n-track vs. more $$ programs

[Neil G]

been checking out logic, cubase, sonar, pro tools and just heard about n-track. for the price i automatically think its going to be inferior to the above, i hope im wrong. i need at least up to 16 tracks with little to no midi and be able to program drums. with a good card can i get as good sound quality as the more $$ programs and can i use vst plug ins. does n-track have good support and manuals. and is it reliable and capable of recording 8 tracks at once?

is there any other cheap programs that can record high quality sound that are reliable or do i need to get logic, sonar etc .

[gordone]

I've never used any programs besides N-Track, but I've never felt the need to! The sound qualiy is determined by your sound-card and then by the plug-ins used. I use a Delta 44 along with Waves plug-ins and I'm happy with the sound I'm getting. Never tried recording more than 3 tracks though (which I'm able to do without a problem). I have no problems with N-Track using a Dell PII 450 MHZ, 256 Megs of RAM. Give the demo a try! I don't think you can wrong for $60. Also leaves more money for mics/pre-amps, which really have an affect on your sound! Good luck!

PS - don't let the price fool you. I have N-Track sitting along comfortably with my Neumann, my Soundelux, and my Great River! Think of N-Track as the RNC of software!

[Chris Shaeffer]

I have used both n-track and Cubase quite a bit. The bottom line is that n-track cannot be judged by its price- it is a high class piece of software, no doubt about that.

I find drum programing much easier in Cubase. I find mix automation easier in n-track. Audio editing is about the same in both. N-track is conciderably less stable on my systems, but not so unstable as to be unusable and I just get in the habit of saving my work frequently.

Other programs look and feel more powerful than n-track, but they really aren't. I've never had any trouble doing what I wanted with n-track and switched the Cubase for hardware compatability reasons. N-track should do all the things that you descrbed in your post and you really can't go wrong for $60. If you end up wanting something else in 6 months, at least you will have a good idea of what you want- but you might never want anything else.

Take care,
Chris

[Neil G]

yeah for the price i think i'll give it a shot and get familiar to pc recording then upgrade if needed or is there anything that beats it for under $200? i don't mind spending extra for something more stable.

[TimOBrien]

You can download the manual for free from the website. Play with the demo (it'll do everything except the final stereo mixdown.)

I don't think you can find a better program without spending $500 or more.

I've run up to 33 tracks @ 16bit and regularly run 10-15 tracks @ 24-bit with the CPU meter only going up to 15% without plugins. And I'm only running a mere PII-450 with 384Mb of Ram and two 20Gb drives.

[Neil G]

thanks people for all the info these forums are great beats phoning your salesman every 20 mins.

[Slackmaster2K]

n-Track is good for the price. It's feature list stacks up against programs that are much more expensive.

On the other hand, a lot of its features don't work right for everybody. The VU meters are inaccurate. The automation is extremely difficult to do precisely with the mouse. Effect automation doesn't work right. Its MIDI capabilities are somewhat weak. Many tasks are extremely unintuitive, and there's no concise, well-written documentation.

Aside from that, it's damn cheap and it works. If Flavio would spend more time fixing obvious blaring issues instead of trying to implement more features, I'd be a lot happier.

Support is actually great. You can email the author directly and he will get back to you. The BBS over at fasoft.com is fantastic, although filled with too many "fans", so you have to watch yourself a little bit.

Would I use n-Track if somebody gave me a 1000 dollar gift certificate to Multitrack Software 'r' Us? Nope. Do I use n-Track now and do I recommend it to everybody on a budget? Yes indeed. There are more important places to put your money when n-Track can get the job done for $60.

Slackmaster 2000

[Mark VH]

In the mp3 forum on this site, I posted a song I did on N-tracks, with drums programmed in FruityLoops. I give some details of my very modest setup. Some of the guys seemed surprised.

The thread is entitled "1st of 12 Chapters" if you are interested.

[Slackmaster2K]

Most of the guys here use or have used n-Track and Fruity loops

They were impressed because you were running an SM58 through a tascam into an SB Live! monitoring with a PC speaker system....not so much the software. Both n-Track and Fruity can produce very fine sounds.

Not that I'm doggin ya, good work and nice recording!

Slackmaster 2000

[DarkFriend]

I've been using N-Track for 6 months now. I bought a copy of Cakewalk's Sonar and mixed a song I recently mixed in N-Track. About 3/4 of the way through the song, I stopped mixing in Sonar and removed it from my hard drive. Sonar is definitely less buggy than N-Track, but lacks intuitive features. N-Track just "feels" right, and allows me to create what I want quickly and easily. Sonar has some cool features, but is a pain in the butt to use in many cases. Drawing volume envelopes, zooming, and viewing parts of a wav file are simple things to do in N-Track that are difficult in Sonar. Just my 3 cents, but I'm sticking with N-Track.

[Tom Hicks]

N-Track has always been glitchy recording but really shines for mixdown.I like to record in cooledit pro and import the waves to n-track for a bit of spit and polish.
Tom

[T-RAVE]

I must be very lucky because I have had no problems recording and mixing audio in n-track...I have a modest system. Athlon 550, Gigabyte 1st generation athlon board. Wavecenter pci card, fostex vm200 mixer, and event powered monitors. N-track gets you the results fast and intuitivley and for me it has been rock stable and works well with win 2k ( an important fearture for me). I try the latest and greatest but keep going back to n-track. The only thing n-track lacks in for me is midi...older versions of the prog were unstable with midi. Now I just import midi files I create in Fruity loops to n-track and it is working awesome with version 3.2. I say go for it! It's a great program for beginners and powerful enough for experts

[Slackmaster2K]

Wow, Tom, I totally have had the opposite experience.

n-Track is mega glitchy for mixdown but rock solid for recording. In fact, I use n-Track to record *everything*, even when a wave editor would be easier to use.

Mixdown is where I have n-Track problems. From its inaccurate meters to its tendancy to crash when adding and removing plugins to the pain of drawing envelopes to the features that don't even pretend to work correctly, it's a real pain sometimes. I save my projects OFTEN, and I save under many project filenames. Mixing in n-Track is a very irritating process.

I still love n-Track, but it costs me time. If there was a stable product with the same feature set (of working features anyway) at the same price, I would switch in a heartbeat.

Slackmaster 2000

[DarkFriend]

I'd agree with Slack.. N-Track works great for me when tracking, but only average when mixing down. When I do offline mixdowns, I find my volume and pan envelopes don't always process fully. I also find that some WAVs are missing from the mix. Generally annoying, but then I learned that "Mixdown While Playing" solves all of those problems - it just takes longer to mix each tune.

[TimOBrien]

I can only say that if anyone is having stability problems in N-Track, I think it has to boil down to the inherent differences in PC hardware. (You'd have to test out a software product with every different type of chipset and driver available to find these kind of bugs.... sometimes done with big software houses but I'm sure Flavio doesn't have those kind of lab facilities.) There are also stability issues beteen individual pieces of hardware; soundcards, videocards, drivers et al.

In my humble experience, with a lowly PII processor, I have no stability problems at all with N-Track. There have been a couple of "flakey" builds but those were quickly fixed by Flavio.

It's a shame that the PC manufacturing community hasn't been tighter with specifications and quality control but as long as the vast majority of PC owners try to slap together gaming systems for $399 I think we're going to continue to have these issues.

[Slackmaster2K]

Ah, Darkfriend, I've had that SAME exact problem! It's very weird. Hasn't happened in a while, but just the thought of it makes me nervous.

One time I made a backup of the project and reset the envelope, then drew a NEW one and it still cut out at the same exact point. Don't remember exactly how I fixed it.

Slackmaster 2000

[ColdAsh]

Neil i dont think you're going to get the most unbiased opinion in the forum. I think most of the people here use n-track so obviously they like it and will recomend it. Im not saying they shouldnt or that n-track is a bad thing ( i havent used it much so i cant comment) but maybe you should as in the computer forum?
BTW if there have been a few fairly unbiased opinions my appoligies because i was too lazy to read all the respones

[Clark_Griswold]

Am I unbiased? I dunno, but I guess I have opinions...

I mainly use n-track on my laptops. One is an old pII thinkpad and one is a newer Sony Vaio. Using even the cheapass soundcards built into these units, n-tracks fills the need for any "mobile" type recording I want to do. And does it well. I then take and dump those .WAV into my Digi 001.

Why don't I mix with it? Just don't like the interface for mixing as much. I don't like editing with it and it seems to go unstable on me right about mix time. I put version 3 up thinking it would maybe solve those issues, but it didn't. So back to v2.x whatever I am using...it works the way I want for what I use it for.

For the $, I think it is more than ok.

Good luck,
C

[Yadi]

I agree with that statement..and I agree with Slack. Not only do I come across glitches that ultimately cost me time, but I just don't get it. Sounds dumb, but I've been using Cubasis for awhile and got to a point where I could move along fast, like back in the four tracking days. With N-trak, I'm usually lost easily and it doesn't guide my intuition like Cubasis did, hell, even my Sonar demo is easier. It is cheap and thats a plus, but where's the midi features???

I think a "has it all" wonder is the way for me..like a SONAR. The Jury is still out....

[shackrock]

I've been using n-track for about a year now...and about half a year ago i actually found out HOW to use most features (I actually sold a shitty album..mostly just for fun..and to friends...but I look back at those files now - and its just one big pile of intense clipping! haha).

but thats not the point of this..haha

I was just wondering if that thing about the VU meters was actually true...(that that are inaccurate).. HOW inaccurate are they? Should i not be mixing songs with N-track then?

[Slackmaster2K]

Well, they're pretty bad. I had a thought that it *might* be because I have them set to anticipate ouput (e.g. show how much I'm clipping by) but I haven't tested it yet.

Let's just say this. I start playback from position A, and I never see a clip on the playback meter. I start from postion A+n, and suddenly I see a clip or two (no dynamic processors involved). I did realize just the other day that the master channel clip meter in the mixer does appear to accurately show clips...but that's hoaky. It's funny because for a long time (years?) I ignored the clips on the master channel because I wasn't seeing anything on the playback meters.

Side by side with the Pinquin Audio Meters I picked up, which are semi-highly-regarded, the n-Track playback meters are just not that usable. Bummer.

I posted about this to the fasoft boards and got a couple "yeahs", so I'm not crazy

Slackmaster 2000

[Raticus]

N-Track is a nice very user friendly multitrak program... Very easy to make the transition from analog to DAW....

I downloaded the demo played with it and saw the price for 24 bit recording and immediately bought it....

after about a year of steady use the unstablitiy of the software was anoying and embrassing at times....

I now use Nuendo and the transition was smooth... It would not have been this way without me first learning the basics of of harddisk recording from N-track...

My point is N track to me is more of an intermidate level multitrack software(that can produce competitive results).... And depending on what level you are at it may or may not be appropiate.....


Raticus
http://mp3.com/chopshop