Best DAW for piano roll edit

[maanga]

All DAWs can do move, delete, stretch, copy, duplicate, step recording etc.
If you want additional things like, 'show notes for only this scale', 'insert chords' or 'articulation maps' then the list can be shortlisted. If you are interested in other features of the DAW, you get the DAW which you like. Slowly additional features also will be implemented.
I would suggest to get the lower priced DAW first and then move on from there.
Regards.

[neverbefore]

I thought Bitwig pretty good for midi but got rid of it because the audio editing is not that great. It really depends how you work and what you make. Mu.Lab might be worth a look as well

[MrJubbly]

Is this a trick question? Just kidding.

Of course, there is only one correct answer to this and that is FL Studio.

FL Studio's Piano roll is 'miles better' than any other DAWs' Piano roll.

And that was the case even before the latest 'Pimp My Piano roll' feature boost within the upcoming v21.1 version of FL Studio, due for imminent release any time now.

Wherein, it has a bunch of new snap to scale functionality added, in addition to the 'huge' new feature for supporting user-created 'Piano roll scripts', to further add all sorts of new advanced tools and functionality to its Piano roll.

Like I said, when it comes to Piano rolls, there is only one winner. And it is streets ahead of the competition.

[jtikey]

1) FL Studio
2) Reaper (has its issues)
3) Ableton (with Live Enhancement Suite)

oh wow I never heard of the Live Enhancement Suite. Gonna try it now, thanks

[Widowsky]

The only DAW that do MIDI editing right is Cubendo. In most other areas, it's become an incoherent and buggy bloatware, but its MIDI editing is second to none and should be the gold standard, in both in Piano roll and List Edit (you'll need to activate and set up the Info Line to unleash its full power, though).

It's the most comprehensive and granular of all. Once you've tested it, there's no going back if you really care about MIDI editing. It's also extremely efficient, since its basic principles are over thirty years old and were designed to work with the limited resources of an Atari.

Among the DAWs I use, Logic comes second, Reason has a few thing right, Ableton is a joke.

[anevva]

oh wow I never heard of the Live Enhancement Suite. Gonna try it now, thanks

Neither had I and I use Live quite a lot.

I managed to get this working today but it took a few hours to get some basic menus up and running. It's working on Live 9 and 10 so far very well (Live 11 is on another machine). Once the program is instantiated and running it will provide the functionality in Live. It takes a while to set up because the documentation is very terse and basic and hardly any tutorials at all. So most of the time was spent just getting my head around how this program generally works. It gets minimised to the task bar so you might miss it even after installation.

It helps to have a bit of coding experience. I can't imagine non-coders getting very far with this. Also Ableton search is a mess and they have disabled some stuff there making it harder. You need to experiment with your search strings. One clue is to do the search in Live and when it yields what you want, then put that string in to the enhancement suite.

Also some things are very esoteric. For example, if your VST has an underscore you will need to start your search with a ", but don't enclose with another " or it won't work. As I said, you really need patience and to experiment.

Some things are not possible, for example, MS-20. I have the Arturia version as well as Korg. So you have to save a default preset and search for that. No way around it since Ableton disabled some search functionality. This is mentioned in the docs.

Loading the VST3 version of MS-20 is only possible by saving a .vstpreset. This loads the plugin no problem when you put the search string as "MS-20.vstpreset". But for normal VST2 plugin you have to group it so it exists as a .adg. So the search string for that is "MS-20.adg". But then it is grouped which is not really a problem. To ungroup just right click and select Ungroup from the menu.

Also I figured out stuff that didn't seem to be included in the documentation that I found. For example putting 'VST' or 'VST3' after a space after the search strings helps to denote whether you want either of those called up. Also some times you want to enclose in quotations marks for the search string, but other times that does not work so you just put the search string in without them.

This is a great idea and well done. I really appreciate it. I can't see many people getting much out of it though except the most dedicated of Live users, and then it will take some time to get where you want. A labour of love but worth it. One good thing is you don't need to put in the VST paths as it seems to rely on the ones already there in whatever Ableton has. Makes sense.

It's also nice being able to have sub-menus. This helps to keep things organised. I will be donating to this project for sure. I haven't even got in to the midi stuff yet.

I'm looking forward to the latest release of FLStudio as I also use that quite a bit as well. I had a quick look and it seems that there is some scripting ability and on the image-line website people are already putting up scripts that enhance the functionality by a whole lot.

If I wanted to do serious midi stuff I would use Cubase as nothing really can touch that. But Live and FLStudio can still take you a long way and they are quicker as well, at least for me, for basic stuff. Sure, FL is a bit more advanced than Live, but it's going to be interesting to see how far I can get with that enhancement suite.

At least with the menu stuff I feel confident of getting a properly working menu with my most used plugins, both vsti and fx. But it will take some time. It's worth it because it will be quicker in the long run to just right click than to take hand off mouse and type in to the search bar, and then, the search does not work properly in Live so you have to alter it to get the results you want. I have a history with programming regular expressions, so this is fairly trivial to me, but as I said I can see others just giving up in frustration because to be honest the whole search system is broke in Live. Also just right clicking is easier than menu diving both vst and vst3 in the browser of live and scrolling down, clicking to access sub-menus etc. etc.

This is the relevant part from my config file so far for anyone who is interested. If you have the same plugins as me, this should work, whatever your specific path.

Code: Select all

;==================================================

/Instruments
Impulse
Impulse

Simpler
Simpler

Drum Rack
Drum Rack

//U-HE
Diva
Diva(x64) VST

Diva VST3
"Diva"      VST

Zebra2
Zebra2(x64) VST

ZebraHZ
ZebraHZ(x64) VST

ZebraHZ VST3
"ZebraHZ"      VST

Hive
Hive(x64) VST

Hive VST3
"Hive"      VST

Repro-1
Repro-1(x64) VST

Repro-5
Repro-5(x64) VST

..

//ARTURIA

SQ80 V
SQ80 V VST

Analog Lab 4
Analog Lab 4 VST

Korg MS-20 V
Korg MS-20 V VST

Pigments
Pigments VST

..

//KORG

M1
"M1" VST

M1 VST3
"M1"    VST3

MS-20
MS-20.adg         

MS-20 VST3
MS-20.vstpreset     VST3

Wavestation
Wavestation VST

Wavestation VST3
Wavestation      VST3

Triton
Triton VST
--
Triton Extreme
"Triton_Extreme VST

..


;==================================================

Also it's worth noting that if you have u-he plugins, using the default file names won't work. After much trial and error I figured it out. You can see in the code. You have to omit the "(x64)" to call the VST3 plugin for some reason. Anyway, this is a good example config file for anyone wanting to work out how to call vst or vst3 specifically and also for getting around Live's esoteric and arcane search implementation.

Sometimes those quotation marks are superfluous but at other times they are crucial. You have to experiment. If you have the Arturia collection and the Korg collection and even the "u-he collection", then this file will go a long way to helping you figure things out. I'm happy to help (if I can) so if someone wants to start another thread on this, I'll jump in if I can help you figure it out.