Tracktion alternatives?

[fromwithin]

I've used (professionally) every version of Tracktion since version 1, but the further that Tracktion goes down its current development path, the more I find that I'm fighting with it. It's getting more and more non-intuitive and there are loads of frustrating things about the way it works now that just do my head in. I almost dread loading up Waveform as it feels like it sucks all the creativity from me as soon as I see it on the screen.

So I'm finally considering putting in the effort to switch to an alternative.

Does anyone have any suggestions for something that is solid, stable, and preferably doesn't copy its interface paradigm from Cubase on the Atari ST?

[bidule]

How much do you want to spend?

[tatanka]

Only thing with comparable approach (one window, rack-concept) that comes to my mind is Mulab. And this one remains faithful to the ideas of the (one man...) devs concept.

But you mentioned "professionally" and I am not really sure if this fits with Mulab.....Great community here on kvr to help you out with questions but no professional help availabe of course with that one-man-band concept.

And lot of things just hidden somewhere in some forum topic....

I realized for myself (as only hobby musician) I just cant keep up the track with mulab and never really get into it enough (I use it as fast(est) tool to try out new ideas, vst etc.).

I agree totally with your critics on now "waveform" (to bring out a daw that could not use its own sampler that kind of ridiculous and thats now for month...) but I once get the main concepts and I like some of the new things (like the midi pattern generator) that worked and are for me much clearer then things in mulab.

But I cant thing of any "professional" version in that direction.

Maybe Tracktion 6, its even free now

[fromwithin]

How much do you want to spend?

That's irrelevant for the right product, although >£750 / $1000 is getting a bit ridiculous.

[dRowAudio]

Could you perhaps share a few things that are non-intuitive and frustrating? We always like to hear from users where the stumbling blocks are and where we can improve workflows.

As we add features it's always a challenge to find the best workflows for the majority of users but we do put a lot of time and effort in to that. We also try hard to not change the original workflows that made Tracktion so great. Some of the newer features may be aimed at those with more time but the original features should be just as quick to use. If this isn't the case please let us know.

Thanks! Dave.

[ErBen]

For now, fixing Biotek / Collective so that they actually work without bringing down the whole DAW on Linux would be nice
Since I bought Waveform I actually didn't use it much, because I just don't have any synth I can use...

[rosesbyrosex]

To be honest i have tried many daws including very popolar ones (FL studio 12.5 producer, and Studio One 3 profesional, Reaper), but i always unistall them after many minutes mixing (or trying to mix), because the interfaces are very saturated, when mixing the options may be not very ovbious or hard to find (for me), when importing a midi file they doesn´t import tempo and time signature as well, otherwise in tracktion whoever can do a mix, it´s very easy to use, and the most importan thing is that very ligewight, i been using tracktion since version 4 (when it was paid) now i use it profesionally, and i never needed more DAW functions than the ones that tracktion offered me but using third party VST.
I also think is good for Waveform being a Only-DawEssential software i mean, not having a lot of mixing/mastering Plugins because i don't use them and i think people uses them only to do a fast demo mix or when learning to mix, i personally preffer to use third party VST samplers and mix/mastering plugins because there are really good comercial ones like the ones of Izotope, Toontrack, Three-Body Technology, Amplesound.
So Waveform is the only DAW i use because is simple, ligeweight and very powerfull and I will continue to use it unless an easier, simpler DAW appears (maybe Waveform 9 , juts saying!!)
Also in beta 8.2.1 waveform now can randomise MIDI velocity to make the sound more "HUMAN", so they keep improving in some aspects.
But if you still want to change to a popular DAW with a lot of documentation and video tutorials i would recomend reaper (only 10.6 mb the latest x64 version)

[dRowAudio]

For now, fixing Biotek / Collective so that they actually work without bringing down the whole DAW on Linux would be nice
Since I bought Waveform I actually didn't use it much, because I just don't have any synth I can use...

Yes, this is a priority for us, replicating it is elusive though. I've only just today managed to see the silence issue but after restarting and running the test Edit for over an hour I've not seen it again. I have passed on everything I can find to our synth dev lead though hopefully we're getting close.

I may have also just triggered the freeze up for the first time. If what I'm seeing is what others have reported, this looks like a driver error in Pulseaudio. The driver seems to be locking up and not returning from the process call. I'm now looking in to if there's anything we can do to work around that.

However, the OP mentioned "non-intuitive and frustrating" practices these are really a separate issue to obvious crashes/hangs which we need to fix.

[fedexnman]

I like StudioOne3 , ..... But it's a Cubase, Reaper , ProTools , type of host .GUI and workflow wise .. I do like Waveform 8 .. I have my ups and downs with it , but it's a nice interface GUI seeing I started with Tracktion 1 free right as Mackie bought it from Jules .... my 1st host ...

[fromwithin]

I'm writing out a bunch of stuff and will post it here when it's done.

[fromwithin]

To be honest i have tried many daws including very popolar ones (FL studio 12.5 producer, and Studio One 3 profesional, Reaper), but i always unistall them after many minutes mixing (or trying to mix), because the interfaces are very saturated

This is precisely what drew me to Tracktion in the first place. It was the first thing I'd seen that ignored the Atari ST Cubase paradigm and did things sensibly and simply. It followed the same left -> right data flow as Bars & Pipes on my Amiga, which I used to use for everything.

I keep trying DAWs every few years and they always seem convoluted, but I know that if I got to know one of them as well as I know Tracktion, I would be fine. The sticking point for me is that Tracktion just hasn't been doing it for me lately. It's not simple and intuitive anymore beyond surface operations and I don't feel "at home" in it like I always have done. When you start trying to use it seriously, it reveals a whole ton of deficiencies and inconsistencies. There must be something serious when I, a Tracktion user for 15 years who has been evangelising it and extolling its virtues for just as long, has got to the point where it's so frustrating to use that I'm looking elsewhere.

[fromwithin]

Ok. All of the following is stuff that I have to contend with every single time I load up the program. If it was one or two things, I would feel that I'm just nit-picking, but I would consider myself a power-user and all of these combined add up to a dismal experience. And this is really just the things that are mostly on the surface, there is a load more stuff that I haven't gone into like the render window, the whole Settings tab, problems with markers, tempo remapping, the audio clip panel and loop properties and a ton of other stuff that have issues, but this is enough to demonstrate the weight of problems that I come across.

Some of this has been problematic since early versions of Tracktion and waiting 15 years for them to be fixed/improved is long enough. I understand that commercially, features must be added, but I've started to feel that usability is swiftly being lost in the race for features. There are a load of new bells and whistles, but rudimentary stuff is still broken. And for our sins, we lost the ability to edit the colours.

1. The biggest crime against usability: Zooming/scrolling.
   • The implementation is awful and I hate it. There are various options that can be set for the mouse wheel and every single combination is horrible to use and is inconsistent. It's like none of the options are completely deterministic. It works differently between track zooming and clip zooming, and now the MIDI editor too. Only "Mouse wheel scrolls MIDI grid" allows mouse scrolling and zooming in each direction for all components, but with this switched on I want to throw my mouse at wall half the time. There's no consistency. Clips zoom/scroll with different key modifiers to tracks and now in Waveform, different AGAIN with the separate MIDI editor. Whichever combined options are set, it's frustrating.
   • Or how about this one: My mouse is somewhere over the outputs panel on the right, I scroll the display down with the wheel. It moves one step and then stops. Why? Because when it scrolled, the mouse pointer happened to land on the pan section of a Volume/Pan control (or the volume section if the plugin has been highlighted) and it wants to change the pan via the wheel instead.
   • I expect that if I'm holding down Ctrl, I get the same zoom type no matter the context. If I hold shift, the same. Ctrl+Shift, the same, and so on. I have some big, complex projects, and I often fear using the wheel while editing because I don't feel like I know what it's going to do if I use it.
     I would like to see something like: mouse wheel always scrolls up/down, shift+wheel always scrolls left-right, ctrl+wheel always zooms vertically, ctrl+shift+wheel always zooms horizontally. Whatever it is, just be consistent across the board.
   • The scroll resolution is also mad. In the MIDI editor, one step of the mousewheel scrolls miles up or down. There's no reason whatsoever for it to scroll more one note's height. Every time I scroll, I have to waste a second looking for the note I was trying to scroll too. I shouldn't have to. It should be obvious by scrolling one note at a time.
   • Another annoyance that has been there forever is that if you Ctrl-wheel to zoom, it centres the zoom around the mouse pointer, but if you press Z to zoom a track, it zooms the selected track and not the track of the clip your mouse is pointing at. Argh!
2. On a related note: The Z key. I'm constantly zooming/shrinking tracks, but what's the point of having the folder tracks be zoomable? Their height should be locked and the Z key should open or close the folder. Instead I have to mouse to the tiny little triangle to open it, and I have to have "Automatically Hide/Show panels" switched off because 9 times out of 10 that browser panel will pop open and push away the triangle that I'm trying to press.
3. Settings/options. Tracktion has got too big now and every time I want to change an option, I have to go searching in too many places. Was it in General Behaviour? What was that keyboard shortcut called? Is it in one of the menus on the edit screen? Click click, no, click click click, no, click click, not there either. Why are Slide Panel Position and Track Resizing options in General Behaviour, but mouse-wheel action in the Options menu? There's seemingly no rhyme or reason to them. Also, things have spilled into having to open too many sub-windows that contain further options for some features, which totally goes against the original Tracktion design ethos. It's started to feel like things are just being wedged in wherever there's a space.
4. More consistency problems:
   • Select a clip. In the properties panel, you can adjust the overall velocity by dragging inside the Velocity box or hovering with the mouse and using the wheel, but for MIDI channel, you have to use the little +/- buttons (or you can double-click and type nonsense into the box).
   • And on the subject of the draggable little controls, a single click without dragging goes into text edit mode. This is silly because the rest of the entire application is based on the idea of single-click = focus. Therefore, a single click with no drag should be a focus equivalent (i.e. do nothing) and a double-click should be text-edit mode.
   • The Start/Length/End/Offset boxes are single-click select and accept keyboard input without showing a cursor line. Typing without a cursor line anywhere else begins insertion of a numbered marker at the play position. Click and drag in these boxes is also unique and weird. The numbers change quickly until the mouse hits the edge of the screen at which point they change slowly.
   • In the MIDI clip panel, the Amount value control relates to the Quantise control above it, but in the audio clip editor, the Speed and Pitch value controls relate to the controls below them.
   • In the MIDI editor, cursor left/right selects the previous/next note while holding shift moves the current note, but with an automation point selected, cursor left/right selects the previous/next point while holding shift does nothing. It basically makes it impossible to move the time of a point without affecting its value unless you use the Time control in the panel, which is worse because the Time control doesn't relinquish keyboard focus until you click outside it.
   • In the mixer panel, the volume can't be changed with the mouse wheel, but it can be in a highlighted volume plugin (same with pan).
   • Select multiple clips and you get the relevant options in the panel for operating on them collectively. Click on a folder track or submix track and the same buttons are in a different place or different sizes.
   • The Delete Track button in the Track panel is in a different place than every other delete button. All others are placed at the bottom-right of the panel.
   • There are inconsistencies between single and multi-select of clips.
     • For audio clips when multi-selecting: the colour bar moves, the Split Clips, Copy Marked Section, and Move Clips button all move, the Render Clip button becomes Render Clips but moves, the Left Ch and Right Ch buttons disappear even if all clips are stereo, the Reverse button disappears.
     • For MIDI clips when multi-selecting: the Split Clips, Copy Marked Section, and Move Clips button all move, the Remap on Tempo change button disappears, the Show Note Expression disappears.
     • The Delete button in MIDI single-select shows options for multi-selected operations. The Delete MIDI content sub-menu should be contained inside the Delete button to keep all delete operations within the notion of "red-button, bottom-right".
5. For some specific stuff I've been doing, I've needed tight control over program and bank change events, with fast switches occurring. Without a step editor, it's nigh on impossible to tell what's going on. I have to use a MIDI event viewer and when the events are out of order (Note being sent before Program Change, for example) it can't be resolved without me zooming right in and moving the Program Change back 1 tick or the note forward 1 tick.
6. There's too much stuff packed into small spaces and not enough documentation. It's got to the point where I just don't understand a bunch of stuff in the program (even though I bought Bill Edstrom's book). For example, I still can't work out what a submix is for when a folder track appears to do exactly the same. The only difference I can tell is that Mute/Solo works differently. I also don't see the point in "Create Comp" when multi-selecting. It just does a render.
7. The comp stuff is a really nice feature, but dealing with the groups is really awful. There's no colour distinction between multiple groups in the editor when visible, and to switch the comp editor back on, you have to know which tracks are in a comp group, select one, go to the Comp Group menu and switch it back on. But that's a global operation that affects the visibility of all comp groups, so has no place being in a single Track panel. There's no Comp Groups overview, even though the Tracks panel is basically meant for that sort of thing. At the very least, the comp groups could have tags added automatically with the comp group name. And speaking of the Tracks panel, if you select a Track(s) in there, shouldn't it also select that actual Track?
8. MIDI editing has barely changed since Tracktion 1. I've put up with it and waited for a long time for improvements, but it's still so rudimentary even after the additions in Waveform. I could write a whole other treatise on this one.
9. A more minor point, but why do I still have to switch to show seconds/minutes at the top of the screen to show how long my track is in the master section? The master section should always show the time at the play position alongside the bars and beats.
10. Have you seen the size of that default Groove menu? On my laptop, it is off the top and bottom of the screen and I have to scroll it. Most of the entries follow the same pattern of naming/feature. Why not have constants for these and cut that menu down to a three-parameter Type/Resolution/Amount? Then only have user templates listed in the menu.

I'll stop it there otherwise I'll be here all night.

[fromwithin]

.............(there really needs to be a way to delete erroneous posts on here)

[gesslr]

Wow. That's a helluva list and some really great points...Thanks for taking the time.

Somebody get this man on the beta team!

[TSC]

This is all really useful stuff - as we have mentioned loads of times before, we are absolutely open to feedback and user input

We wish you guys would reframe the discussion - rather than struggling with particular things to the point at which you want to scream, take a moment to let us know and we will either improve it, or at the very least, let you know why it is the way it is

Get involved and help shape your favorite DAW - not many folk take the time/energy to give these detailed responses - we greatly value your input and welcome it