Sell me some n-Track

[mrx]

So what's the gag with this stuff - I see quite a few posts that make this sound like the early days of an open source project - so many bugs an quirks that debugging the app becomes as much fun as making music.

Is it a hobby thing, or is there any reason (other than price) to use this versus Cakewalk, CEP, Vegas, SAW, etc. etc.

I have my down payment right here...

[Slackmaster2K]

n-Track probably has more bugs than the average app, but it also has more features. And yeah, price is a huge factor, especially when n-Track costs about 10-30% of what the big dogs cost.

It can be frustrating, but all recording apps are frustrating.

Slackmaster 2000

[mrx]

I guess to be more specific, I haven't happy with a piece of music software since the days of Voyatra's Sequencer Plus. I've used Cakewalk since it was the only game in town, and have really hated every minute of it. Even today it is a contant adventure wondering what part of a simple project will skip, drop, vanish, explode, etc.

I can deal with Flavio and a product's 'quirks' as long as I can edit/master in peace. I'm working on pretty standard Nashville-esque stuff with drums, bass and the occasional keyboard in MIDI format, with guitars and vocals as imported wavs (16 bit mono, 44.1). No crazy looping or 32nd notes at 250BPM - all really straight forward that any 21st century all should be able to handle.

Looking at other forums, I see quite a few people moving to dedicated hard disk/compact flash recorders due to frustration over computer recording. Since virtually everything you hear on the radio was recorded on a computer (Mac/ProTools), I have to wonder - is Cakewalk to blame for all the pissed off users around here?

[mrx]

damned keyboard - I meant to say "stuff that any 21st century application should be able to handle..."

[Slackmaster2K]

Nah. The problem is that in order to happily run a DAW, you really have to know computers, or be very willing to learn fast. You can't just toss in a soundcard, install some software and go... hell, you can't even do that with PT!

Slackmaster 2000

[mrx]

I've been on the bleeding edge with this stuff since I found a sequencer with full step editing for the Commodore 64. Remember Quad from Turtle Beach and the first version of SAW?

The problems with Cake seem to go beyond all that. I had many audio tracks, locked to MIDI all playing back fine with an earlier version of Cake with a Turtle Beach on a P90 (of course the user interface was so bad that work was painfull). Now I see people saying that their 500MHz machines, 40GB drives and state-of-the-art sound cards work like crap.

I can't put my finger on the problem - perhaps in this age of high speed internet there's so much crap on our machines that anything could be causing a problem.

Is the answer to load up a clean version of Win2K, install an audio app and lock the machine down?

[mrx]

Well... I just loaded some tracks into the n-Track eval. Installation took about 10 seconds, the tracks came in fine, and after cutting/sliding a vocal track, everything sounded great. This could be a keeper...

[gordone]

I have a PIII 450MHZ "Piece of cr*p" machine and N-Track works fine for me. I rarely go over ~6 tracks w/ a few Waves plug-ins for my folky music. I have a Delta 44 soundcard. Like Slack says, maintaining the DAW is very important to how well your software performs. I did a clean install of Windows 2000 (over a Dell Windows 98 installation) and things run pretty smoothly. I do have the internet and MS Office on the machine, but I disconnect from the Net, disable all my USB ports and shutdown anything non-audio when I do audio work. I also run ZoneAlarm when online and regularly run AdAware. Good luck with N-Track! It's the only SW I've used for multi-tracking and I've been using it since 2000.

(of course I am accepting donations for a faster PC, at least 2 GHZ would do, but I would prefer 3 GHZ!)

[Garry Sharp]

Hey mrx - I was there about three weeks ago. Instantly paid my $45 - I love it. BTW I felt about Logic Audio as you did about Cakewalk.

[mrx]

I worked with it all last night - best 45 bucks I've ever spent. It saw my Gina card - with no whacky 'wave profiling crap'. Two clicks and I was directing tracks to separate outs. The UI is so cool and clever that it makes Cake look like it was designed by a terrorist intent on thwarting the creation of Western music...

[badassmak]

those same terrorists probably work at compaq...
I have no complaints about n-track whatsoever, and thier forum is a great place for help and info as well, I dont know if ive ever spent better money...consider this, for the same price as 24 bit n-track, you get an extremely scaled down version of cubase...cubasis (which by the way never worked on my compaq)...


anyone in the market for cubasis or a compaq?