Why don't more people use Tracktion Waveform?

[Rockatansky]

I tried Waveform. Watched the official get-started videos on YouTube and followed along. It has a few good ideas, and that's about it. I could live with many of its quirks and behaviors, but as soon as plugins are involved (even their own Tracktion plugins) things get ugly. Unreliable, unstable and just annoying. When I click the Waveform icon, one of three things will be the case: 1) I see the loading screen and it crashes, 2) nothing happens and I have to force-quit the process, or 3) it actually starts up. Out of 5 attempts, 1 or 2 will actually successfully launch it. It has problems scanning some plugins that other hosts (Reaper, Cubase, FL Studio) have no problems scanning, and will just not let me use them, no matter how often I make it forget and re-scan them. (Most notably Voxengo TEOTE and a Waves Shell, in any format). And all of this already happens before I even press Play. Which, by the way, doesn't guarantee that the transport actually starts playing, especially if a plugin window is in focus.
I also tried the DAW Essentials plugins, and while they loaded alright in Waveform, all of the ones I tried had some sort of problem when resizing the UI. Resizing the EQ gives me a black plugin window, with a few pixels of the top of the UI showing at the bottom of the black box. No way to bring it back until the plugin window is closed and re-opened. Resizing the Compressor messes up its graphics too, I got all sorts of problems, even a striped 'interlaced' background instead of a solid color. The gain reduction meter in the Compressor is completely useless, since it factors in the make-up gain. Even if there are currently 12 dB of gain reduction, turning the make-up gain up 12 dB will make it seem like there's no compression happening at all. While compression is quite audibly happening, the GR meter can be made completely static by adjusting the make-up gain. The compression display has two overlaying rectangles, seems like one is supposed to visualize the input level and the other one visualizes the output level. Those level indicating rectangles should support the compression curve, but they're all over the damn place once make-up gain gets involved. Moved a slider back and forth on the Reverb plugin, and it totally crashed. Sandboxed, but still.
I mean, who lets faulty products like that loose on the public, even wants money for them? And somewhat worse, who doesn't make sure that their products actually work well with their other products? Nah, it's off the hard drive again, and that's exactly where it belongs.

[chagzuki]

Adding an instrument and creating a midi clip for it cannot require you to check YouTube tutorials on how to actually do it.

Once you've clocked the icons at the top for plugins and clips, dragging and dropping couldn't really be easier. That's the sort of thing that I miss having moved to Logic; in Logic a track is constrained to having a single instrument output. In Waveform I can shove as many instruments as I want on one track and switch between them to audition sounds... very quick. There are ways around that in Logic, such as using stacks, but I'll always be keen on the drag and drop speed of Waveform. E.g., if I want to duplicate an effect or instrument I just CTRL drag.

[ferez21]

User experience in Waveform is simply atrocious. And I am someone who used Renoise for years...
Adding an instrument and creating a midi clip for it cannot require you to check YouTube tutorials on how to actually do it.
Also the GUI with all those weird text field-button thingys where you never know what is the context of any of it, is just wrong.
You waste 30 minutes trying to create a simple loop and go back to any other DAW which doesn't try to reinvent the basic principles of working with instruments/tracks/clips etc.
That's why the user base is so little for Waveform.

I totally agree. I have tested almost every single DAW on the market in the last month or two, and Tracktion was the only one in which i had to check Youtube and forums on how to accomplish basic and common DAW tasks.
People who have been with Tracktion for years don't see that problem, but that's a huge problem when trying to attract new audience. I bought the full version and sold it after a few weeks.

I see the potential, Waveform can turn into something really great, but i also see why it has problem attracting more people. Maybe their commitment for releasing new versions often makes them concentrate more on adding new features instead of improving and streamlining the interface, user experience and fixing bugs.

[MuzikFreq]

User experience in Waveform is simply atrocious. And I am someone who used Renoise for years...
Adding an instrument and creating a midi clip for it cannot require you to check YouTube tutorials on how to actually do it.
Also the GUI with all those weird text field-button thingys where you never know what is the context of any of it, is just wrong.
You waste 30 minutes trying to create a simple loop and go back to any other DAW which doesn't try to reinvent the basic principles of working with instruments/tracks/clips etc.
That's why the user base is so little for Waveform.

To be fair though, every DAW has a strange way to make a midi clip. I think bitwig is the easiest one where you just need to DoubleClick and stretch for the length.

Fl studio isn't the most obvious where you need to know that you need to open the piano roll then add it to the arrangement

Ableton.... Sure you can DoubleClick but it only makes 1 bar and you need to adjust the length in the clip and stretch. Or you need to highlight the length and something like Ctrl+shift+m which is the dumbest command to make one.

Studio One is nice but needs some knowledge on which duplicate commands to use and how to zoom to clip length.

Reaper is nice as you can I think alt+drag to length to make a clip

Another super easy one is Reason. Double click and drag

[Johnny!]

Still more intuitive than Waveform though

[emasters]

I used to use Waveform. Similar experience with plugins - OS X here and very unstable (or any just don't pass the scan so are unavailable). As a result, workflow suffered and I avoided a large number of plugins for fear of crashing. At this point, moved on. I really liked the early Tracktion UI philosophy of simplicity, single screen, etc. But a DAW has to be solid with plugins. Without this, not much else matters.....

[Erisian]

OMG - I hope I haven't wasted bandwidth downloading this. I thought I would give it a try.

[Erisian]

It isn't the most intuitive setup there is, but I had no problem getting the hang of the basics without Youtube videos and I have had no crashes or stability issues so far. The few plugins it couldn't read are disposable anyway. All my favourites are there. I think I can enjoy working with this one.

[Functional]

It took me more than half an hour to set up an instrument track because the whole process was just so extremely non-standard (back when I tried it anyway). May be bit harsh, but that's a litmus test for me.

[Erisian]

It took me more than half an hour to set up an instrument track because the whole process was just so extremely non-standard (back when I tried it anyway). May be bit harsh, but that's a litmus test for me.

It's tricky getting used to this way of working but I'm finding it really easy now. You just drag and drop the instrument onto the left of the mixer and any effects to the right of the instrument and off you go. Of course, if you already have something better that you are used to working with, there's no point in having this as well. I went for it because Cakewalk messed up for me and it was too big a download for me to reinstall (you cannot just keep the setup files and reinstall from them - you have to use the bandlab assistant and install a new download.) So I chose Waveform because it was more convenient with bandwidth but I'm starting to really like the modular approach.

[apoclypse]

It took me more than half an hour to set up an instrument track because the whole process was just so extremely non-standard (back when I tried it anyway). May be bit harsh, but that's a litmus test for me.

Messing around with it my experience wasn't that bad. I actually was up and running fairly quickly.

My issues with it are:

The extremely slow plugin scan, probably the slowest I've experienced.
The buggy UI. Text was all over the place
The UI in general. Looks like a really old application even though its supposed to be a new-ish recently developed interface.

I didn't mind the workflow though. I thought some things were pretty cool. Nothing feels to far left field imo.

[Domenico KVR]

As far as I'm concerned, Tracktion Waveform is really unstable on Windows, which is a big downer for me...
But it is free.

[Functional]

It's tricky getting used to this way of working but I'm finding it really easy now. You just drag and drop the instrument onto the left of the mixer and any effects to the right of the instrument and off you go. Of course, if you already have something better that you are used to working with, there's no point in having this as well. I went for it because Cakewalk messed up for me and it was too big a download for me to reinstall (you cannot just keep the setup files and reinstall from them - you have to use the bandlab assistant and install a new download.) So I chose Waveform because it was more convenient with bandwidth but I'm starting to really like the modular approach.

That's the thing; I'm already using Cubase. Cubase comes with its own caveats, but it's still among the top dogs if not the top dog.

From this perspective, it's hard to generally look at other DAW's that do things so wildly differently. it would take considerable amount of time and effort for me to evaluate how well does it perform against what I already have.

Now, even though I'm all in for innovative designs, I still think that going for non-standard route with DAW's especially this late into the game is probably not great for the company itself. I suspect many people are like me in the sense that they already have a DAW that they are fairly content with and, unless they can clearly see that alternative DAW outperforms theirs (something that is hard to evaluate if the control scheme is so non-standard), then they're probably going to get frustrated because they have to figure out functions that they can bring up at the stroke of a single key.

That being said, for newcomers, they might be a whole other story. Learning these traditional DAW's with their workflows is a lot of effort. A friend of mine who is new to music production (although has a really solid composer & songwriter background) picked up Waveform and seems to fare quite well in learning it.

[hoxclab]

It's horribly designed and it's not intuitive. It might possibly we the worst DAW out currently.

[Erisian]

It's horribly designed and it's not intuitive. It might possibly we the worst DAW out currently.

There are worse, honestly.