Mixcraft 10 Recording Studio

I am an old Cubase user, but health and other issues kept me away from production for a few years and my old Cubase 7 is well redundant. I am not a professional musician, I like to create and experiment and try multiple genres just to scratch the creative itch.

Picked up Mixcraft 9 in a bundle on Humble (I think) a while back and having recently returned to production I thought I'd give it a go since upgrading my Cubase is well out of my current budget (mostly retired disabled pensioner).

Since learning the ins and outs I recently upgraded to 10 with a very budget friendly price.

Mixcraft is very intuitive to use, especially if one has experience in other DAWs as familiar tools are in familiar places. I have never had to refer to the manual and any confusion as to where, what or how I may have had was solved with a quick search. Answers to issues seem fast to find so while I am not an active part of any community, support from users seems to be out there. I have struggled with learning some other software I have trialled and Mixcraft seemed the easier of the lot.

I have an old collection of Native Instruments tools, bought Komplete...err...5(?) years ago and all those amazing synths such as Massive, Absynth and my beloved Battery all work flawlessly. So do my U-he products. 64-bit Supported.

On my system 10 feels a little heavier than 9 and performance in loading projects and swapping/adding VST effects on the fly does not seem as smooth as it did in 9. I feel the same on the laptop I also run it on, but it is well workable and does not slow down the actual process of production at all but is there reason for the dropped star for this review. 10's improvements over 9 are nice, I won't list them here.

I have a muti-monitor setup of four screens and being able to undock windows such as the mixer and sound/sample library to a separate screen is great.

I am a terrible mixer/engineer but I am well happy with the result I am able to get out of this software.

For budget minded people or enthusiasts looking to dip their digital toes, Mixcraft is a solid professional easy to learn product and at a price point that many competitors only offer severely cut down and limited applications..

I am using Mixcraft (Recording Studio) for about a month extensively, and there was no need (for me) to read any of the documentation. I used Mulab and Reaper before. Mulab is nice but has its limitations. Reaper is also nice, but it feels like there are too many whistles, and the plugins (js) UI turns me off.

Mixcraft has some awesome tools built in. For example, I love the compressors (try the TB bus compressor) and TB de-esser. There are also synths like Messiah, Journey, VB3 organ (my favorites), and more instruments.

The UI is fine to me (1920x1080), and the program works stable. I have 600 VST plugins, and all are working fine.

Some people claim that DAWs have each their sound (like one is warmer or brighter than the other one), but that is a myth. So I would choose a DAW according to price, stability, workflow, capabilities, etc.

Yes, it's a nice DAW, and I hope Mixcraft will do well in the coming years.

Robert.

UPDATE: 6/13/23 * Mixcraft Pro Studio V.10 *

- Incredible scaling for superb scalable 4K/8K monitors.

- FULL VST3 support with incredibly robust stability on par with Pro-Tools.

- Excellent mixer with a completely revamped and highly accurate mixer.

- Accurate mixdown of the master that sounds exactly like the original mix (leaving FL Studio and Studio One 6 with their flat and non-dynamic mixdown) Mixcraft exports your work in 24-bits with a professional and unique precision in the market.

- A joke price, I paid $39 for the upgrade from 9 to v10 (Well done Acoustica!!!).

- Professional effects.

- Incredibly robust MIDI board and never leaves a note behind when you Quantize.

- Best DAW on the market with CPU heavy VST like 'Avenger - Vengeance' - I could simultaneously run 41 instances of the synth and it barely scraped 35%, impressive performance.

- Dream automation, any handle you move on the synth will record excellently! You can cut and paste entire tracks including all automation.

- Excellent Samplers included, you drag a loop and it automatically cuts it mapped to the Sampler, crazy.

- TB Barricade the best mid class limiter on the market! Try it, your mix will never be as punchy as with it.

- Instant combination of synth layering and layered effects with instant recall.

- Excellent and robust audio handling and wave elasticity algorithm, whatever you throw at the sequencer it will automatically put it in time, not like Studio One's garbage, you have to manipulate it and it never stays in time, Mixcraft is classy here.

- The recording controls bar detached wherever you want, lightning fast loading of large projects and top notch support make Mixcraft v10 the DAW of your dreams, trust me, it leaves all the others that cost 10 times more by the way!.