Why I have come to hate PT. Advice for new DAW?

[bryan_kilco]

+ 1 for Reaper.

I've been using it for about 4 or 5 years now and love it.

Witnessed PT9 in action on Win7 PC and it surprised me the issues that came up. It took minutes to even just open/run the program with a BLANK SESSION. Crashing and having to reboot, etc......After seeing that I'll probably never get into PT.

 

[LeSedna]

Reaper. No bug (I mean not caused by reaper itself).

Ugly UI but once you get used to it, and adapt a few things to your taste, it's good. You can customize the menus to display what you've been used to, or what you use the most (you can change it all)

I can't say how professional and efficient the workflow can be compared to PT or Cubase but I can slip edit with one hand while I'm eating a sandwich with the other one, so it's probably a balanced problem.

Comes with everything you need, though you're not gonna have a good synth right inside reaper out of the box, or any character plugins. All the plugins are pure and simple, mathematical, so they are good at what they do "for example I use reaper's comp for sidechain comp because it's so easy and fast to set up and eats 0.01% CPU. Some of them are golden though (reasamplomatic is so practical when you wanna use a single sample, or the multitool FTT plugin can be handy at times. There is some stillwell plugins inside as well, without the UI or the extra buttons you have in the commercial ones)

You also forget about what type of track you need or wanna setup, since that concept doesn't exist anymore. If you want a drum buss, just add a track, and drag/drop your drum tracks in it, done. You can keep the midi with the audio etc.

The fact it's light and fast is also something to consider. It opens in 1s, and loads the plugins in 5 to 10s max. It's still smooth after 6637288 chops of audio editing on your drum tracks, like it doesn't care.

It really has everything one needs, except a good mastering solution (so that you can create a master with absolutely every code or track info in it) eventhough you can burn a pseudo master from it, character plugins, and the workflow/UI is debatable.

To me, unless used to something else, it's so worth the savings. It's a 60$ license for 3 versions, so like 3 or 4 years easily. If you know what reaper is about and don't expect it to be PT or Cubase, it's a total win. With some background or need to comply with industry standards like professional interfaces, it's another story.

 

[LeSedna]

Oh and it takes a few seconds to install it and set it up on any system, and it's clean to remove it if you don't like it, it still literally takes around 20mo and doesn't install crap everywhere (it just creates peakfiles next to any wav file you load there but that can be set up to something cleaner)

Just download, install, start, go to the preferences and choose your interface. Then give it a good shot, you're not gonna be impressed by it in a few minutes or hours because you're gonna search for a cubase or PT workflow which it doesn't have, and cause its kind of ugly. Give it a few days, or a week, going in there try a few things for a few minutes at least, with the help of the manual you can download in pdf for free. Check the adamwathan slip editing tutorial, as well.

Then you'll set your mind wether its for you or not

 

[Skinny Viking]

Tascam 8 track portastudio

never look back

 

[bryan_kilco]

Tascam 8 track portastudio

never look back

Back like 10 years ago, my "band" would mess around with the 4 track. Couldn't figure out why it sounded so horrible. This was long before I really knew a thing about recording/mixing.

 

[The-Zeronaut]

Reaper
but im currently very impressed with Studio One 2
just the melodyne integration and its editing possibilities are worth the change of DAW

And if you are considering one of this DAWs
Groove3 videos for this daws are PRICELESS.

 

[Siguros]

Reaper if you use VSTs but if you are up for a drastic change, go for Logic

 

[mva801]

^^^ He's on a Pc man. Sounding like you should demo Reaper, Cubase and maybe Studio One, and choose which you like best.

 

[Fox Mulder]

My advice to you is to hire a tech dude for your studio who'd do maintenance runs on your PC from time to time. Pro Tools needs a lot of optimization.

My first PT version was MP 7.4, and then MP 8 which I used to operate on XP. I'm currently on MP 9 on Windows 7. I wouldn't use any other DAW.

You might wanna focus on the music and let the tech guy take care of stuff.

Just my 2 cents.

 

[Rendered]

Like a lot of others in this thread, I'd definably recommend Reaper. It's fully customizable. I've seen skins that change it to look like PT or Cubase or whatever. Works flawlessly for me.

 

[LeSedna]

Reaper
but im currently very impressed with Studio One 2
just the melodyne integration and its editing possibilities are worth the change of DAW

And if you are considering one of this DAWs
Groove3 videos for this daws are PRICELESS.

How does this one run nowadays ? Any bug ? It suffered a lot of them when I demoed it but it looks very nice.
What editing possibilities are you talking about ?

 

[Fandus]

Used Protools for 3 years. Started using reaper last month. Do it! I run a current model Mac pro 8-core with 12gb of ram. Here's the awesome part: sessions in Protools that hit CPU overload errors barely even push 20% CPU in reaper. Track freeze is there but I don't even need it! I have high hopes for pt11 but as for right now, reaper makes Protools look like a joke.

 

[t-rave]

reaper just performs so quick, it has to be coded really efficient, other daws seem really bloated and slow ( to me) once you get a workflow in reaper going...

if your main thing to do is record and mix tracks without alot of advanced dance oriented midi I think reaper is as good as anything...

 

[The-Zeronaut]

How does this one run nowadays ? Any bug ? It suffered a lot of them when I demoed it but it looks very nice.
What editing possibilities are you talking about ?

I haven´t had a single crash with it in the time i have been using it

edit bass and vocals on the fly with melodyne
im a guy that likes to edit at the same time im tracking so
when i have a good vocal/bass take i like to edit the timing/tuning on the fly
(i think its more time efficient this way...)
slip editing AND a beat detective clone for drums
their "audio-bend" i think its called but basically time stretching
the edit window helps A LOT.
and i don't know it just seems more "intuitive" than reaper...and with reaper i always feel that i need to search or use a "workaround"
to emulate some function/action that should already be implemented inside it...
for a lot of stuff in reaper you just have to use SWS extensions
i really dont understand why arent they already "inside" reaper...

the studio one mastering window is awesome...

the other day i had a terrible time editing some keyboard midis with reaper...
something simple just quantizing and doing some minor edits
and without knowing shit about studio one (first time using it)
i did in 20 min...


seriously they spent too much time with little things that 3 people use and
dont do request that had been the most voted for years...
so im starting to be really tired of waiting
and studio one has a lot of things i´ve been wanting for a LONG time...

but dont you think im bashing reaper
i love reaper and it has been my favorite daw for years
(and i have used cubase 3/4/5 and pro tools 8/9)
reaper is a little more cpu friendly...but hey i have a 6 years old
that wasn't even the best in the market (not by far) when i bought it
and i dont have problems with cpu when mixing
and if i have something eating too much cpu
i just freeze it...
and there are a couple of things reaper does that i would like to see in studio one

and i could continue using reaper without problems but
there are those little things in studio one that aren't like
"TOTALLY IMPORTANT AND MUST HAVE" but would make ME work faster and my life easier XD


and in my opinion thats whats important at the end of the day

 

[Uros]

Does S1 have some sort of audio2midi function, useful for converting trigger ticks to midi, or integrated Melodyne is good at that?
I've been using Reaper for that for some time now.

Oh, and how that audio bend function is compared to Beat Detective? Are they on the same level or not?

 

[The-Zeronaut]

Does S1 have some sort of audio2midi function, useful for converting trigger ticks to midi, or integrated Melodyne is good at that?
I've been using Reaper for that for some time now.

Oh, and how that audio bend function is compared to Beat Detective? Are they on the same level or not?

Beat detective clone with or without audio stretching
(still i prefer slip editing for drums but its good to have another option)

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYDJ_UpPFVY&hd=1[/ame]

And something i thought it was REALLY COOL
time stretching preserving the initial transient attack
watch from 13:10m till the end

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCHv6E-V2uo&hd=1[/ame]


audio to midi drums
you can do it 3 ways
1º melodyne
2º with the presonus gate plugin you can use a midi out
3º use the transient detect -> drag part to instrument track and there you have your midi hits...

 

[MetalWorks]

I think everyone has had these sort of issues.

You can always beef up your processing on any DAW. But it also helps to take a step back and re-evaluate your process and look into ways of streamlining your work.

For example, Drumagog on 5 drum tracks might be working harder than one instance of Slate Drums or something of that nature that plays all in one.

Applying EQ, Compression, Reverb etc, to a BUS of tracks routed through it instead of the same settings on on each Vocal/Drum/Insrument track.

In the end, there is really no substitute for Plugin Processors, HD Accel, UAD, TC etc...

No matter how good you are at building a house, having 5 helpers frees you up to do other things.

7 years ago I thought my Custom Dual Processor Windows PC, RME Converters and Nuendo were going to be top notch. Nope. Then I thought Apple would help and bought a Mac G4. Nope. Upgraded the memory more. Nope

Sold my entire setup and bought HD 2 Accel and Mac Pro Quad Core setup.

I dont even think about adding plugins anymore. I can still max out on TDM plugins for the HD cards but at that point I just use RTAS on a few.

I want to buy a 3rd Accel card just because I hate when I fill up and Pro Tools trys to reshuffle all the plugins to make room and it takes a few minutes. Gets annoying.

Recording is a Money Pit, no doubt about that.

You can do a job with Shovels and a Wheel Barrow but it will never compare to a Backhoe and a Dump Truck.

Theres times I thought about selling my car just to afford a better setup.

Just figure out what you need and keep upgrading.

Just dont waste too much money in between.

Sometimes taking a bigger leap saves alot of headache in the middle.

 

[Uros]

audio to midi drums
you can do it 3 ways
1º melodyne
2º with the presonus gate plugin you can use a midi out
3º use the transient detect -> drag part to instrument track and there you have your midi hits...

Cheers for the response!

This 3rd option - do you have to do it hit by hit, or it does it all at once, sort of like Reaper does with dynamic split (set up a threshold and you're done)?

 

[The-Zeronaut]

Cheers for the response!

This 3rd option - do you have to do it hit by hit, or it does it all at once, sort of like Reaper does with dynamic split (set up a threshold and you're done)?

i havent used it XD i just searched the forums for 5 min

all at once i would think

 

[infectdsniper]

alot of cool features in studio one. almost worth it just for melodyne and the mastering thing. not sure if there is an easy way to make songs flow into each other like that in reaper. def gonna demo that soon.