Topic: Sonar X1 – Essentials/Studio

What levendis said: personal preference for one workflow over another. But just as important or even moreso, add to this the fact that features vary quite a bit between DAWs, although recently most of the leading ones are all coming ‘up to speed’ with feature improvements that support fully professional use. In this business, you sit still, you die, and users will drop you like a hot potato.

If you plan to stick with recording for the long haul, the best thing I could suggest is that you try as many DAWs (and the wealth of different free plugins) as you can get your hands on. Most have some sort of free trial offer, and even if the demo is limited in one way or the other it will still give you a great idea of how the full-blown versions operate.

Also, for many of us, being stuck with one DAW only just doesn’t cut it. This is basically my case, and I learned this the hard way. I have some brand loyalty, but stuff needs to work the way I need it to or it ends up in the trash or closet pretty quick. The word ‘limited’ is a dirty one to me and not in my vocabulary. I still try to favour Podium but I’ve evolved to using it more as an external editor for my REAPER, and I am beginning to rely on Podium more for final mixing and mastering. Why? REAPER has many more features, such as almost unlimited routing and other things I discovered that I require. I also have Ableton Live 8 Lite that is great for major looping and as a stress reliever. I also use Audacity, a free audio editor that is superb and quick for capturing live audio streaming.

In the end, I decided I wanted to be familiar and cross-trained on practically all, so I can walk into anyone’s studio or setup and be able to carry on with business as usual. Many full-time engineers have this capability, and it always helps. This week in my spare time I’m fooling around with another good free audio editor called Acoustica 5.0 Basic. With NEW showing up almost daily, one can never know too much. Someone just mentioned a DAW called “Chaotic” — never heard of it — in another thread. The name alone makes me want to have a look, since I fight chaos in my musical world almost every day!

Finally, I never worry too much about system requirements, unless the software is demanding like twice what my laptop can handle. Some companies overstate PC requirements a little anyway. At worst, the software may load or run a touch slow or perhaps glitch occasionally. Still you get a good idea of what the item you are trying out is all about.