I popped in once here on this, but I use Digital Performer, and in some ways I fully get that "picking a DAW is hard", it's really easy for me to get to know a DAW pretty well, and find all the little annoying things about it that drive me nuts. In the end it's the one that least does this that you stick with for sure.
I wish Live or Bitwig 100% worked for me, I own both, have used Live since 2003 but never wanted to make it my main DAW, and always used it alongside DP or Logic. The reasons are simple, I like kitchen sink DAWs, I want SysEx saving in the DAW, extensive MIDI editing capabilities, movie hosting, multiple window support, some orchestral features like Articulation mapping and score layouts, extensive customizable keyboard shortcut lists and presets for things like quantization settings etc.
I love the modern workflow of Bitwig and Live, but I hate the extensive mousing for MIDI quantizing, constantly mousing for locator position, track arming that doesn't "stick", and general reliance on the mouse to navigate the interface.
The best way to describe it is with Live Suite, great product, but buying Push 3 you're confronted with Ableton's glacial thinking in terms of what a standalone version can do, it's basically a loop player in standalone, doesn't have any ability to change time signatures beyond looping partial measures of 4/4, has no tempo control for Scenes, and can't string a simple arrangement of Scenes into a song on it's own. It took them around 16 years to implement a simple key command to explode the edit window full screen. Over a decade and an half for something any other DAW could do. Same with recording clip automation...
I've got Logic and Reaper on this machine, and to a degree the same applies with them, Reaper doesn't do Clips and Scenes, and Logic only recently got the ability to differentiate MIDI hardware by port...
So I stick with my dinosaur DAW and all of it's oddities because it covers most of the things I like in Logic, Reaper, Live, Bitwig.
I'm also a fan of the MPCs, they're going the way of dumb for MPC3.0 with no time signatures, but enough of us squealed that if it was something they were going to add in later, it's happening soon. Just waiting on the software version of 3 to drop it into DP as a VSTi and it's the best of both worlds IMO.
I wish Live or Bitwig 100% worked for me, I own both, have used Live since 2003 but never wanted to make it my main DAW, and always used it alongside DP or Logic. The reasons are simple, I like kitchen sink DAWs, I want SysEx saving in the DAW, extensive MIDI editing capabilities, movie hosting, multiple window support, some orchestral features like Articulation mapping and score layouts, extensive customizable keyboard shortcut lists and presets for things like quantization settings etc.
I love the modern workflow of Bitwig and Live, but I hate the extensive mousing for MIDI quantizing, constantly mousing for locator position, track arming that doesn't "stick", and general reliance on the mouse to navigate the interface.
The best way to describe it is with Live Suite, great product, but buying Push 3 you're confronted with Ableton's glacial thinking in terms of what a standalone version can do, it's basically a loop player in standalone, doesn't have any ability to change time signatures beyond looping partial measures of 4/4, has no tempo control for Scenes, and can't string a simple arrangement of Scenes into a song on it's own. It took them around 16 years to implement a simple key command to explode the edit window full screen. Over a decade and an half for something any other DAW could do. Same with recording clip automation...
I've got Logic and Reaper on this machine, and to a degree the same applies with them, Reaper doesn't do Clips and Scenes, and Logic only recently got the ability to differentiate MIDI hardware by port...
So I stick with my dinosaur DAW and all of it's oddities because it covers most of the things I like in Logic, Reaper, Live, Bitwig.
I'm also a fan of the MPCs, they're going the way of dumb for MPC3.0 with no time signatures, but enough of us squealed that if it was something they were going to add in later, it's happening soon. Just waiting on the software version of 3 to drop it into DP as a VSTi and it's the best of both worlds IMO.
Statistics: Posted by machinesworking — Sat Jan 25, 2025 5:06 am