Help me choose a DAW

thebigcheese

thebigcheese

"Hi, I'm in Delaware."
I studied recording as a minor in college (nearly 10 years ago now...) meaning, as you might imagine, that I learned on Pro Tools. But outside of school, I found it pretty irritating that I needed their expensive hardware to run the software, so I switched over to Reaper. I was pretty happy with that for many years until it came time to mix my band's album and I was struggling mightily to salvage the fairly crappy recordings we wound up with from a studio. On a whim, I thought I would try Studio One and it was much, much easier to get good sounds. But now I tried actually tracking an album and found it to be... unintuitive at best. So now I am trying to figure out if there is a DAW that actually has all the features I like.

Reaper Pros:
-I love folder tracks. They keep my edit area tidy and they are an easy way to control an entire group with one fader. On top of that, I can stick FX on them, so it's really easy to have, say, a master compressor and reverb for my drums. Having looked around at how some of the other DAWs do it now (Cubase, namely), I can see advantages to other methods, but boy are folders fast and handy.
-Takes are super easy to comp together. I think Cubase works much the same way. Just keep recording over and over until I get something I like, then split it up and pick the best ones.
-Super resource efficient, tiny program.
-Great user base, making it really easy to figure out how to do things (most of which are really simple).

Cons:
-The plugins it comes with really aren't that great, in particular the EQ and compressor. I have to load up a third-party plug for even these basic tasks.
-When doing takes, if I don't record them all exactly the same length, I end up with a bunch of splits that I have to go in and either delete or glue back together.

Studio One Pros:
-Really good plug-ins bundled. Really easy to dial in a mix.
-Relatively quick to load.

Cons:
-Takes are super irritating. After more than a year playing with the software, I still didn't even know how to record takes. Turns out it's an option you have to enable. Why would I ever not want it to record takes instead of just recording over what I've done? And why would it be off by default? So dumb.
-No phase button on the mixer. I have to load a plugin just to do that.
-Still don't know how to do tempo/time signature changes, either. Nothing in this software is obvious or easy to find online.

I've been looking at Cubase, which seems similar to both, but I'm worried that it's going to be this giant, slow program that won't even do anything any better than the other two. Any thoughts or suggestions?
 
Looking at your list of pros and cons, it seems that the advantage lies with Reaper, specially as the recording of takes con is minor. All you need to do is toggle snap-to-grid (ALT S) and they will be automatically the same length.

However, I am biassed, because I use and am a strong advocate for Reaper. Its EQ and compressor? EQ works fine and behaves how I would expect an EQ to behave. I've found no need to use an alternative. However, I agree that the compressor takes a bit of getting used to. But whether you load a Reaper plug in or some other . .. it's all the same action.
 
I'm with Gecko - ReaEQ is very easy to use and unlimited. Set up some templates for the way you use it regularly (low and high pass, etc).
 
Besides, there are plenty of free comps out there, like Density MkIII or Klanghelm's DC1A just to name a few...
Not to mention the stuff you can purchase!
 
I have some nice Waves comps that I tend to use, but I can never get the EQ to actually do what I want it to do. I make a ton of adjustments and get only minor changes, meanwhile in Studio One every change is much more noticeable. Same with the Waves Q10, but I still think the S1 EQ is better. And the Pro EQ, that shows you the frequency meters in the background, is tip top. I did a little research today on doing tempo changes and what not in S1, not terribly difficult. About the same as Reaper, really. Hmm.

Huh. So I played around more with Studio One and it still is pretty dumb with takes. The only way that I could get it to register takes is to set a loop region (which requires selecting a region then going into a menu to tell it to make that a region, dumb), tell it to loop record, tell it to record takes as layers, and then record it in a loop. Really, really dumb. That is not how I record. But I did discover an option in Reaper that lets me do takes the way I would like, which is to say it doesn't split the latest take where the old take starts and stops, it just plops it over top, exactly like I wanted. Of course there was an option for that... So uh, I guess now really I just want a good EQ plugin and that's that.
 
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thebigcheese said:
I make a ton of adjustments and get only minor changes
Click to expand...

That sounds like something is not quite right, but I can't think of what that something might be.

thebigcheese said:
I did a little research today on doing tempo changes and what not in S1, not terribly difficult. About the same as Reaper, really. Hmm.
Click to expand...

Reaper: click on where you want a tempo or time signature change, go Shift C, enter new tempo and/or new time signature, done.

I did say I was a fan of Reaper.
 
Yeah, I know how to do it in Reaper. I wasn't sure in S1, but it's not too difficult. If you've ever used different EQ plugins, you'll know that the same changes in different plugins yield different results. I just think the results from the S1 EQ are better.
 
why would cubase be 'this giant slow programme' lol

it works fine here, even on demanding sessions with large track counts and a lot of VST instruments e.t.c, never known a more stable DAW.
 
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