Why do you mix/master in a different DAW?

[mholloway]

just be sure, OP, that if you're going to buy another DAW for mixing, you do it for reasons that YOU understand fully, and can see the benefit of directly as it concerns your particular workflow and interests.

a lot of people spend $$$ because they read that "program X isn't profesional for this" and "program Y is better for this" when in fact, the spender has no real clue what any of this stuff means (often the posters don't, either) and the truth is that PDC and other factors will mean little or nothing to your creative process and will affect your results in absolutely no noticeable way. obviously there are exceptions to this and people to whom this stuff is a practical concern - just make sure you are one of those before you "decide" that you're supposed to be mixing in ProTools after writing in Ableton, etc.

as a general rule, 98% of this kind of "what's pro or not" tech talk is horse-shit, you really gotta just focus on your own abilities as a writer and producer and trust your instincts about what sounds good to you.

just sayin'.

-M

[3phase]

but note aswell how many people in the pro audio world consider lives sound quality in the mix down rather crappy..
of cause theese guys all dont know a thing about music production..they just trust their ears while others trust ableton statements.. like the one that stated L8 to be totally stable..

However.. Ableton never claimed that theier DAW sounds especially good.. they just stated that playing a single files thru live in neutral settings with warp engine off will give an allmost bit transparent result with artefacts to little to recognize...

between the lines that says that the whole daw cant work bit transparent..and excluding totaly what happens in the mix has probably aswell a reason..
However.. check for yourself..it dont needs big investions..reaper allready sounds better and is free and the harrison mixbus is just 90 $

So it dont needs big investions to get a better mixdown platform..

when you have daws for mix down that can handle 32 bit float files you should render your tracks in ableton without any 3rd party plug ins with 32 bit float and apply the 3rd party plug ins in the mix down daw..

that applies especially to send fx because theire performance gets corrupted by abletons mixbus allready...

you will be surprised how good your 3rd party reverb plugs can sound

[fisto]

If I was to choose another daw just for mixing would Reaper be sufficient? I'm looking at either that or Pro Tools.

as a Reaper-Fan I would say Reaper of course . It can do all that Pro Tools can and has a great engine and very lightweight and highly customizable too.

that's what's convincing me as well. i love it's engine.. GUI wise i like pro tools better but i think just practicing a bit on Reaper would get me used to it. Also if you stem all your tracks and remix in Reaper, would the bad PDC in ableton be overcome? my hypothesis is no, it wouldn't. How would you get by this? Thanks.

why not make Reaper look like PT9 That theme is for the alpha version of R4.



or like this:



each mixer-track can have different layouts:



or if you like it elegant:




Combine that with ultra customizability (workflowwise) and think: 50 bucks, you can't lose


But the damn think looks much better on a real screen

[kanuck]

but note aswell how many people in the pro audio world consider lives sound quality in the mix down rather crappy..
of cause theese guys all dont know a thing about music production..they just trust their ears while others trust ableton statements.. like the one that stated L8 to be totally stable..

However.. Ableton never claimed that theier DAW sounds especially good.. they just stated that playing a single files thru live in neutral settings with warp engine off will give an allmost bit transparent result with artefacts to little to recognize...

between the lines that says that the whole daw cant work bit transparent..and excluding totaly what happens in the mix has probably aswell a reason..
However.. check for yourself..it dont needs big investions..reaper allready sounds better and is free and the harrison mixbus is just 90 $

So it dont needs big investions to get a better mixdown platform..

when you have daws for mix down that can handle 32 bit float files you should render your tracks in ableton without any 3rd party plug ins with 32 bit float and apply the 3rd party plug ins in the mix down daw..

that applies especially to send fx because theire performance gets corrupted by abletons mixbus allready...

you will be surprised how good your 3rd party reverb plugs can sound

This is exactly my attitude towards the whole idea. Ableton is incredible for what it does.. it's my tool as a composer.. and with max for live musically I can't see any limits.
Now the engineer side of me wants to work in a different DAW that's more dedicated to the task. Preferably, I'd rather not spend a lot of money and so Reaper or Mixbus looks perfect for the task.

I saw that you wrote a method to for bouncing to a mixing DAW. You said not to use 3rd party plugins until the second DAW. how about Ableton's native plugins or M4L plugins? Thanks.

[3phase]

I saw that you wrote a method to for bouncing to a mixing DAW. You said not to use 3rd party plugins until the second DAW. how about Ableton's native plugins or M4L plugins? Thanks.

obviously plugs that only run in live need to be rendred in lve before you can use them to mix in another daw..

however no big drawback becuae ableton live is not very good in the classicak mix down tools like eq´s compressors and reverb.. so its anyway beneficial to do that with 3rd party plugs..


actually i personalyl would prefer live to have a comprehensiv sound quality..

that opensource daw´s can do it so much better is a bit surprising.. but maybe they just have the better coders..or more experiance regarding digital audio.. the ableton people claim a bit too often that nobody can hear what might go wrong in their daw ..while its pretty obvious that others sound better when you compare in a mix down situation.

[simpleton]

Wavelab 7 and forget it.

[Akshara]

In the past it was just 'something is wrong' for most people without havign a clue what, let alone why and what to do about it.

I hope two positives thing come out of the two main thread thas picked it apart:
1. People understand it and hence know how to deal with it and so make beter sounding mixes.
2. Ableton accept the cat is truly out of the bag and sort it out once rather us having to sort it out everytime its an issue.

I encountered the PDC problem firsthand on a complex project, and didn't know what was happening until coming here to research the issue. I since have migrated to Logic Studio for projects which need advanced routing and precision timing; yet still prefer using Live to work out creative ideas and sketches, and just export stems of the midi and audio to Logic.

I was admittedly disappointed at having invested so much into Live on many levels, only to discover that a key aspect of the software, both necessary to the mixing process which I had developed and grown accustomed to over many years, and standard in other DAW solutions which I had migrated away from, was not simply broken, yet actually not included at all.

Yet the music continues, and Logic gets it done.

[kanuck]

In the past it was just 'something is wrong' for most people without havign a clue what, let alone why and what to do about it.

I hope two positives thing come out of the two main thread thas picked it apart:
1. People understand it and hence know how to deal with it and so make beter sounding mixes.
2. Ableton accept the cat is truly out of the bag and sort it out once rather us having to sort it out everytime its an issue.

I encountered the PDC problem firsthand on a complex project, and didn't know what was happening until coming here to research the issue. I since have migrated to Logic Studio for projects which need advanced routing and precision timing; yet still prefer using Live to work out creative ideas and sketches, and just export stems of the midi and audio to Logic.

I was admittedly disappointed at having invested so much into Live on many levels, only to discover that a key aspect of the software, both necessary to the mixing process which I had developed and grown accustomed to over many years, and standard in other DAW solutions which I had migrated away from, was not simply broken, yet actually not included at all.

Yet the music continues, and Logic gets it done.

i remember reading about users complaining about apple not fixing the PDC problem in logic. Has that been fixed now?

[Akshara]

i remember reading about users complaining about apple not fixing the PDC problem in logic. Has that been fixed now?

I haven't encountered a problem so far.

Just ran a search for PDC and PLC at LogicProHelp and Apple Discussions and came up with one unanswered problem report in the last six months, yet nothing conclusive either way. MacProVideo recently released a tutorial on how to use Logic's latency tools to optimize timing, which I have yet to watch, yet was hoping to this weekend, and chapter 6 deals with Plugin Latency Compensation.

https://www.macprovideo.com/tutorial/logic9207

[fisto]

In the past it was just 'something is wrong' for most people without havign a clue what, let alone why and what to do about it.

I hope two positives thing come out of the two main thread thas picked it apart:
1. People understand it and hence know how to deal with it and so make beter sounding mixes.
2. Ableton accept the cat is truly out of the bag and sort it out once rather us having to sort it out everytime its an issue.

I encountered the PDC problem firsthand on a complex project, and didn't know what was happening until coming here to research the issue. I since have migrated to Logic Studio for projects which need advanced routing and precision timing; yet still prefer using Live to work out creative ideas and sketches, and just export stems of the midi and audio to Logic.

I was admittedly disappointed at having invested so much into Live on many levels, only to discover that a key aspect of the software, both necessary to the mixing process which I had developed and grown accustomed to over many years, and standard in other DAW solutions which I had migrated away from, was not simply broken, yet actually not included at all.

Yet the music continues, and Logic gets it done.

welcome to the club

[fisto]

also want to add that one can use some 3rd party plugs without noticing drift. Just don't use too many and be careful with racks and all should be fine when bouncing to stems.

[Ben_Binary]

If I was to choose another daw just for mixing would Reaper be sufficient? I'm looking at either that or Pro Tools.

Its free to try and even if you dont look at the midi tools, stability, routing options and scripting ... YES!

[The Carpet Cleaner]

OMG
So you're telling me that, this time I made a drum buss and layered different drums, and on some drums I put a rack with lots of plug-in do to some kind of parrallel compression plus other distrotion and saturation effect. And then my drums seemed not in the same groove anymore and there one one that was slightly behind. i though it was a plug-in bug ... but actually that was this PDC stuff that you are all talking about . and it's ableton's fault ! No WAY!


By the way. I think I'll never buy anything from avid company because, I've said it already on this forum, but after you buy product from them, you need also to pay to get technical support from them as well. so that sucks.

[distaudio]

as a general rule, 98% of this kind of "what's pro or not" tech talk is horse-shit, you really gotta just focus on your own abilities as a writer and producer and trust your instincts about what sounds good to you.

What? You mean music comes down to your ability to write a good song?

I thought it was all about phat bass, slammin beats and having a "floor filler"?

[nylarch]

mholloway wrote:
as a general rule, 98% of this kind of "what's pro or not" tech talk is horse-shit, you really gotta just focus on your own abilities as a writer and producer and trust your instincts about what sounds good to you.


What? You mean music comes down to your ability to write a good song?

I thought it was all about phat bass, slammin beats and having a "floor filler"?

agreed. TapeOp had a Sufjan Stevens article a few years ago where he was saying he recorded his earlier records on a VS-880 set at 32kHz b/c it gave him more recording time. And they sound wonderful and have great songs. The guy interviewing him was just laughing.