The end of an era

[Nestor]

BTW: DX7 was my very first synth I ever had, it was, for me, extremely difficult to understand The sounds I would get would be more through intuition than through understanding of all the many, many parameters it had. I think it was one of the difficult beasts out there in those years, I think I got it about 1983 or around. In those days I could not yet speak English, so I could not understand the manual either… it was, nevertheless, a real pleasure to play it, very good sounding keyboard, everything had an expensive feel to it.

[Sounddesigner]

Regarding the Studio One crossgrade offer, see this blog post: http://blog.presonus.com/index.php/pres ... ade-offer/

We typically offer a significant discount for customers that are coming from other DAWs to Studio One so that they can get it for about 25% off the price of a standalone copy of Studio One Professional. However, through the end of this year, we want Cakewalk customers to enjoy Studio One Professional at half off the existing crossgrade price—around $149 USD; exact pricing and currency will vary by region, of course.

We will offer this special crossgrade through a handful of select dealers worldwide and also through our direct shop.

Thanks for posting this info! It means I definitely need to consider Studio One now wich I previously ruled out largely because of high price. Their $149 Cross-Grade offer for Cakewalk users is for sure within my $200 limit and Presonus's Studio One has almost all the main features I want and love about Tracktion (and I'm sure Studio One has many things that Tracktion doesn't have wich I may come to love). Presonus knows how to design a DAW feature-wise for sure and like Tracktion Presonus has re-built Studio One's CPU-Engine so that it's more efficient wich is VERY important to me since that correlates with expensive hardware upgrades and latest plugins and low-latency at high samplerates. When I buy a powerfull computer like I did recently I want my DAW to get the most out of it and Sonar unfortunately let me down in some situations in this regard.

The main problem I still have with Studio One is the $149 for each subsequent upgrade but I may be able to dance around that. I prefer upgrades to be under $100 now since I don't trust spending a lot of money into Native DAWs and most Native plugins anymore. Most Native Copy-Protection systems and needed repeatative DAW upgrades makes all that stuff not worth a lot of money to me anymore. I've been screwed too many times now. Reason's upgrade is a little high at $129 but I can dance around that by skipping as many upgrade cycles as I want and Reason's upgrade price will still only be $129, there is no skipping penalty. Right now i can go from version 3 to version 10 of Reason and the upgrade price is still only $129 wich makes it dirt cheap and worth the risk.

Studio One is back on the list of options and I will consider it. Since my Tracktion upgrade is only $50 I may get both Tracktion and Studio One and figure out over time wich one connects with me best. I probably will be doing a long time shoot-out with those two DAWs. I know I want Reason as well cause it is dirt cheap and I like a lot of things about it as well. Reason doesn't have many of the features I love about Tracktion and Studio One but Reason will compliment either one of them well. Thanks for the important info!

[Sounddesigner]

My final words for you brother:

Jingle bells, jingle bells, Presonus all the way.
Oh, what fun it is to run Studio One in a system full of grace.
Jingle bells, jingle bells, Presonus all the way.
Oh, what fun to dump Cakewalk away, in exchange of something grate!
Jingle bells, jingle bells, Presonus all the way….

.. I have my own take on that song and different Holiday wishes!

Jingle Bells, all DAWs smell, cause Native is a joke.
Their C-P left me without a Host, once Cakewalk went broke.
Oh, Jingle Bells, all DAWs smell, and the Native Model should be revoked .
i proposed a Bill, to Capitol Hill, then left it all for SCOPE .

[Nestor]

[Nestor]

Brother, download yourself a trial version and try it out as crossgrade offer remains please!

One interesting thing about Studio One that is happening right now, is that many big studios around the world are going its path... that's pretty interesting to me See it for yourself on the internet, there are many testimonies of engineers talking about why they have left behind Protools and Cubase to embrace Studio One.

Studio One 3.5, as it is today, it is a "wonderful machine" to go on and on for a very long time I guess, you will not even need to upgrade for anything "essential" at all, because there is everything you could possibly want on it already, right now, and you already have the path to work with 64 bits and 96 Khz, how would you ever be out of date with version 3.5? What I can tell, is that I have more than I need with it, without the need to upgrade, probably, for a long, long time...

[Sounddesigner]

Brother, download yourself a trial version and try it out as crossgrade offer remains please!

One interesting thing about Studio One that is happening right now, is that many big studios around the world are going its path... that's pretty interesting to me See it for yourself on the internet, there are many testimonies of engineers talking about why they have left behind Protools and Cubase to embrace Studio One.

Studio One 3.5, as it is today, it is a "wonderful machine" to go on and on for a very long time I guess, you will not even need to upgrade for anything "essential" at all, because there is everything you could possibly want on it already, right now, and you already have the path to work with 64 bits and 96 Khz, how would you ever be out of date with version 3.5? What I can tell, is that I have more than I need with it, without the need to upgrade, probably, for a long, long time...

You are correct, one shouldn't have to upgrade that often. But IMV that's only because many DAWs are more mature and complete now than they was when many of us first started using them. Just look at version 1 of Studio One compared to version 3.5 and the difference is night and day since there is many must-haves added to v3.5. Likewise with Reason wich was not even a DAW long ago but has morphed into a far more sophisticated and powerfull app that's a completely different beast now. There has been many powerfull additions to DAWs over the years some of wich are must-haves for some of us. Improved routing, better stability, far better cpu-engine, added step-sequencer, better Audio-Engine, Surround Support for some people, etc etc along with new O/S and x64-bit support for some people. DAWs were greatly under-developed many years back so many of us had to repeatedly upgrade to get basic-fundamentals and in some cases like with Sonar bug-fixes and stability. If Studio One still only had the feature-set and cpu-engine it had in version 1 I wouldn't even be looking at it right now. Today's DAWs should require a lot less upgrades but still j'm sure some will still be needed for me, and if not it's still prudent to still plan for them.

Native DAWs, Native plugins, and Native computers were all very young and in some infancy stage many years ago and thus frequent upgrades were needed back then just to get a step closer to pro sound-quality and desired workflow, especially if one did not have dedicated dsp's. Altho times are changing I still plan for worse case scenario. In recent times I still found myself needing to upgrade Sonar and some Native plugins and even tho I now go much much longer time before upgrading computer such upgrade still inevitably comes. Overall I've greatly reduced upgrades over the years and try to stay away from products with planned-obsolence built-in and rental apps but the computer-world is flawed and still occasionally forces upgrades with me.


EDITED

[Bud Weiser]

Studio One 3.5, as it is today, it is a "wonderful machine" to go on and on for a very long time I guess, you will not even need to upgrade for anything "essential" at all, because there is everything you could possibly want on it already, right now, and you already have the path to work with 64 bits and 96 Khz, how would you ever be out of date with version 3.5? What I can tell, is that I have more than I need with it, without the need to upgrade, probably, for a long, long time...

I´m a Studio One Pro user and IMO it lacks a major feature ...

MIDI SysEx support !!!

Before I bought I never asked if it supports sysex or not because I thought that´s a given, especially because Cubase mastermind W.Kundrus, who I know in person, was one of the major developers,- but NO.
Then Kundrus leaved before v2.5 was released and ´til today they refuse sysex implementation.
A shame.



Bud

[Nestor]

Cool! He looks like Charlie’s brother!

Now, I have never needed to use SyxEx myself, beyond the automatic use the program does itself. What sort of messages or works do you do for it to be so essential in your music creation Bud?

[valis]

I have several outboard synths that ONLY use sysex for parameter changes, where a normal synth uses CC (Roland, I'm looking at you). There are some programmers available which will solve this for say, the jx3p and so on, but for my JD800...nope!

[astroman]

did you check this one ?
https://www.squest.com/Products/MidiQue ... index.html
(kind of expensive, but sysex is a very special case and customer base is limited)
I've tried their Kawai XD-5 (drum synth) editor and it worked quite well.
The XD-5 is one of my few hardware items that survived into the DAW era

cheers, Tom

[next to nothing]

On a side note, Ableton Live 10 will apparently support SysEx, which i "need" as well for my Elka.

[Bud Weiser]

Cool! He looks like Charlie’s brother!

Now, I have never needed to use SyxEx myself, beyond the automatic use the program does itself. What sort of messages or works do you do for it to be so essential in your music creation Bud?

Well, when you use older hardware synths, romplers, hardware drum machines and such,- all w/ limited patch memory,- you want to put the desired patch or "song" (drummachine) as sysex data into the preroll- or count-in segments so that data is transfered over to the hardware device before the MIDI track starts to play back.
In that case, the patch is transfered into the edit buffer and doesn´t need to be saved into memory of the synth.
Parameter changes are another task,- not all speak MIDI CC exclusively.
At least in the past, there weren´t enough MIDI CCs available/implemented,- in most cases just only pitchbend & modulation wheels, AT, footcontroller, expression, sustain and soft pedal.
All the other were sysex,- if at all.

With software instruments sysex is meaningless.



Bud

[Nestor]

Sounddesigner, how is it going?

[Sounddesigner]

I'm about to write Presonus a email to ask a few questions, but also after thinking about it further and reading more info on it I'm leaning twards not buying Studio One now, and just settle on Waveform and Reason. Studio One has most of what I want but has no dedicated Step-Sequencer like Waveform and Sonar wich I'm too use to using, cause it speeds up workflow. And the upgrade price is higher than I want to pay, plus Studio One in some ways has way more than I need. Tracktion Waveform is a small DAW but oddly has all the things I want and need, plus Tracktion has alternative versions and one of those versions is the stripped down basic version that does not have all the extra plugins and content. The Tracktion Waveform's basic version almost exclusively focuses on genuine DAW features and not plugins or content. My current Tracktion 7 is only about 7 MB's in size. I think most DAWs focus too much on extra bloat-ware and after dealing with Sonar wich had this focus I'm really turned off about it. I'm going to still further investigate Studio One but I don't think I'm going to bite for multiple reasons.


EDITED

[valis]

Studio One also has multiple versions. Just for the sake of saying it...

I haven't used Tracktion since v3 or so, so have no comparison there.

Also, there are certainly outboard tools that will talk sysex to the synths, and while that's an extra step over the age-old 'load all your sysex & program changes at the start of your track in the DAW' workflow, it's still something that can be done. I use so many silly tools and computers, such a thing seems normal to me.

[Nestor]

Well, the important thing is that you choose what you need

[Sounddesigner]

Studio One also has multiple versions. Just for the sake of saying it...

I haven't used Tracktion since v3 or so, so have no comparison there.

After investigating Studio One's different DAW versions I seen that it's not like Tracktion's different versions. Studio One'is more like other DAWs in that it has 'Lite version' and 'full-fledge version', wich means the Lite version wich is called 'Artist' is missing some actual DAW features and functionality such as - Scratch Pad, 64-BIT Mix Engine (smaller versions only have 32-BIT), Project Page (Mastering, DDP, Red Book CD burning, and digital release. The larger 'Professional version' has all these things and more. The Studio One Artist version is a cut-down/watered-down version and not the full-version wich is what the Professional version is.

Most mainstream DAWs have several versions wich are lite and full, but Tracktion's multiple versions are all full versions when it comes to the actual DAW feature-set and functionality. The only differences with the different versions of Tracktion is additional plugins and iirc samples, just 3rd party bloat wich I don't want. The cheapest version of Tracktion Waveform has full-DAW-features and full-DAW-functionality exactly same as the more expensive versions and the only differences is plugins and samples. Meaning the cheaper basic version of Waveform is not some cut-down/watered-down version but is full-fledged when it comes to true DAW features and functionality. The basic version of Tracktion Waveform almost exclusively focuses on actual DAW features and not plugins wich is what I like. I don't think any other DAW does it like this.


EDITED

[valis]

Agree on the versions for Studio One, and most DAW apps. Even garageband is similar in the Apple ecosystem...

It sounds like you're partial to Tracktion, so I see nothing wrong with exploring that. Just a note that I own an aging Nuendo license (v5), Tracktion 3, Studio One Artist 2 (which I was learning but never really dug into), Live 9 Suite (will upgrade to 10), Logic Pro X and a few smaller independant titles that are interesting (modular sequencers and the like). I spend most of my time 'writing' in Logic, and Ableton is either a live performance tool or a super powerful sampler (triggering clips externally it's like a phrase sampler & phrase sequencer on steroids).

[Sounddesigner]

Studio One v4 has just been released. Looks like I wasn't the only one who felt it needed a Step-Sequencer cause that's exactly what Presonous has just added. It seems to be a very flexible and fast usage one. They claim a innovative Step-Sequencer but I don't see the innovation yet. Studio One is a fast developing DAW and over the last few years have had major additions added to it. I simply put may be forced to buy it since it has pretty much every major feature and functionality I want now and only missing a couple things wich aren't that important. Presonous seems to be implimenting the best features from other DAWs to make one super DAW. It has a lot of great and popular features. Presonous seem determined to rule the DAW world. It definitely has my eyes since major additions are continuously being added and I will be demoing v4 soon.

Here's more info on the new Studio One v4 - https://www.gearslutz.com/board/new-pro ... e-4-a.html

[Nestor]

Presonous seems to be implimenting the best features from other DAWs to make one super DAW.

Exactly I've already told you, go for it!