I don't know what DAW to try anymore

[cryophonik]

Sounds like you just need to spend more time with one of the DAWs, as multiple people have mentioned, and really get to know how to customize it, (re)assign shortcuts, etc. And, unless you want to code your own from scratch, you’re going to have to learn to live with some things that you can’t change. It’s really that simple.

Anyone else going to quote the entire first post?

Beat me to it

[Yorrrrrr]

Give up already.

[Biscotto]

Did you try Waveform?

[Saffran]

Just stay away from Cakewalk.
New users with new feature requests may overwhelm our developers. And that's not good.

[Schmidi]

Easy to use with good features, is what I think I got from your post. I recently discovered Acoustica Mixcraft and I'm really digging it. It has Ableton like clips, this far the most stable DAW I've tried, great plugin handling within tracks, and it's just really easy to pick up and use. Not to mention it's very affordable.

I was a V1-9 ableton user, but I'm sick of the instability and so much tacked on feature bloat by trying to act like parts of other DAWs.

I tried and liked the concept of Tracktion, but it was way too crash prone. Same with Harrison Mixbus.

[EnGee]

OP on Mac, right?

[Phazma]

Cool to see that FL Studio has included some help in organising things but sincerely I don't really feel like going back to FL Studio, I have tried v20 a few times but the whole pattern based workflow, the mixer where you can only see the inserts of one channel at a time, imported audio files automatically generating sampler tracks and things like that don't really attract me. When needed however it's sampler is one of the coolest things and I really miss the piano roll and slide notes.

The "Key Map Mode" in Live looked interesting, I tried also the demo, but seems like you can only assign keys like some kinds of controllers and not like for example make an audio file reverse when pressing r, open the browser on f and so on. Also don't like the interface, I'd rather give Bitwig another more detailed test than Ableton.

I also won't choose the DAW based on sound because they are all capable of clean summing of signals and if there is any difference in things like pan law I will mix accordingly. For me it is really just about workflow, getting my ideas to sound as quickly and hassle-free as possible with minimum amount of workarounds for features I need.

I have actually made some good music on Logic, but when it started outputting random loud noises (an issue discussed in other threads, that only happens to a few unfortunate users) and I started literally being afraid to turn up the volume to normal working levels it just wasn't that enjoyable to make music in Logic anymore. And feature-wise, compared to Reaper, the only thing I miss are easy to do tapestops, other than that the advantage in Logic is just that the interface responds perfectly to cliking, dragging, zooming, scrolling and so on and looks butter-smooth.

I actually spent a lot of time with Logic and Reaper, reassigning things and customizing, in Reaper I have even changed the content of the various menus, the click sample of the metronome and so on, but both fall short on things that are important to me, which led me to write this post in the first place.

I also tried Waveform. Wasn't all to inspiring at first but who knows how much customizability it offers. Would be one of those that I might give another go toghether with Bitwig, watching some videos and reading up to truly understand how it works.

I haven't tried Samplitude, Mixcraft and Cakewalk but afaik Cakewalk works only on Windows (correct me if I am wrong and I indeed am on a Mac. The other 2 look rather uninspiring to me. I know I shouldn't judge a book by its cover (Reaper also looks bad initially but is awesome) but I feel those will be the last ones I will look into, if I ever need to.

I think the first step will be to get a new mouse and see if that improves the workflow in Reaper or Studio One and if not I will see if I give Waveform or Bitwig another go or if I stick with Reaper/S1/Logic and work on projects in parallel to see which gives me less headaches.

[EnGee]

I suggest to hunt the problem in Logic first and try to find a solution. Writing to support, hunting in forums, ...etc I have used Logic 9 on a Hackintosh (my Acer laptop) and loved it (before that I used it on PC version 4 and 5). Anyway I chose to buy a new PC desktop rather than a mac, so my relation with Logic has ended.

If one day I buy a mac (desktop or laptop), sure Logic would be my first choice. It is a great DAW full of features and high quality instruments and effects. It's also reasonably priced, so it deserves some efforts to iron the problems IMO

[machinesworking]

Either make up your mind or don't. It doesn't matter, if your brain is wired to where you can handle using more than one DAW, it can be a handy way to not get frustrated at a perceived limitation of a DAW.

I mostly use DP10, but right now Reason 11 Rack will not run as a VST3 in it or Reaper, so I'm going to be writing in Ableton Live for a while. When I want to use MPE I'll go back to Reaper.

I really love the articulation mapping in Logic, and I'm seriously thinking of buying the mapping library https://www.babylonwaves.com/logic-pro/

This is just a great idea for the issue of orchestral libraries and tedious remapping for articulations that I'll put up with my pet peeves in Logic for it.

Anyway I more think about the cool things I want to use in a DAW than the shortcomings. I don't mind jumping around a bit, so it's not painful for me.

[Michael L]

Fuhgeddabouta DAW. Go buyda poifect guitah!

[chk071]

But... what guitar to try out then? So many questions... so little own will...

[xbitz]

Cool to see that FL Studio has included some help in organising things but sincerely I don't really feel like going back to FL Studio, I have tried v20 a few times but the whole pattern based workflow, the mixer where you can only see the inserts of one channel at a time, imported audio files automatically generating sampler tracks and things like that don't really attract me.

"the mixer where you can only see the inserts of one channel at a time" >>> nope



"imported audio files automatically generating sampler tracks" >> the base is the pattern independent audio clip isn't the sampler

There’s 2 variations of Sampler Channels: Sampler Channel (the generator) and Audio Clips

Audio Clip - An Audio Clip is a special Sampler Channel that isn’t locked to a pattern. It has some limited options compared to normal Sampler Channels, but the interesting features:
Easy normalize, DC offset and Reverse.
Knob-based pitch and time adjustment with a variety of algorithms.
Fade stereo - the clip pans from left to right over the course of the clip
Crossfade - This is really nifty. Crossfade removes some of the start of the audio and adds it to the end fading in to the end. This allows you to create seamlessly overlapping loops.
EQ/Filter - There’s a low-end EQ and a low-pass filter with resonance readily available.
Ring Modulator - There’s an interesting ring modulator with variable sine-based modulator on every channel. Surprisingly fun and useful at times.
2 styles of reverbs and a delay - Not exactly the best reverbs, but there’s 2 styles of reverbs available. The delay is a simple one knob mix affair that delays the left/right channels from each other slightly to produce the precedence effect I never found much use for these.
POGO - Pitch drop or pitch rise. Great for those tape speed up or tape slow sounds.

Sampler Channel - The normal Sampler Channel is like a VSTi sampler. It’s triggered by MIDI. It has all of the features of Audio Clips.

I’m not going through all of the features here. Most of them are self-explanatory and common in samplers. Click the image above for a large image.

- How is Audio handled in FLStudio : https://www.admiralbumblebee.com/music/ ... n-flstudio

[DJ Warmonger]

Maybe you should get together your lazy ass and make some music with what you have. In this case, user is the problem.

[AdvancedFollower]

I started with FL Studio

I went to Logic for a while

I tried Cubase

I tried Reaper

I was then considering Ableton

I think the best course of action is to just find a DAW you can *tolerate* working with and then stick with it until you've learned all the tricks and shortcuts, and found workarounds for the things that frustrate you. Trying to find the Perfect DAW is just a fruitless distraction to avoid committing to making music. No DAW is going to be perfect. They all have little flaws and annoyances. This hasn't stopped others from making great music with then, including those who are much more successful at it than people like you and I are ever going to be.

[JoaquinAce]

Have you considered you are nitpicking too much? How many pieces of music have you completed on each of those that you tried (besides FL studio)? I feel it takes more than 1 decent sized production to really know if a DAW is for you or not. I see it all the time with DAW reviews. They tried it for a short period and then list all the things that "don't work", but it ended up they didn't really spent enough time with it. So many good pieces of music have been written with any of the DAWs you tried. For me it feels like a hard-to-please user issue.