(SOLVED) DAW

Looking for inexpensive DAW.

Details:

• Intended use: Dark ambient/instrumental music.
• Should be able to plug my full-range MIDI synthesizer in.
• Large instrument collection out of the box.
• Said large collection shouldn't only consist of drum machines. Need keyboard instruments and classic orchestra.

Target genre samples:

Spoiler

Advice?

Basically, I'm looking for musical equivalent of Clip Studio Paint.

 

What are you using now? I've been using FL Studio (Windows) since 1997 (used to be FruityLoops) and it does the trick. It has its ups and downs (like any DAW) but ultimately you figure out how it works for you and go from there. Genre-wise, that's up to you, and FL Studio can handle it. I've worked on releases in all kinds of genres from 'dark trip-hoppish industrial' to 'bubbly synth pop' to 'rock' and back again. It also works great with the MIDI controllers I use.

It comes with a bunch of instruments but for full glorious orchestral you'll want to look into third party VSTs and sample sets.

So there's one recommendation. There are a ton of DAWs out there so since I'm most familiar with FL Studio I'll leave it at that. I'm sure someone else will have some other suggestions. I've got friends who use Abeleton Live and that looks pretty cool, too.

 

What is your budget and OS?

This is one of the only things left that isn't totally cross platform and Adobe-ized yet.

I'm assuming you are asking this because you have already eliminated Pro Tools for one reason or another, given that thats like the industry standard DAW, and therefore expensive.

For Mac, my brother uses Logic for his music, and he can make just about anything. I toyed with it a little for one of my games, and it works nicely with Midi keyboards. To me though it looks just like GarageBand. But it has more instruments and samples, which I suspect is what you need.

On the Windows side, I know some people swear by FL Studio, one of my brother's friends who is a rapper uses FL for some of his beats, and they usually come out pretty good. I know Windows has a ton of others, their names are just escaping me right now, mainly because I haven't used most of them. The only ones I have first hand experience with are Pro Tools, and a tiny bit of Logic, and Garageband.

Edit: Heh, yeah, it looks like someone who swears by FL beat me to it, ha ha

 

For MAC Logic is a no-brainer, for PC many like Reaper..

For instruments, most in-DAW one's suck.. You'd always be better off getting what you need from either toontrack / Native Instruments and / or Spectrasonics.

 

I'm not using anything at the moment, looking for software to fill the gap. I saw ableton on someone's computer it would do the trick, but IIRC it was something like $500.

Interesting.... I know that one, but isn't it mostly oriented at drummachines? Had impression that basic version doesn't have midi channel support. Has that changed? Basically, I don't have recording equipment, but can play synthesizer really well (as in - I can play J.S. Bach on it), and I'd be looking for synthetic instruments.

Hmm. Any suggestion for those? I think that steam had some cakewalk instruments. Not sure how good were those.

Windows 7 64bit, the lower budget the better. I think I can throw about a hundred usd max at that, more if it is on steam, because steam does local price adjustments (I'm not in USA). If it is really really good, might go above that. Slow incremental upgrades could also work. (that's how I got CLip Studio Paint Pro). Basically look at Scrivener-like price ranges.

 

I use Reaper and won't pass up on any opportunity to recommend it! I think as a programmer and blender user you would enjoy working with it. It is very customizable and flexible. It also is cheap (60$ for non-commercial or low-income use) and has a 2 month free trial. It can be installed as a portable app and does not have any DRM beyond asking for your serial number once. The company was founded by the guy who made winamp and they don't spend money on advertisement or bundled plugins. Reaper comes pretty barebones (only 11 MB to download) and you'll need synthesizer plugins and sample libraries. For general purpose mixing tasks like EQ and compression some decent plugins come with Reaper, but no synths or samples.

Imho this is a bad requirement to decide which DAW to use. If there are compelling reasons for you to need that stuff out of the box, and tied to your DAW, then I would recommend Reason. It should be very well suited for all kinds of synth based music. Afaik you can't get those synths any other way and if you go with a DAW that has a ton of bundled stuff I'd suggest to pick one where this gives you something that you wouldn't get otherwise.
https://www.propellerheads.se/reason

If you can afford it: Native Instruments Komplete Ultimate has you covered on all fronts. It's good value for the money if you check out the prices of the individual components. But it's also more stuff than you'd ever be able to use imho. Maybe the regular Komplete (non-ultimate) bundle would fit your needs better. If you want to focus on a single synth and rather learn that one properly than play around with a big collection without diving in deep anywhere, then I'd suggest to check out Native Instruments "Massive". That seems to be pretty popular/flexible/user friendly. If you want the most low level hardcore control over your synth, then get Native Instruments "Reaktor" and build your own synths ^^.

Personally I'd recommend to stay away from all Cakewalk products. I've owned Cakewalk music creator 5 and they were not up front about the artificial limitations they put on their tool. It said you can have 128 Midi tracks in the description (which is technically correct), but you can only have 8 vst plugins which is ridiculous and they didn't mention that in the product description, and the store where I bought it refused a refund. Besides that, the thing was crashy as hell.

I did use Fruity Loops 10 or so years ago, so my knowledge of that is outdated. I didn't like the UI and their general way of doing things too much. It's not a bad tool, you can get stuff done with it like you can with any other good DAW, but I personally prefer Reaper. FL Studio always gave me the impression of trying to "look less frightening/overwhelming", almost like a toy. Some might like that, some won't.

 

Well, the idea is that I don't want to spend eternity hunting digging through gazilliion of vst instruments (I saw how many of those are there). I just want an instrument pack I can get once, plug in and forget about looking for more of that.

Instruments could be tied to DAW, could be separate.

Well, I saw cakewalk daw demo (Cakewalk Sonar or something?) on steam... and it was surprisingly horrible. Thought that their instruments might be better.

 

With the caveat that I mentioned before, maybe take a look at z3ta 2+
http://store.steampowered.com/app/241790/?snr=1_7_7_151_150_1
I own a z3ta+ synth that I like, but I think I have an older version. I haven't tried the one on steam, but you could check out the demo and add the full version to your wishlist so you get notified when it's in a 50% off sale.

To get started with free stuff check out https://tal-software.com/Products
They make some very decent vintage synth emulations and have a few free plugins on offer. I'll probably buy this one some day:
https://tal-software.com/products/tal-u-no-lx

Let us know what you choose and post your future compositions here!


Edit: I just clicked through the Jericho soundtrack, sounds like I should listen to that soundtrack again. I just remember not liking the game.
But I think for that kind of orchestral music you'll need a sample arsenal that goes way beyond the 1000$ mark. Orchestral stuff isn't cheap already, but when you need atonal orchestral samples you'll need to look at libraries like Symphobia, and those are expensive.

 

At the risk of getting into fanboy territory, I think this part of your post deserves to be addressed. If the last time you used a software product was 10 years ago (a lifetime in software) then saying, "It's not a bad tool, you can get stuff done with it like you can with any other good DAW, but I personally prefer Reaper" should possibly instead read, "I don't really know what it can do since I use Reaper".

I checked out Reaper when it first came out roughly 10 years ago, and found it very limited. If I were to base my current opinion of Reaper on that experience, I'm not sure whether that opinion would hold any water. To the best of my knowledge, it's improved greatly since then and I would recommend someone to check it out if they're interested in DAWs. Beyond that, I'd honestly have no idea, and it would be disingenuous for me to imply otherwise.

As far as FL Studio looking like a toy, that may be true for some people. If music software needs to look intimidating and frightening to be useful then I must be doing something wrong. I'd rather spend my time focusing on creation with a Fisher Price xylophone than fiddling about with a complicated and frightening software interface.

So yeah... wanna fight?

 

I really like project sam's tutorials although the pack itself is quite pricey.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5T96VJUPcPP27X6g40JSmg

It shows me roughly what to do in garageband, which I like a lot. Just wish I had a midi keyboard instead of a non midi one as I can't tweak the sounds from my keyboard.

 

No need to Fight! For FL Studio literally my only complaint is that I personally and subjectively don't like how it looks and how stuff is organized, and I thought I made it sufficiently clear that I don't have any insight on its current feature set etc.. That's the reason why I mentioned how long I haven't used it. I know that's a lifetime in software. Sorry if that came accross the wrong way! I did go to their website to make sure they didn't do a 180 on their UI design, which they didn't. It looks almost exactly how I remember it. I even pointed out that what I don't like about it, may actually be something that others like about it. If you prefer that approach over Reaper's, that's totally fine.

In terms of what the professional DAWs on the market can do, I don't think there are too many big differences left these days. Do you? Imho my 3rd party synths and samples are gonna sound the same, no matter if I use Reaper, FL Studio, Cubase, Samplitude, Logic, Pro Tools or whatever. Please correct me if I'm wrong!

 

Oh my god, I almost forgot about Cakewalk! Man that program sucked! ha ha ah

I remember in high school one of my friends was downloading different music programs on his computer, and one of the ones he picked up was Cakewalk, and after about an hour with that, we were just amazed by how useless it was, ha ha ha. That was over 10 years ago now. I can't believe they are even still around

Yeah, let us know how this goes. While I'm not in the market now, I know once I can get my new computer, I might be, and if I chicken out on trying to save up for Pro Tools, I'll be interested in knowing what my other options might be.

 

That's pretty much it in a nutshell. They all do basically the same thing with different interfaces. Except Cakewalk 5, apparently, based on your review. Only 8 VSTs? What were they thinking?

 

At the time Cakewalk had several different DAWs and I suspect that they just took the core from their flagship DAW (Sonar Platinum maybe? I don't really know their lineup) and stripped features out for cheaper versions of Sonar and Music Creator. The 8 VST limit for Music Creator 5 as an artificial limitation creates a need to upgrade for users that want to do anything serious with it. They try to get people into making music by offering one of the cheapest DAWs on the market (or now by going onto steam where they have very little competition and can be seen by people who don't know a thing about DAWs and making music), and once the users find out they can't do anything serious with it, they start looking around and will see that Sonar looks familiar enough, but doesn't have that 8 vst limitation. And that way they get the people to not only buy their professional DAW, they buy the S***ty one on top of that and they expand their potential userbase by lowering the barrier to entry with the cheapo DAW. At least that's probably how they thought that would play out. In my case they got a seriously disgruntled customer and now I will go out of my way to discourage people from buying their DAWs for the rest of my life. The crazy thing is, I probably would have been happy with Sonar and might have never felt the need to look for an alternative and might not have ended up using Reaper. And I would have been willing to pay the higher price for a proper DAW right from the start. But I was not willing to further invest into a company that I felt scammed by.

 

A nice DAW that's inexpensive and free is Lmms.
AKA Linux Multimedia Studio.
Like all DAW's, it has a few bugs. And some midi keyboards don't work well in it.
The other good news is, that it's not a crappy DAW.
And it works in Windows too.

 

Sounds like you really need to ask this at a forum dedicated to sound like gearslutz ...you'll get more people familiar with the VST/samples required to get those genre sounds you are after.. like http://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/komplete/orchestral-cinematic/ then go find out what similar vst/samples exist, music production can be expensive and time consuming are you sure you want to even bother http://www.midilifestyle.com/music-production/best-orchestral-vst-plugins/ or

As far as my personal opinion on DAWs, I've tried a bunch over the years current favorite is Ableton, its got good sound processing/effects built in, so you don't need to continue looking for more things to buy to improve it. Also happen to like its Interface & customization, it packs advanced features but its not instantly easy to use, once you get past its, on the surface pretty simple looking gui, I think it grows on you more than other DAWs as its features are tucked away and come out when you need it.

So I'll give Ableton Live a thumbs up..you can often find instrument hardware being bundled with the full live suite or the standard for better prices than buying standalone. You save alot at least if you were interested in using the hardware that bundles it.. like Push2, Alot of other instrument manufactures also bundle Ableton live/standard/suite these days for good reason. https://www.ableton.com/en/live/feature-comparison/

I think getting started with music you really need to get the instrument hardware with good vst/daw bundle that you're interested in, its often the cheapest way.

Because it really is all about them VSTs and Samples for most part, unless you are an instrument player, really good and can just use sound processing effects to get what you want out of less expensive samples or your own instruments..which you hear alot from Ableton users who have become one with all bundled sound processing effect plugins as it has some of best ones native to the software, and the suite version comes with even more.

Reaper is like the Ableton underdog.. I mean I got Ableton bundled with hardware so its not huge appeal for me as its pretty similar, I could see why its a popular choice to go with lately, its price, workflow, features and customization support is alright, they also let you export to mp3 via linking directly to library like lame_enc (avoiding the license crap) while Ableton can't be bothered to provide its users a similar export setup ..so you're restricted to wave/aif and soundcloud upload :S pretty weak excuses and yet its often requested .. anyway if you've already got VST's and you don't really need to spend extra on a DAW bundle then its not a bad choice. Notice its such an underdog its popularity increase has only been in last few years especially last years 5.0 release.. it doesn't even show up from this old chart..



The learning curve of most DAWs isn't super easy for a complete newbie in any of them imo, however its the workflow and advanced usages, that is where you start liking or hating the software design. Workflows and options or lack of, that is cause for most annoyance. They can all be used to make music, however the ones that will make you stick with it are the ones that have an interface/interaction that doesn't suck for your tastes and experience, and provides good GUI controls to tweak its style/coloring to something you will stick with.

 

10..12 years ago I saw people use Cakewalk music creator as score writing program. It worked okay for this purpose (I mean, it is no lilypond, and you probably wouldb't be able to create "Faire's aire and death waltsz" in it, but you could make a score in it and listen to it), then they started doing something weird with it... and I saw people switching to Final, Sibelius and the like. IIRC right now there's actually free software for this purpose (like MuseScore), which wasn't available back then.

How does reaper work with improvisation sessions (I think I tried it but didn't "get" the interface)? IIRC in ableton you're able to create multi instrument tracks, put them on a loop, then start recording new track while older ones are still playing. A "song"/composition can be then composed from those preconfigured blocks. AFAIK something similar can be done with FL studio, expect fl studio tends to think that all your song must have 4/4 beat and you really want a drummachine.

The game had amazing aesthetics (sound, mostly, plus visuals in some places), it is just gameplay itself wasn't that good.

 

I know things changes with time. But in any case if its helpful to you.

• Native Instrument Komplete
• Voice of passion or shevannai voice of elves and/or east west quantum leap symphonic choirs
  
• heavyocity damage

 

Reaper doesn't have dedicated midi or audio tracks, it just has tracks that by default route both midi and audio to their parent track. You can organize them in a hirarchy, and you can make all kinds of special routing setups. Tracks can have FX plugins, that way you can for example route all the string instruments through the same reverb or fx setup if you want. You also can hide tracks in the main view if you want to only see certain ones at a time.
When you record, Reaper creates a clip with midi or audio data, depending on what you are recording. Those by default can be moved around, looped, cross-faded, cut etc., like you would expect. Unless you "glue" an audio clip you're always operating nondestructively on the clips. You can create clips with linked midi data, similar to prefabs in Unity. You can use different overdub modes for recording. E.g. you can setup a loop region in the timelin and record while hearing the other tracks in the looped region playing while you record either midi or audio data, or both at the same time onto separate tracks. You could have midi recording always add notes to the existing midi clip in the looped area, e.g. to play a harmony over what you recorded already or add to a beat, or you could set it up to record different takes. The take recording feature works for audio too. You can set the loop region, record x number of loops and then afterwards you can select which take you want to keep or explode all the takes into normal clips and things like that. I don't record much, so I don't use it that often.
You aren't stuck with 4/4 beats, you can set time signature markers on the timeline and can choose whatever odd beat you want and also can set different BPM tempos that way. You should take a look at some Reaper recording tutorials on youtube, and compare to tutorials for the other DAWs that you consider to see what workflow would suite you best. I don't have any good video recommendations, I learned most things about Reaper with trial and error and googling for forum answers.
Come to think of it, I had a bit of trouble getting the latency for midi recording to be correct. I can't tell if that is related to my audio hardware, or driver, or to Reaper, but others seemed to have that problem too. I think I just experimented with the latency compensation value for recordings, till it was precise enough for my needs. This is something you should look out for, because someone who can properly play an instrument will be more annoyed by that.

Damage is now part of Komplete, would be a waste to buy both. I bought Damage before it was included in Komplete too :-/.

 

If you're talking about situation where you press midi key and software synth plays at some random interval after that point, then as far as I know (might be wrong about it), it is inherent problem with software synth. IIRC device operates on a short audio buffer, and maximum latency is size of that buffer in milliseconds. If the buffer is too short you'll start hearing static, if it is too long, then you'll have significant delays after keypress. Hardware synth won't have this porblem. IIRC usually this kind of issue should be fixed when you "render" the song, but it was unavoidable during live play. At least that's how it worked many years ago. I don't know if anything changed.

 

Nah, not an issue as long as the DAW calibrates latency compensation correctly.. Well it's not really "midi" latency that's the issue, it's generally the VST you put on top of it that knocks everything out of whack.

I use Midi drumkits quite a lot and have no real issues with modern DAW's like Samplitude, that being said I run Pro Tools 10 and there is some issues with the master bus causing phase variances due to latency compensation (that's when mastering with heavy plugs) so I had to bounce the mix then master it after, which you should do that really but in a lot of DAW's today you don't have to.. I recently picked up Samplitude again, which is my favourite DAW (used to use MAC's but I got my UAD stuff working with PC so it was sat collecting dust)..

It can actually be a bigger issue in hardware synths as you're describing pops / cracks etc. (well not really any more with how powerful PC's are and new I/O's), set your audio interface buffer to about 128 (if you have a dedicated interface). Maybe crank it up when you're mixing to 256 / 512 (again things are better today so you can get away with less)..

Ultimatley, how much of an issue it's going to be depends on your setup.

 

The problem I described was happening in cakewalk, it was years ago, and for a musician to have comfortable response, it was necessary to set buffer size to something like 32 milliseconds, because 128 was still very noticeable.

Anyway, I am not familiar with specifics and might be wrong about this. I haven't watched progress of audio software/hardware for a long time. Maybe things significantly improved.

 

Those power of two numbers in the settings are buffer size in samples as far as I know, not miliseconds. The general latency issue you describe isn't fully avoidable, like you said. USB audio interfaces alone add a bit of latency, afaik Firewire is better (Edit: it isn't, see below). If you use an internal soundcard, you should try the Asio4all driver, it might give you better latency.

For recordings the DAW should compensate for the latency by making sure midi data is shifted in a way that when playing back the recording, it sounds like I heard it while playing. There was an issue where that didn't line up properly. So e.g. I recorded me tapping a 4/4 beat on my midi controller, then recorded again and played in sync with the first recording, and then when I play that back the recordings, they would not be in sync and the offset was noticable for me. In theory using the reported latency to compensate for the recordings should work out of the box, but in my case it didn't. I had to guess the value with trial and error, and then it worked as intended.

P.s.: upping the project samplerate to 96khz for recording might help with audio latency because at double the sample rate the same buffer size covers half the time. But there probably are a bunch of possible problems with that approach.

 

They have, one of the biggest things were dropping firewire and replacement with USB 3.0 (plus DP / Thunderbolt for some) and decent latency compensation.. I'm fine with 128, 32 caused a lot of pops / crackles generally (dependant on software instrument) I use an MOTU 1248 and an Apogee Symphony and I can easily get away with 64 / 128 for both recording and mixing.

Although they aren't exactly "cheap", but interface technnology has moved on so much over the years that near enough most ADDA solutions over USB 3.0 will do.. I've had a lot of interfaces and used pretty much every DAW underneath the sun over the last two decades.

@Martin_H

Firewire is horrible, I use it for UAD plugins and I've have various FW interfaces.. It's pretty much out the window in music recording today anyway. Avoid if at all possible..

If you're having to manually sort out the DLC than there's an issue, I've never even had to bother in modern DAW's unless I'm using some extremely heavy plugins and that was only because PT's delay comp was slightly rubbish in older versions.

In older setups it was an issue, I have to admit Reaper is the only DAW I've looked at.. Un-installed 10 minutes later as I wasn't a massive fan, but many seem to love it.

Oh by the way, you actually mean "buffer size" and it does have quite a bit impact on latency:

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jan05/articles/pcmusician.htm

Some light reading for you there.

P.S today most audio interfaces have ZLM (Zero latency monitoring) which bypasses any noticeble issues with people recording stuff (most of the time).

 

Oh, didn't know that. Thanks for the info, I edited my post. I only ever used USB 2.0 interfaces, no 3.0, so maybe that's where my impression came from?

And I edited in a bit about 96khz recording in my last post, is that correct at least?

 

Ok, it's a little difficult not to deep dive into this. USB 2.0 is fine the only real difference is track amount (think of it like how many lanes are on a motorway) USB2.0 with a well optimised driver set can be just as fast, but USB3.0 just allows you to record more tracks at once.

When we talk buffer size, it's the amount of samples additional to the RTT (Round Trip) of natural latency through the AD / DA / chipsets / usb controller / buffer sets etc. the higher the buffer size the more additional latency you add.

One of the main benefits to USB 3.0 is the amount of voltage, which USB 2.0 suffered issues with 48V phantom power or powering a decent headphone out. Apart from that again it comes down to the amount of tracks you can record / export (in a hybrid (HW outboard and Interface setup)) at any one time.

The only type of tech that's worth looking at in terms of latency is thunderbolt, because it has direct access to the CPU the latency time is therefore decreased. TBolt devices aren't exactly cheap, neither are they common in the PC market at the moment.!

When we talk about 96KHZ, completely avoiding the whole Nyquist / plugin upsample bit (tired of that convo). Yes it does decrease latency if your computer can handle it, it requires higher CPU cycles and on top of that you need a quicker disk solution to quickly store the additional amount of data.. So you'll be looking kinda I7 / I5 / SSD to get the most out of it. If your PC isn't powerful enough, then you have to move the sample buffer higher therefore making it pointless.

FW in itself wasn't so bad, there were just a lot of issues with chipset manufacturers and audio driver sets.. It's been bad enough over the years with USB, many of them causing unreasonable latency amongst other things. Like I had an Apogee Duet 2 that I needed to constantly keep being re-booted to work correctly.

As for Asio4All, you'll always be better off with a dedicated interface.

Out of about five different FW interfaces, the only one that worked correctly was an allen and heath GSR-24 (I know someone who ran Metric Halo and had no issues either). Which I later sold because it took up too much space (nice piece of kit though )..

 

That's good to hear, if I ever record audio it's usually just one channel, and my midi controller only has it's own usb connector and no real midi out (it's a Steinberg CMC PD pad controller).

Don't worry, I don't know anything about that ^^. I don't use 96khz anyway.

Yep, I used to hit a wall there even without recording things, just from the amount of sample libraries I was using. I7, SSD and a ton of ram solved that fortunately .

Of course, I was just mentioning it in case a dedicated interface isn't within budget. Before I had my first USB interface it made things a bit better for me.

Thanks for sharing all that information, good stuff! I also read the article. Weird to hear Windows XP mentioned again ^^, but I guess this is one of the few areas in computing where in 10 years almost nothing changed (except for USB3 etc.).

I did another test on that Reaper recording latency thing because I thought that some of the plugins I used back when I first encountered the problem might have caused it. Plugin delay wasn't something I had considered as a possible source of the problem, so now I used the most barebones sinewave synth I have to test. I have to admit that I really have absolutely terrible timing as a musician, and that makes it impossible to see clearly how many miliseconds the recorded midi data is off. But I can pretty clearly see that overall when I activate the option "use audio driver reported latency" everything gets shifted somewhere between 30 and 60 ms too early. When I deactivate that option I saw no latency issues. So for what I need, I consider the problem fixed. My guess is that the audio driver just reports the wrong latency to Reaper or it interprets the value incorrectly. The asio driver control panel reports total latency of 14.4ms in "recording mode" and 30ms in "mixing mode". As far as I can tell that's correct.

Would you rather recommend composing/mixing in 44.1khz or 48khz? That's one of the things I'm still clueless about. Or is it another "it depends" scenario?

 

Hang on, that doesn't sound right..!? Are you using ASIO4ALL? My MOTU with a stock compressor reported 1.5 ms (32 samples / 96KHZ) over thunderbolt and 2.3 ms over USB. That's for round trip as well, from AD to PC back to DA..

I'd be interested to hear what interface you're using.

44.1 vs. 48KHZ? Doesn't really matter ..

 

I'm using a Focusrite Scarlett Solo (USB 2 with the proper asio driver from the manufacturer)
https://us.focusrite.com/usb-audio-interfaces/scarlett-solo
The Asio control panel is pretty crappy, and the normal driver control panel even more so. It has 3 latency presets (recording, balanced, mixing) and in the asio control panel that can be opened from Reaper all of those settings report 128 samples, so my guess is they rather use more buffers than more samples per buffer in the mixing preset!?

Is your interface using USB 3? From my memory USB 2 latency is significantly higher than your total RTL. I did a quick search and found this:

https://www.gearslutz.com/board/8253121-post348.html

and this:

https://www.presonus.com/community/Learn/The-Truth-About-Digital-Audio-Latency

I only skimmed, but this looks relevant:

Cool, then I'll just leave it at 44.1 and not worry about it .

 

Nah, that's well out.. My Apogee Symphony which is quite old now only has 4.8 ms of latency (96Khz / 64 samples) RT. Over USB 2.0, you got to remember though these are pro audio interfaces.. The Apogee cost $2.5K and the MOTU is $1.5K...

Also the system I use is a 12 thread (six core) 5830K with M.2 SSD's, so unless it's a pretty meaty vst (like guitar sims w/ cab sims etc.) I relatively don't have any issues.

Don't get me wrong, I'm clocking this at a best case scenario.. I doubt it'd actually work @ 32 samples with USB, I know the apogee symphony won't, it'll do 64 at best and for the MOTU I use the new AVB bridge which uses a PCI-E 10GB ethernet connection. For the Symphony I use the PCI-E bridge card which is roughly 1.8ms..

I was just intrigued to see what you could get over USB..

I had a Focusrite saffire pro 24 (FW) and the latency seems about right for that, it was around 14 ms (can't remember exact settings). It's a prosumer interface, which generally does for most things.. But as said, I used to track / mix and master bands (as well as my own stuff) so I invested in a lot of gear..

 

Well for over 10 times the price of my audio interface it would be really sad if you didn't have way better latency .

 

Y'know what is sad, how hit and miss the audio industry is.. From plugins to audio interface all the way over to mic's / monitors. Like I bought some Equator D5's because the room I moved into wasn't big enough for the mains I had, before that though I tried six pairs of monitors some costing upwards of $1.5K and a lot of them weren't very good.

The Equators were $300.00 and some of the best monitors I've ever had.

We don't do enough on audio in this forum..

 

I'm not into chiptune, but I thought maybe some of you might care about this:

http://impactsoundworks.com/product/super-audio-cart/

 

I use Presonus Studio One and love it. Very intuitive and reasonably priced.

If you're looking for,some monitors the KRK Rokit G3's are good bang for your buck.

Some room treatment will also go a long way.

 

I've used a few DAWs over the last 16 or so years as a recording musician. fruity loops, cakewalk sonar, logic to name a few but I've now discovered Reaper.

It's the best DAW I've used, it just makes sense to me and has a great price. I realise all this is subjective but I think it's well worth checking out.

 

Yaaay Reaper! Since you used Logic, how does it compare to Reaper? I've recently seen a video where I thought "that's a nice dark skin for reaper, where can I get that?", and it turned out I was just looking at Logic.

 

Reaper is just more natural for me to use, I always found myself googling how to do stuff in Logic. You know that feeling that you could of done something much quicker in other software? I got that a lot with Logic, but again that's my experience with it.

 

Yeah, I'd recommend Reaper. It's pretty cheap and powerful.

I use Sonar - used to be called Cakewalk a LOOOOOONG time ago, before I used it. Sonar 8.2 is awesome but a bit old at this point. With Sonar 10 they changed so much of the UI that I hate it. That was a bitch move and stupid decision on their part I think. Lots of old "pro" Sonar users won't upgrade to 10 because of it.

As far as "Logic is a no-brainer", I've never seen the program but I was told by more than a few people that it's incredibly difficult and non-intuitive to learn. But this was about 10 years ago, maybe they have improved?

And yes, choosing a DAW because it comes with lots of instruments is a very bad reason to pick one. Most included bundles suck. You will need to purchase something extra for that or just record all real instruments (get an expensive synthesizer).

USB2 is ok for a maximum of 2 inputs. Otherwise you'll need USB3 or Firewire (my choice). Never had a problem with Firewire in 12 years. It only takes buying a $12 Firewire card to plug into the PC (make sure to get Texas Instruments chipset if you do this). Interfaces: MOTU drivers seem to be the best, I've never had a problem once I switched to MOTU. I'd personally stay away from Saffire interfaces. I ordered their 8-input interface and it had 2 faulty channels on delivery. Got a replacement and it had 1 faulty channel as well, so I did what everyone else did and got a MOTU.

SPDIF though, never had anything but problems with it.

I record everything in 44k. Never could hear a difference in the final product with higher sampling rates, I tried a few times.

The best monitors for the buck are the $350 Yamahas. Seems everyone around me has them now.
http://www.sweetwater.com/store/det...e=&network=g&gclid=CMS_xvW-r80CFYiVfgodDMsLtA
Cheaper than that, I had KRK Rokit 5's and they completely outclassed everything in the price range.

And yes - agreed - I've heard monitors more expensive that are terrible and usually you will need a subwoofer if you want to fine tune "tight bass" without getting any woofing and having to take it to a half dozen different speaker systems repeatedly to double-check the mix. I'm saying that with a subwoofer you won't need to try it on other systems to make sure of the mix.

 

As they say, better late than never.

I found out that LMMS in conjunction with soundfonts seems to be working for my purposes.

Sample:
https://soundcloud.com/user-62897555/battle-track-2

Marking thread as solved.

 

if you are mostly trying to make electronic music and not record real instruments i would recommend ableton live and reason. Otherwise i would lean towards pro tools and cubase. Problem is to do proper mixing you will need proper studio monitors with a flat frequency response and will need a good external audio interface.

 

The thread is "solved".

I might grab ableton one day (I know what it can do, and session mode was quite useful), but not right now. And yes, I am interested in synthesized instruments, not in recording the real thing.

 

As far as "Logic is a no-brainer I think a 5 star rating by a well known and respected music reviewers and industry vet's shows it's far from rubbish. 10 years in software is a LOOONG time.

http://www.musicradar.com/reviews/tech/apple-logic-pro-x-580421

USB2 is ok for a maximum of 2 inputs. You may want to check up on that:

http://motu.com/avb/avb-faq

Q: What is the maximum number of audio channels available to and from the computer?
Connection Sample rate Channels (in and out)
Thunderbolt / USB3 44.1 to 96 kHz 128
Thunderbolt / USB3 176.4 or 192 kHz 64
USB2* 44.1 or 48 kHz 64

The best monitors for the buck are the $350 Yamahas.

https://www.google.co.uk/?gws_rd=ssl#q=best+studio+monitors+2016

If you are talking about the Yamaha HS8, I'll agree they are half decent. But they are $349.99 each and there is much better out there. The JBL LSR305's are good (actually prefer them) as an entry level monitor..

will need a subwoofer if you want to fine tune "tight bass" Ummm no:

Yamaha HS8 Active Studio Monitor Features:

• High-performance drivers and mounting system
• 8" cone woofer, 1" dome tweeter
• Impressive 38Hz to 30kHz frequency response

If you read up on pro audio, you'll know adding a sub can do nothing but exascerbate issues. The crossover frequency needs to be correctly aligned and you need the equipment to do it, that's if you already have your room fully treated and do not suffer things like standing waves. Bass traps come in very handy for such things..

Not to mention the HS8's are full range pretty much, anything below 20hz you simply can't hear and you really should be rolling stuff off via a HPF from around 40hz.. In Metal music I tend to roll off everything below 50 / 60 or it just wrecks the mix.. Good article for metal mixing here http://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/mixing-metal, but a lot of the components apply true for any mix. So in short there is NO reason to buy a sub with a decent full range monitor. It's more trouble than it's worth..

I've not used the HS8's long term but tested them I use the JBL 4328P's (because I got them for half of what they usually go for), there is no port woofing or anything. Although I have seen it happen on more expensive monitors than the HS8's (Adam A7X's). As I said, the audio market is a little hit and miss..

The JBL LSR's 305's are fine though, cheap, wide stereo imaging, decent accuracy.