I use different software for different genres of music. I hesitate to mention particular software most of the time because there is no "best" DAW overall. They all have major strengths, the strongest being you can take a good song in your head and bring it to reality. The goal here is not to start an argument over what's best.
If you have some ideas about features you'd like to see in a DAW, I'd love to hear them. Also, if you especially like some features that already exist, I'd love to hear them too.
If you'd like to comment and review the software you use for music production, it would be helpful to all of us. Please exclude commercial comments.
The first inclusion I'd like to see is the ability to list/print all of the settings in a project. Most important would be the plugins used and all of their settings. It would also be helpful to save a project including the required plugins and samples. Plugins that would work only within that one project -- and only the original "owner" of the project would be able to further edit the project. That way, backing up a complete project would ensure the life of that project beyond the life of a plugin.
What would you like to see?
My two favorite DAWs have long been Pro Tools and Studio Vision. I will never forgive Gibson for buying up Opcode and killing it off. I'll boycott them the rest of my life for it. It was perfect for composing any genre of music. I'd be thrilled if someone could come up with a DAW that combined all of Studio Vision's features with the best of Pro Tools's audio tracking and editing features. I've tried Logic, Cubendo, Live, Reason, even Sonar and Audacity. Each has it's nice features. None is even in the same league, in my opinion, as either PT or the late, great SV. Logic comes closest, but since it's Mac-only these days, that takes it out of competition for most users, anyway. Cross-platform is too important to today's workflows.
ReplyDeleteI use Acoustica Mixcraft 5. My criteria is that it must support MIDI, which Audacity doesn't (not at the time I tried it, anyway); and not be unnecessarily complicated and cluttered like I thought ProTools 8 and FL Studio were.
ReplyDeleteI used to be kind of a nut about keeping records of my settings, so I would screen cap them so I could always have a record of what I did, but it became far too daunting. The settings are saved within the files anyway, so it just made more sense to go back to the actual file to see what I did rather than look through all my screen captures.