DAW Wars - Discussing DAWs

@TheSheep I’ve been in Logic for years and use Studio One as well.

I hope this comes across in a friendly manner; I think you’re overthinking it man. I can think of a number of very high caliber mastering engineers who do stem work in Logic. It has an excellent audio engine. (Also don’t forget that Apple has acquired a number of audio companies in the past. The people they have coding it aren’t generic Apple devs, they’re DSP engineers who established some pretty great little companies prior to Apple. And considering the money Apple has to throw around I’d imagine they were deliberate in their reasoning of acquiring them…)

One other thing to note - I was sitting in on a webinar a while back with a fairly well established mastering engineer. She’s pretty neurotic about this kind of thing… Anyway, she mentioned doing DAW fidelity tests and found Logic to be very transparent and Pro Tools to be anything but. (According to her PT hypes the low end and has a lot of subsonic noise. It’s hearsay without the data but I trust her putting her reputation as a a M.E. behind the claims… ((Also worth mentioning was Live winding up at the bottom of the heap… No surprise there really…)) Anyway, the tests weren’t just listening tests, she did some analysis as well…)

The main point is Logic does have a solid audio engine, and I’ve always enjoyed its sound… Studio One and Cubase are spectacular too, but Logic is no slouch by any stretch…

Hey @Danny or @Paul have you guys ever done a DAW transparency / fidelity test, or thought about it?

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Studio One here, tried many others. The interface is very intuitive and tidy with absolutely no slouch of an engine underneath, scratch pads and project features. It just made sense to me when I tried it versus many others.

hey i use cubase for production and now looking forward for the new akia x standalone and pro tools 12.7 mix and mastering is it ok or is there a delay ?

delay compensation is 16000 or so samples. /e: in pt12/ you will run out of it quickly during plugin-heavy mastering :slight_smile: but if you dont make music on picture, (or specific timecode) and if you run out of available samples after stems come together it shouldnt be problem.

hey just…yes we have been talking about it for a while…and the time might be right very soon…i think we need a very complex mix with lots of 3rd party plugins, automation, parallel processing…and we can just run it thru each DAW…and let people do a blind vote online for a month…i am actually looking forward to it…and yes, Logic has an excellent sound! – a unique sound to me.

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Dunno if anyone’s still on this DAW thread but I wanted to share my recent experience with Studio One. I started with Logic 7 years ago. It was great but always really difficult to really learn as there are so many hidden menu’s and functions and the settings are hard to find, and remember the locations as well. Always felt it’s native plugins were great sounding but could never quite settle into its workflow. I learned Pro-Tools on an elementary level in school and loved the interface and also felt the native plugins were great but the workflow is horrible imo, even worse than Logic for composing and editing. I just feel pro-tools takes ten clicks to get something done which can be done in logic with 5, and Ableton with 2. So a friend turned me onto Live and gave me a crash course in it. OMG, it was magic. I primarily make electronic music, having began with hiphop and migrating through the years into dubstep, garage, and now DNB. Ableton was a game changer. My composition and arrangement went from a two or three week affair to a 4 or 5 night event in some cases. The point being that Ableton has a workflow which imo is unsurpassed for creating, composing, and arranging electronic music. I have not tried Bitwig though so have no comments on that DAW.

I have to admit that when I signed up for the Mixing and Mastering Program and I heard Danny say Live is just no good for mixing I thought “here we go again with this Ableton is insufficient discussion again”, but was open to hearing the reasons. After taking the courses (I’m not currently done yet) and learning new routing and Danny’s incredibly efficient workflow, I agree with this reasoning. Being an Ableton user since 6 I love it but it definitely has a tough time with third party VST integration and doesn’t handle large plugin counts well, CPU wise. It has gotten so tough that I’ve emailed the company many times throughout the years and adopted the name “Crashleton Live” for the DAW. Nonetheless this was not enough to persuade me to leave it. Well, a few months before signing up for Danny’s courses, I bought the newest Logic and tried switching back to it, but here I was faced with the same old buried menu’s and slow compositional workflow. I then found out about Studio One…Wow. Just wow.

Studio One has a great workflow for mixing. I will report on the composition workflow as I gain more experience with it but so far I am blown away. Presonus really nailed it with this DAW imo. What they have seemingly done is to create a DAW that took the best of Ableton, Logic, and Protools and left the problematics behind.
It’s got the sound engine and mixing capabilities of Logic, the recording and editing ability of Protools, and the extremely efficient and straightforward composition workflow of Ableton. The editing capability of one or two step mouse editing is fantastic and very straightforward, the menus are not too crazy, and the routing is flexible, the interface beautiful, very customizable, and the number one facet is that it’s very quick and easy to learn, although I am a seasoned DAW user so that may play into it as well. It’d be interesting to hear how new DAW users get on with it.

In conclusion I am really digging Studio One so far and am just kind of blown away by the whole thing. Anyone else have any comments about it ? Especially those producing electronic music ?

(I’ve no affiliation with Presonus either lol).

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I’m actually in the opposite camp.

Studio One’s pretty fantastic. The native plugins are excellent, Mix Engine Fx are awesome, and the latest update to the audio engine is really smart. I find myself having a hard time adopting to the switch after almost a decade in Logic though. Studio One’s easy to get around, the plugin thumbnail view is handy and I actually really like scratch pads… Still have a hard time feeling quite at home in it though, but pretty sure it just comes down to getting familiar enough to work quickly…

It’s weird, I found Studio One really buggy for me until 3.5. It would do this weird thing where if I dragged plugins in a different order audio would stutter if I had anything playing, it would crash randomly replacing plugins and CPU use was really high. I’m also not a fan of how flat it looks since version 3. Sure drop shadows don’t impact most functionality, but for whatever reason it does have an impact on my ability to find things easily… Small complaint, but a few friends feel the same way… Overall really good though and the ability to hop back and forth between song and project is really smart. Wish other DAWs had a proper mastering section…

Logic has its imperfections for sure… I hated 10’s UI overhaul when they rolled it out. I adapted quickly though, but not a fan of the newest 10.3 UI. That said for me Logic has the best arsenal of creative tools. Alchemy is amazing and Drummer’s crazy powerful once you start building your own kits or using it with Battery, Kontakt etc, layering multiple drummer instances, and mixing and matching ‘personalities.’ (Also didn’t like drummer at first. After playing with it it’s actually kind of genius.) The campy personalities are kinda lame, but it’s a small price to pay for what you can do with it… The Midi FX are pretty fantastic too, and Scripter seems like a whole world of potential no one’s really tapped into yet…

Anyway, both are solid DAWs but love Logic for its creative tools…

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I use propellhead reason because I love the mixer and rack extensions , I can add a bunch of things and never crash, I try fl studio but I hate writing songs in that DAW , amazing mixer but not for me haha

I’ve been around the block starting on Cubase, and then over to Logic 7-X professionally for many many years. I needed to browse loops in time while producing so looked at Ableton Live. I really enjoyed the workflow but it was lacking something for me. I prefer a more traditional arrange and mixer GUI and the really long bounce times put me off making the leap.

From then on I tried ProTools and fell in love with it. Another reasoning was that I wanted to work in commercial studios and they all use ProTools. I spent ages learning it top to bottom and I’m very happy with where I’m at now and it does everything I want it to. AND I did get those jobs in the studios because I learnt PT! I think its definitely one to learn if you want to go down that route.

For me, what I love about ProTools is previewing loops in the tempo of the session, take folders, and the awesome editing, Beat Detective and mixing as I work a lot with recording live instruments and a bit of MIDI. That said I’ve produced Techno tracks all in MIDI so it can be done!

There is no ‘best DAW’. The best DAW is the one you know the most and enjoy using :slight_smile:

UPDATE ON STUDIO ONE:

So unfortunately after purchasing and spending two weeks crash coursing Studio One I am back to Logic X. Studio One was grinding to a halt for me with minimal plugins. 3 instances of Slate VTM would give it hell. I’m running a MACB Pro 2.8 gHZ Quad Core i7 w 16 gb RAM and a 1 tb SSD drive and have no issues in Logic X, and Ableton handles the CPU ok but as I stated earlier third party vst/AU integration has been subpar in that DAW. I did a google search and there are no shortage of topics about Studio One and subpar CPU problems. SO subpar that Logic seems to outperform it by 5 or more x’s per plugin count. People are fairly upset about it and PreSonus will not get involved or give any response, or offer any refunds at that. It’s too bad because a DAW that imo offers the best of all daws I’ve used , and surpasses them in ease of use, gui, and overall workflow, not to mention the integrated Mastering interface of the daw, is basically un-usable for alot of people. I had to switch back to Logic because it was just making my situation unworkable. Hopefully in the future PreSonus will sort it out because I really fell in love with Studio One only to have to breakup after a month of our relationship.

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@mike, I’m curious about the “much better sound”.

@Danny mentioned multiple times that Ableton Live is good tool for production and performance but not a good choice for mixing and mastering. Having seen pros working with Avid I understand well that Live is messy when it comes to mixing many tracks, missing a dedicated “mixing view” with direct access to channel strip, etc.

I love the creative side of Live and have been using it for many years. Mixing in the box and using some of the plugins for sound design AND mixing, I find it difficult to draw a line between production and mixing. I get the benefit of being forced to “make production choices and move on to mixing” but prefer the iterative process of being able to go back to for instance MIDI files and fine tune beats and melodies.

What makes me pause though is the claims of reduced sound quality of Live and it’s limited ability to handle lots of plugins. Searching the internet I’m struggling to find objective evidence of that. Granted, earlier versions of Live had (more) flaws. Also, many users seem to ignore the various “high quality” settings throughout the daw, effects and plugins.

Have you or anyone else come across recent convincing evidence? I can live with the less-than-perfect mixing environment, as my focus remains on the production side, but I will not accept a lower sound quality and consider dropping my dear straight-through-processing for better outcomes.

Have you used Ableton in the passed? I’m a long time Ableton user and am wondering if it’s worth learning Bitwig as another writing tool. Is there much difference between the 2 DAWS?

I’m a long time DP user myself and haven’t really spent much time on other platforms. What am I missing, what should I look at in your opinion? I played around with recording a few times during my musical career, took some classes locally a few years back and have just been getting back into it the past several months using DP9. After having checked out a lot of YT videos I was impressed with Daniel’s presentations hence why I signed up here.

Hey Kevin,
If you’re comfortable w/DP, I’d say stick with it-- you’re not missing
anything! DP is a very deep DAW, as you probably know–some great tutorials
on Groove 3 if you want to go deeper. I think the chunks aspect is great, I
loved being able to nest several sessions into one file (like, mix,
overdubs, mastered as separate chunks.

For me, after being forced to learn PT, I found a workflow that I couldn’t
get w/DP, so I just gradually ended up more and more in PT. I could geek
out in greater detail if you like, but I’ve found that learning how to
fully use the tools I have generally beats time spent trying to learn too
many other DAWs (although I use Ableton, Logic, PT, Reaper, DP and an old
version of Reason/Record, so forget whatever I’ve said!).

And yes, Danny’s classes are game-changers, and largely DAW agnostic,
although he’s been leaning on the Cubase a bit heavily of late ;).

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Thanks, I’ve always liked DP just wanted to see if there was a reason more people weren’t using it. A professor I studied with told me that although he didn’t think it was one of the better DAWs, I should get up to speed on PT because it was the common denominator for studios. Maybe someday I will.

Hey Guys, Studio One user here. Are any of you experiencing it crashing all the time. Also, CPU problems Now thinking of moving to Logic X. I read on here someone else was also experiencing similar issues.

Yes, that was how I got sucked into PT world: a few too many projects pooted into DP from PT, until I finally thought, what the hell, let me try to learn this damn program. But without that impetus, why do it, unless you like spending your time scratching your head re: how do I do task x that I could do half asleep in DP…
__

Did you made the switch or are you still on Studio One?

Post a support request, the support guys are super friendly and eager to fix any problem

Are you using a macbook pro with touchbar? That caused a lot of problems around november as many plugins crashed.

/K

I just reviewed 9.5 Pro in comparison to artist and elements. It says there it has 16 inserts. Am I reading that wrong?
Joe

The new Cubase pro has 16 inserts. this is new for Cubase Pro 9.5 - so far all of us Cubase users have loved this change.

Not sure about artist and elements, I think they might be limited to still only 8 inserts.

Alexa