Most productive DAW app to record 24 tracks of audio, play my .sf2sounds and VST plugins?

[Keoki]

I have a long story of switching DAWs; I started with Cubase, but
never liked its dongle time bomb aspect. Then I used Logic Pro, but
its Apple Loops utility was no match for Ableton Live by a mile. So I
upgraded to Ableton Live, which was finally intuitive, except its
Sampler just couldn't handle my 5000+ hand-picked .sf2 (SoundFont 2)
library. (Oh, that dreaded "media files are missing" window as soon as
I moved something... and 1 hr+ seek time to relink just one...)

Instead of drifting through the other 30 DAWs too on this seemingly
endless quest, let's see if I can take a shortcut. In your opinion,
what is the most productive / intuitive DAW today to record 24 tracks
of audio, .play back my vast .sf2 sound library, and host 4-5 VST
plugins? Without a dongle. (Any OS is fine. Dedicated hardware units
too.)

Thank you in advance

[Peter Larsen[_3_]]

Keoki wrote:

> I have a long story of switching DAWs; I started with Cubase, but
> never liked its dongle time bomb aspect. Then I used Logic Pro, but
> its Apple Loops utility was no match for Ableton Live by a mile. So I
> upgraded to Ableton Live, which was finally intuitive, except its
> Sampler just couldn't handle my 5000+ hand-picked .sf2 (SoundFont 2)
> library. (Oh, that dreaded "media files are missing" window as soon as
> I moved something... and 1 hr+ seek time to relink just one...)

> Instead of drifting through the other 30 DAWs too on this seemingly
> endless quest, let's see if I can take a shortcut. In your opinion,
> what is the most productive / intuitive DAW today to record 24 tracks
> of audio, .play back my vast .sf2 sound library, and host 4-5 VST
> plugins? Without a dongle. (Any OS is fine. Dedicated hardware units
> too.)

I can't promise you they can do what you want, but you should take a good
look at reaper and at vegas.

> Thank you in advance

Kind regards

Peter Larsen

[geoff]

Peter Larsen wrote:
> Keoki wrote:
>
>> I have a long story of switching DAWs; I started with Cubase, but
>> never liked its dongle time bomb aspect. Then I used Logic Pro, but
>> its Apple Loops utility was no match for Ableton Live by a mile. So I
>> upgraded to Ableton Live, which was finally intuitive, except its
>> Sampler just couldn't handle my 5000+ hand-picked .sf2 (SoundFont 2)
>> library. (Oh, that dreaded "media files are missing" window as soon
>> as I moved something... and 1 hr+ seek time to relink just one...)
>
>> Instead of drifting through the other 30 DAWs too on this seemingly
>> endless quest, let's see if I can take a shortcut. In your opinion,
>> what is the most productive / intuitive DAW today to record 24 tracks
>> of audio, .play back my vast .sf2 sound library, and host 4-5 VST
>> plugins? Without a dongle. (Any OS is fine. Dedicated hardware units
>> too.)
>
> I can't promise you they can do what you want, but you should take a
> good look at reaper and at vegas.

x2 . Vegas and Reaper (and Acid).

geoff

[polymod]

"geoff" > wrote in message
...
> Peter Larsen wrote:
>> Keoki wrote:
>>
>>> I have a long story of switching DAWs; I started with Cubase, but
>>> never liked its dongle time bomb aspect. Then I used Logic Pro, but
>>> its Apple Loops utility was no match for Ableton Live by a mile. So I
>>> upgraded to Ableton Live, which was finally intuitive, except its
>>> Sampler just couldn't handle my 5000+ hand-picked .sf2 (SoundFont 2)
>>> library. (Oh, that dreaded "media files are missing" window as soon
>>> as I moved something... and 1 hr+ seek time to relink just one...)
>>
>>> Instead of drifting through the other 30 DAWs too on this seemingly
>>> endless quest, let's see if I can take a shortcut. In your opinion,
>>> what is the most productive / intuitive DAW today to record 24 tracks
>>> of audio, .play back my vast .sf2 sound library, and host 4-5 VST
>>> plugins? Without a dongle. (Any OS is fine. Dedicated hardware units
>>> too.)
>>
>> I can't promise you they can do what you want, but you should take a
>> good look at reaper and at vegas.
>
> x2 . Vegas and Reaper (and Acid).

Another vote for Reaper.
Version 4 is still in Beta, but I've been using it for quite some time.
It's lean and mean.

Poly

[Nil]

On 17 Jul 2011, Keoki > wrote in rec.audio.pro:

> In your opinion, what is the most productive / intuitive DAW today
> to record 24 tracks of audio, .play back my vast .sf2 sound
> library, and host 4-5 VST plugins? Without a dongle. (Any OS is
> fine. Dedicated hardware units too.)

I don't know of any recording applications that natively support
soundfonts. The ones I know need all an add-on/plugin.

I would suggest you look at Reaper for Windows, plus the SFZ player
(free, can load one soundfont at a time, but you can run multiple
copies of SFZ) or SFZ+ (commercial, can host multiple soundfonts.)

Cakewalk Sonar is good, too.

[Les Cargill[_4_]]

Keoki wrote:
> I have a long story of switching DAWs; I started with Cubase, but
> never liked its dongle time bomb aspect. Then I used Logic Pro, but
> its Apple Loops utility was no match for Ableton Live by a mile. So I
> upgraded to Ableton Live, which was finally intuitive, except its
> Sampler just couldn't handle my 5000+ hand-picked .sf2 (SoundFont 2)
> library. (Oh, that dreaded "media files are missing" window as soon as
> I moved something... and 1 hr+ seek time to relink just one...)
>

Eh? That's weird. The free ( or free & pay ) SFZ handles
any number of Soundfonts - it just pops up a (Windows)
file picker widget.

SFZ is a soundfont player VST. But some soundfonts are
toxic - they can crash the player(s). What experimentation
I have done indicates that they crash them all equally,
give or take. I keep Soundfont projects seperate from
the projects holding .wav files, partly because of
crashiness but mainly because that way I can cycle the MIDI
date back out to be edited and re-rendered.


> Instead of drifting through the other 30 DAWs too on this seemingly
> endless quest, let's see if I can take a shortcut. In your opinion,
> what is the most productive / intuitive DAW today to record 24 tracks
> of audio, .play back my vast .sf2 sound library, and host 4-5 VST
> plugins? Without a dongle. (Any OS is fine. Dedicated hardware units
> too.)
>
> Thank you in advance


I still have a lot of regard for the ease of use of N-Track. I
also still use 3.0 because the MTC/Midi Clock stuff works on it.

I haven't seen Sonar recommended yet. Sonar handles plugin crashes
better.

--
Les Cargill

[Peter Larsen[_3_]]

Les Cargill wrote:

> I haven't seen Sonar recommended yet. Sonar handles plugin crashes
> better.

Reaper clams to be able to contain fst's in their own confined memoryspace
so that they only crash themselves and not the host. As of now only
"readware" in this household.

Kind regards

Peter Larsen

[Keoki]

Thank you for the recommendations. I tried SFZ, it produced all kinds
of "out of memory" errors on my 18GB RAM PC, but VSampler works fine
instead.
I installed Reaper too to see if I like it better than Ableton. (My
main gripe with Live was Ableton Sampler, which VSampler now
bypasses.)

My gut reaction to Reaper is that there is way too many doohickeys
onscreen (the same tracks shown horizontally and vertically?) though
probably there's a reason why. Perhaps all I need is a different skin
file. It's an internal tug-of-war. On one hand, I'd prefer a more
utilitarian view because it's too easy to be wooed by the dance of
rainbow volume LEDs and 3D FFTs how gorgeous one's music looks - when
the listener won't see any of this. (Misjudgement danger!) On the
other hand, I do notice that I'm more attracted to colorful GUIs at
the outset as I'm browsing through various DAW screenshots. Hmm.

[geoff]

Keoki wrote:
> Thank you for the recommendations. I tried SFZ, it produced all kinds
> of "out of memory" errors on my 18GB RAM PC, but VSampler works fine
> instead.
> I installed Reaper too to see if I like it better than Ableton. (My
> main gripe with Live was Ableton Sampler, which VSampler now
> bypasses.)
>
> My gut reaction to Reaper is that there is way too many doohickeys
> onscreen (the same tracks shown horizontally and vertically?) though
> probably there's a reason why. Perhaps all I need is a different skin
> file. It's an internal tug-of-war. On one hand, I'd prefer a more
> utilitarian view because it's too easy to be wooed by the dance of
> rainbow volume LEDs and 3D FFTs how gorgeous one's music looks - when
> the listener won't see any of this. (Misjudgement danger!) On the
> other hand, I do notice that I'm more attracted to colorful GUIs at
> the outset as I'm browsing through various DAW screenshots. Hmm.

The GUI is based on Sony Vegas (I beleieve), which means that the on-screen
dohickies are probably optionally closeable, and also detachable from the
main window (great for multi-monitor setups).

geoff

[Mike Rivers]

On 7/22/2011 9:08 PM, Keoki wrote:

> I installed Reaper too to see if I like it better than Ableton. (My
> main gripe with Live was Ableton Sampler, which VSampler now
> bypasses.)

Reaper and Abelton Live are very different in concept. Reaper follows
the traditional model of a recorder and mixer while Live is a
performance tool that you can use in the studio.

> My gut reaction to Reaper is that there is way too many doohickeys
> onscreen (the same tracks shown horizontally and vertically?)

They all have too many doohickeys on screen. Reaper uses several windows
that you can expand, shrink, or even not display at all. For example,
you can get rid of the horizontal track window and record, play, and mix
from the mixer window. Or you can turn off the mixer window and use the
same controls in the left-hand end of the track display. Or you can
scrunch down that left-hand end of the track so it has the bare minimum
of doohickeys since as you make it smaller, it doesn't just cut off part
of the display, it removes some doohickeys. So really, what you see is
quite customizable. Or you can scrunch down the audio tracks on the
right-hand end and leave some room for the routing matrix if you're
working on something where you need to move inputs around from track to
track while you're recording,

The thing is that the display can be tailored in many ways to best fit
what you're doing. But the problem (and I agree with you that it can be
a problem) is that the designers have to give you something as a
starting point and that may not be what you want to see. So part of the
process in learning how to use a DAW is to learn all of the different
things you can see, figure out what's useful and when, and set it up so
it works best for you. That's the good news. The bad news is that if you
don't take some non-productive time to fiddle around with various
display options, you will probably never be satisfied. In orther words,
it's one of those things that you need to do in order to get beyond the
basic functionality.



--
"Today's production equipment is IT based and cannot be operated without
a passing knowledge of computing, although it seems that it can be
operated without a passing knowledge of audio" - John Watkinson

Drop by http://mikeriversaudio.wordpress.com now and then