DAW discussions

[MBTC]

I didn't want to pollute the existing Ableton Live 9 thread with a bunch of stuff about a prior version (8.4), so I created a new one.

In recent years, I've been using FLStudio on the PC and Logic Pro on the Mac, with a greater emphasis on PC.

Logic is good in many ways, but even as a developer of software for Apple's systems, I've come to have deep distrust for Apple and their handling of their software products.

FLStudio is excellent, but it is PC only, it is largely maintained by a single guy who is talented but a pompous asshole, and if he were to ever get run over by a truck or get his arse severely kicked for some of the stuff he says to people, or even if he just decides to retire, then that would be the end of that particular product. It is written in Delphi which is unfortunate on so many levels. No reasonable chance of porting to other platforms, and not many developers left out there that care enough about Pascal to even fill the open positions to do so. As a music creation tool, it deserves the top-rank it consistently holds on KVR host software rankings, and pay-once upgrade-for-life is such a tremendous value that it does not even need to be explained.

I decided sometime back that I need to think more about the future, and settle on a DAW that will unconditionally be there long-term. I want it to be runnable on Mac or PC (I don't care about Linux and I doubt you do either), so that my hardware options are not limited.

So that got me looking at Ableton Live and Cubase. Hearing such good success stories about hardware integration with Cubase (specifically the Virus control software) really got my interest. However, Ableton seems to have gotten a lot of momentum, those who use it really love it, and I see all of the Ableton-specific HW controllers out there and its very clear this DAW is onto something. They both meet my criteria in terms of having a future, and working the same on either platform.

So I tried a lite version of Live 8.4, and ran into some issues with popping/crackling with certain synths that was not an issue in FLStudio on same PC, same audio interface, same buffer size settings. I have not given up on this, because I think its something about my config that Ableton doesn't like, it is not some limitation of the software itself.

Shortly after that, I downloaded the Cubase trial and was instantly smitten. I must confess that Cubase on the Atari ST was the first sequencing software I ever used, so that may explain one reason I had an instant positive reaction to it. Starting up with any new DAW software involves a learning curve; along the learning trail there are lots of things that seem counter-intuitive, but that was true of my recent stint with Live, and it was true about FLStudio when I was first learning my way around it. The pops and clicks with CPU-heavy soft-synths are still worse in Cubase than in FLS, but significantly less of a problem compared to my specific installation of Live 8.4.

First impressions of Cubase vs. Ableton Live are that if I were performing live in any way (DJ-ing or in a band), I would most likely prefer Ableton's workflow. I also see how the workflow in Live leads to some creative possibilities that would need to be approached differently in Cubase. But perhaps the problem is that *I think sequentially*? In other words, for writing and arranging music, Cubase feels more natural to me (as I said, could be due to my Atari ST roots, or the fact that it is more like FLS and Logic than Ableton is). For general remixing, DJ-ing, and combining of clips in real-time Ableton wins (also points for cramming a lot onto a single window, a plus if mobile on a laptop but kind of a negative for my home studio).

So at this point I'm wondering if that last paragraph above is true for everyone? Or, is it a side-effect of not having spent enough time yet with Live and Cubase to fully evaluate their use? Or maybe I'm just an old dog that is hard to teach new tricks?