you can get on the PC side with nVidia Quadro.

Where I work now it's much the same. In both places it seems mostly driven by gaming but also by the amount of 3D modelling/animation some of my colleagues do.

Apple prices are from a different world. I could never justify them. I'd still probably buy an Apple product if I was super rich, because it wouldn't matter, but their prices are insane. Just choosing a 16gb ram MacBook Air over an 8gb ram variant, increases the price by a mountain. The things I could do with that money on a Windows machine is insane.

When you think about how much more price competitive Apple have become lately, it's surprising they aren't growing their marketshare more strongly. The entry level MB Air is actually a pretty good deal for less demanding users who aren't too fussy about what software they use.

The air is indeed a very good deal for everything that you get. The new processors are very good, even the base variants. The Mac displays are pretty nice, and the overall build quality is very good. I could produce music very easily on a MacBook Air, and not run into any hardware restraints. I also beleive that Mac OS performs better than Windows when running on basic hardware. Might be a different story when it comes to top flagship level hardware. Personally, I'm a little bit into gaming as well, and I have an Xbox as well, so it was always Windows for me. Although, I'm very seriously considering my next machine to be a MacBook or a Mac Mini or maybe even an iPad, considering I can run Logic on an iPad now with the new M serious processors. That's pretty neat.

[harryupbabble]

i used superglue to get stuck on reaper.

[Jac459]

............

I took a quick peek at Ardour today. I'm impressed that it looks like an actual application now and not the usual Linux too-many-cooks Frankenstein's monster thing that most Linux apps usually resemble. It's come a long way as a basic, bare-ish bones DAW.

Oh, and I use MuLab. These days, everything else only gets used for plug-in testing.

Never tried it but I don't see myself using something else than bitwig... After changing regularly I finally found the perfect fit for me... it is all about the modulations.

I hear mulab is good for electronic, what is good with it?

[musicproducerdee]

Okay guys, I already have a DAW related thread that I created a few days ago, which was quite successful as it helped me re-pick a DAW and work on it. I do have another topic though, and did not want to create yet another thread, so I thought I'll just ask here. So here goes.

Has anyone compared the CPU/resource usage between Bitwig Studio /Ableton Live/Cubase/Studio One/Reaper?
Has anyone ever performed such a test, or is aware of a straightforward way of doing so?

Based on experience, I'm guessing the list would go as follows (low to high):

Reaper

Studio One

Bitwig Studio

Cubase

Ableton Live

Any other DAW you are aware of that uses even less CPU?

Reason for this is, I have an old laptop, AMD APU A6-6310 (quad core) with 8GB of ram, 500GB HDD (5600 rpm) which I'd like to utilize for something, rather selling it for scrap value. The only thing that's upgradeable any further is the hard drive, which I could possibly swap for a solid-state drive. Although, I'm not sure if it's worth it, as I'll barely be using it, if ever.

Also, I'm thinking of pairing the DAW with Sylenth1 (which I already have), as it is very generous on the CPU. I would use sample libraries, but the good ones are rather large, and the ram is maxed out at 8GB, I can't expand it any further (it's a very old budget Dell Inspiron laptop), and we already know about the SSD situation, above.

Lastly, I can dual boot Ubuntu and Windows 10, if that matters at all.

PS: Synth recommendations also welcomed (that use less CPU than Sylenth1 or similar).