Waching daily Aug 31 2017

Welcome to your musical software lessons

My name is Eilish San and today we're going to finish

the DAW comparisons by making a final summary

of every single DAW we have seen so far

First let's start with the area that, for me,

is the most important when it comes to working with audio,

and it is the quality of exported audio

We do not want a DAW that, after working

hard with it, lowers the quality of our work,

when we can have another one that gives us

a superior quality

First I want to highlight two specific comparisons,

Podium in my case made the exported sound

several tones lower than the original,

so I strike it directly off from my list,

but you can test it does the same or works

correctly with your equipment if you want

Then we have the case of Bitwig,

I could not make a comparison with Bitwig 2,

but Bitwig 1.3 certainly exported the sound

with a rather poor quality

If I can do a comparison with Bitwig 2

soon I will upload a video to update this,

for now we will mark it as bad assuming that

the audio engine is the same in both versions

In the other comparatives we found the worst

audio quality in Cakewalk Sonar Platinum,

Ableton Live 9, Acid Pro 7 and Pro Tools First 12,

while Cubase Elements 9 and Tracktion Waveform

had a superior audio quality than the rest

Let's go to the second most important point to me,

MIDI

If you do not use MIDI in your work maybe this point

will not interest you, but really nowadays

more and more virtual instruments are used

and less real instruments are recorded live,

in any musical style

Also, if you work alone at home and want to release

your compositions created in your own home studio,

chances are you do not know how to play or don't have

all the instruments you want to use in

your compositions, which is why it's always useful

to have the best tools possible

to work with MIDI

As I have said more than once, a fundamental point

in my opinion is to be able to write the MIDI in score,

since that way you are getting used to it and learning to read

and write in score if you do not already know, which will serve you

in the future if you need to play the music from another

person written in score, which is the most normal

In addition, writing in score is much easier

than in piano roll once it's mastered, since you don't have

to go up and down on the piano to write

octave intervals and compare the grids with the piano

on the left to know what note you are writting,

in a score you have

all the notes at a glance

The DAW with score editor are Cakewalk Sonar,

Digital Performer, Samplitud, Mixcraft, Cubase and Reaper

I have to say that, with the exception of Cakewalk Sonar and Cubase,

the rest of the score editors

are a bit tedious to use

Also, except for these two and Reaper,

the rest are limited in the number of clefs

that you can use, in Samplitud you can not use

the neutral cleff to write percussion instruments

and in Digital Performer and Mixcraft you can only use

the G, F and double score - G and F - clefs

Of course, you can always use external software

to compose in score

and then export the MIDI to your DAW

In that case, the DAW without score editor

with the best MIDI functions are FL Studio, Reason

and Waveform, to emphasize in all three the possibility

of applying a specific groove to humanize MIDI

in case you want it to sound

closer to real live music

Then there is the use of external plugins

Both in audio and MIDI you need to have

the best possible plugins to handle the audio waves

or to have the best possible virtual instrument

and the best effects

Currently the most standard and compatible

with almost any DAW,

at least in Windows which is what we are seeing,

is to use plugins in VST format

In addition, there are many free VST plugins,

many of them of very good quality,

that you can find on the Internet

Of all DAWs there is only one that does not support VST,

Pro Tools, so if you do not need to use Pro Tools

due to some obligation, because you work for a

recording studio that uses it, because you already bought it

or for whatever reason, I advise you not to use

Pro Tools as your DAW in your home studio

If you want to use it or you have no choice,

as I already told you in its video there is a way

to use VST with Pro Tools through ReWire

and the application Plogue Bidule

Of the rest, Ableton Live, Acid Pro and Samplitude

only allow a plugins folder to scan,

so if you are going to use any of these DAW

remember to make shortcuts from that folder

to the other folders where the plugins you use

are installed so that it founds them

In addition Acid Pro is only compatible

with 32-bit plugins, and nowadays

it is increasingly common to create 64-bit VST

On the contrary, Cubase no longer supports 32-bit plugins,

so if you have plugins you want to use

and do not have a 64-bit version, watch out for this,

or look for a 64-bit alternative

which you will need sooner or later

It is also necessary to mention the additional capacity

to trigger different loops for each track live,

what is called Session mode

We only have this option in Ableton Live,

Mixcraft and Bitwig

Finally there are two additional notes to add,

the first is for Reason, where we can not

create punch in and punch out areas,

and another for Bitwig, where we can not insert

time signature changes, to sum it up, both lack

an essential functionality for a DAW

If we remove every DAW with negative points,

we are left with 6 out of the 14 compared

Now that we have a selection of the best,

let's talk about prices

Digital Performer is priced at $ 499

FL Studio comes in three different prices,

€ 189, € 289 and € 786.24, depending on the number

of additional plugins you want to buy

There is a fourth price of € 89, but it is a version

that does not allow audio recording, so I will not

take it into account, since these videos are

mainly focused on singers who want to create

a home studio at home, so the main thing

will be recording their voices in audio

Of course, if you are not going to work recording audio,

it might interest you

Mixcraft comes in two different prices,

$ 89 and $ 179, again depending

on the number of additional plugins

Cubase comes with three different prices,

€ 99.99, € 329 and € 579, but in this case

it does not depend only on the number of plugins

you want to buy, but the number

of functionalities is different in all three versions,

ie, in the € 100 version you do not have

a complete Cubase, although possibly

enough for a home studio

Reaper comes in two different prices,

$ 60 and $ 225, this time the only difference being

if you are going to make a commercial use of the software,

like using it in a recording studio, or not

And finally Waveform comes with three different prices,

$ 99, $ 150 and $ 200, again depending

on the number of additional plugins you want to buy

Clearly, I'll discard Digital Performer,

since for a little more you can buy the full version

of Cubase, Cubase Pro, much better

in all points compared

Among all others, what to use?

If you want to use Session mode,

the option we have left is Mixcraft,

that if you do not want additional plugins,

for example because you already have yours

and do not need extra plugins,

it has an affordable price of $ 89, about 75 €

That you do not want Session mode because

you're not going to use it for anything?

Then we have two options,

get the cheapest within the good,

or the best quality possible

The cheapest DAW is Reaper,

being only $ 60 for personal use, about € 50,

which is basically what you will do

in a home studio

The highest quality position is between Cubase

and Waveform, let's pause a bit at this point

The minimum price for each is similar,

€ 99.99 from Cubase versus $ 99 from Waveform,

about € 83 with the current currency exchange

On the other hand, Waveform gives us the complete DAW

for that price, the other two options being

packages with additional plugins

Cubase instead gives us a reduced version,

having to buy the other editions

to have all the software functionalities,

as a greater number of inputs and outputs,

number of audio tracks, MIDI and instrument, etc.,

and of course additional plugins

It is true that Cubase comes with score editor,

and possibly also the best score editor

in a DAW currently alongside Cakewalk Sonar,

so in this point Cubase has a great addition

It is also true that you need the Pro version, of € 579,

to have the complete professional score editor,

although with the basic it may be enough

if you just want to use it to write MIDI notes

to convert them to audio

But on the other hand, the audio quality of Waveform

is slightly higher than that of Cubase,

and for a slightly lower price gives us

the complete DAW, with no limit of inputs,

outpus, tracks or VST in use

In addition, although Waveform has no score editor,

it has many other very powerful MIDI tools

Also remember that Cubase is no longer compatible

with 32-bit plugins, in case your VSTs

do not have a 64-bit version

One last note, Cubase is available

for Windows and Mac, while Waveform

for Windows, Mac, Linux and Raspberry Pi,

so if you are like me changing between

Windows and Linux, you will have fewer problems

to use the same software

on both platforms

If you do not want to compose using the score editor,

it is clear that the option is Tracktion Waveform

If you want to compose with score editor,

which is my sincerest advice, I would say go

to the comparative page of Cubase versions

and see if the limits of the Elements version

meets your needs

If that version isn't enough for you,

before paying € 329 or € 579

for the better versions, I would buy Waveform

and use an external MIDI editor to compose the MIDI

separately and then import it into Waveform

If you want to use a score editor

and you need really advanced tools

to create the scores, most likely the integrated

score editor from any DAW won't be enough for you

and you'll need a dedicated score editing

software anyway

Personally, both to prevent the limitations

of the Elements version of Cubase from limiting

my work in the future, and to have the best quality

possible, I will stay with Tracktion Waveform

as the best DAW to use, and I will use

an external MIDI editor for my compositions,

as I'll show you in an upcoming video

With this I finish the comparatives,

at least for now,

if I have missed some DAW that you want me to compare

or you have any doubt or thing that you want to share

remember to leave it in the comments

I hope that you like this video, that you find it useful

and I'll see you in the next video