What are the benefits of other DAWs?

Angstrom · Post by **Angstrom** » Sun Aug 21, 2005 1:09 pm

I still use cubase for arranging. Live is excellent for working out ideas and writing brutal chunks - or performing (obviously). but in other areas it is very weak.

recently I have been working on a 60 minute piece, several times I realise a segment wasn't working (for example a 2 minute section at the 30 minute mark)
To show the difference - here's a real world example of where live falls down.

In cubase :
- select the 2 minute long section in the middle of the peice, delete it and drag the whole following 30 minutes back to link up with the previous section (covering up the gap).
The drag action of the 30 minutes of samples and midi (20 tracks) took less than 1 second.
I then crossfaded all the ambient noise clips by selecting them and hitting x. That took about 5 seconds.

In Live :
select and delet the 2 minute section, delete it. Drag the the following 30 minutes to poin up ... and wait 3 years for Live to try and cope with it.

now about crossfading adjacent clips in arrange? live cant do it.

Live's arrangement view is pretty lame for serious editing. I mean - I haven't even mentioned how much superior the multi-envelope editing is in cubase.

forge · Post by **forge** » Sun Aug 21, 2005 1:32 pm

the boxes can make good book ends or you can prop up your speakers with them.

Chris J · Post by **Chris J** » Sun Aug 21, 2005 2:31 pm

Angstrom wrote:In Live :
select and delet the 2 minute section, delete it. Drag the the following 30 minutes to poin up ... and wait 3 years for Live to try and cope with it.

now about crossfading adjacent clips in arrange? live cant do it.
Live's arrangement view is pretty lame for serious editing. I mean - I haven't even mentioned how much superior the multi-envelope editing is in cubase.

Angstrom, you know in both cubase and Live you can use "delete time" which closes the gap automatically. Although I have gripes with L5, delete time works well and quickly.
But no Xfade in live, that's true. What I hate in live is when you have selected say 5 tracks, only one track can be lenghthened or shortened at a time.
In cubase if you have 5 tracks selected, dragging the end of one will also drag the end of all tracks selected.

Angstrom · Post by **Angstrom** » Sun Aug 21, 2005 3:09 pm

true, although I did actually do it the way I said because I wanted a bit of manual control, the patterns weren't in even blocks of 16, they were in what I call an 'English Teeth' formation.So it required a manual aproach - but it still only took me a second to drag-select and move.

I was mainly trying to point out that moving or copying a chunk of stuff in a large Live arrangement will take a weirdly long amount of time compared to a comparitive DAW. I think most people must have noticed this.

I hope that the Ableton team already have a good idea of a different method of buffering the tracks for drag-copy and drag-move. Whatever cubase uses is obviously superior to Lives brute force aproach.

Eventually Live will get these things sorted and until then I just use cubase when it is required.

I don't mind using different tools for different jobs - I dont expect my hammer to undo cross-head screws.

neomodo · Post by **neomodo** » Sun Aug 21, 2005 4:53 pm

I use both Live 5 and Pro Tools LE 6.9 on Windows XP 3.0 mhz and 2gb RAM etc. etc. My digital audio hardware is an MBOX - Prior to that I used an audiowerk8 card from Emagic that sucked a*s with modern day software. Well in fact it sucked with older software too... When I was ready to replace it I looked into the different options out there and decided on the MBOX because it would get me into pro tools in the process. At that time I had pretty much decided that Live was the best tool for me because it allowed me to be somewhat productive while I was learning it. By contrast, Logic, Cubase, Pro Tools require a lot of frustration while getting to the point where you can start recording material. Steep learning curves. ( I haven't used Logic 7 which I hear is vastly improved from the versions I messed with but whatever screw apple for making it an apple only product).

In any case - I found Pro Tools to be an excellent program and some of what others have said is true when it comes to certain types of workflow it is very good. It also has its share of problems. I still mostly use Live because of the ease of use and the ability I have to use it like a linear tape device in a sense. Nonetheless Everything I work on eventually winds up ported over to Pro Tools for finalizing. Pro Tools is such a hog and has some performance quriks that I hope they work out so it's simply better for me to keep a consistent flow of recording instead of tweaking my system to no end and putting up with the countless errors that come up. I have a buddy that's almost finished recording an album using only cubase and he swears by it - Personally I couldn't get into Cubase or cakewalk or anything else - I have tried just about everything... To generate material its ableton live - and I have no problems with fidelity when it comes to recording acoustic instruments in it - VOcals I'm still battling with a little but everything else is decent.

scientist · Post by **scientist** » Sun Aug 21, 2005 7:15 pm

Angstrom wrote:I was mainly trying to point out that moving or copying a chunk of stuff in a large Live arrangement will take a weirdly long amount of time compared to a comparitive DAW. I think most people must have noticed this.

yes! although not a feature difference between live and other DAWs, this is a very inconvenient problem with live. i do a lot of copy/paste/duplicate micro editing, and something about the way live handles all this information is really clunky. moving sections in the arrangement can get seriously slow, and even saving a file with lots and lots of clip edits in the arrange view can take an abnormal amount of time. my guess is this has something to do with live prioritizing audio playback at the expense of more utilitarian features.

in regards to what live lacks in comparison to other DAWs...the biggies are no support for quicktime/editing to picture and no surround sound support, which are pretty important for pro work. then there are plenty of smaller things missing that can be seen as pretty crucial to some: groove templates for quantization, integrated rex support, compressor with external key sidechain, etc etc. and for what its worth, i dropped protools for live, and the only thing i miss is the sidechain compression and quicktime support (but i use revision for this so it's no biggie).

Machinesworking · Post by **Machinesworking** » Mon Aug 22, 2005 5:01 am

I work in both Logic and Live. I've been using sequencers of some kind for about 18 years......

So my taste is pretty refined.... as in, "if it doesn't do exactly what I want, fuck it? I'm on to the next, NOW!...."

I think if you're happy with Live, why question it? let other people do what they do, if you get to some point where you think Live is in the way, or you really like Logic, SX3, Sonar, Digital Performer, Fruity Loops, Pro Tools etc....... then add it to the collection!

With a dual 2Ghz G5, you should be pretty happy CPU wise for a while. I get roughly the same CPU performance out of Logic on a dual Gig G4 that you get out of Live. Logic is CPU efficient, and uses both processors on the dual, Live does not.

The odd consideration, and this applies to all dual CPU Live users, is that if you do in fact run out of juice, you could run another DAW or host on the machine at the same time, and get another 2Ghz out of your machine! Look into Jack, or Wormhole if you use both PC and mac!

nz · Post by nz » Mon Aug 22, 2005 11:03 am

The only thing I believe that Pro Tools has over Live 5 is that damn playlist feature. It is absolutely invaluable for tracking multiple takes of drums, vocals or any other material. If Live 5 would add "takes" and let you group tracks so you can switch multiple tracks to different takes at a time (this is great for editing drums), I would never look at Pro Tools again.

This is something that I wish Cubase would have implemented long ago as well.

Staiolz · Post by **Staiolz** » Mon Aug 22, 2005 8:08 pm

I'm having a good time with Live which is why I don't ever try to mess with anything else. I do wish that live had dual cpu support, there are times when even my dual G5 starts to get hungry. I think I may check out Logic just due to that fact, but I've yet to upgrade to 5, only been using the demo. So, when I get Live 5, I'll see what happens. Thanks everybody for your input, we just need another thread pushing the Dual CPU support to Ableton

dave999z · Post by **dave999z** » Tue Aug 23, 2005 5:55 am

The other DAWs (Protools and Cubase at least) have better summing algorithms. It doesn't sound like analog blending of tracks, but it sounds better than Live, which seems to be of lower fidelity.

Flame away if you want. This is just my opinion from my experience. Scream that I must not know how to use Live, etc. But I think Live sounds 2d compared to the 3d sound of the others.

That said. I use Live, not one of the others, because it's so much cooler in many respects.

Dave

Angstrom · Post by **Angstrom** » Tue Aug 23, 2005 10:47 am

1 + 1 = 10

if they got that wrong - we are in trouble!

dave999z · Post by **dave999z** » Wed Aug 24, 2005 3:18 am

Angstrom wrote:1 + 1 = 10

if they got that wrong - we are in trouble!

Seriously. The algorithm is not that simple. And when you get lots of tracks and other processing going on, you lose bits. Back in the day there was a like a million post thread about this on the Cubase board--how the audio engine in Cubase SX blew away the one in the previous version, VST 5. You actually lose bits in the audio processing when too much is going on.

You people all probably wonder what i'm smoking. I don't claim to understand it. But some pretty knowledgeable audio and software engineers chimed in and agreed that rather than merely choking the processor, some programs ignore bits.

Dave

MrSleep · Post by **MrSleep** » Wed Aug 24, 2005 4:23 am

Staiolz wrote:Ableton Live is my first DAW, I always hear about other DAW's like Logic and Cubase, which I have checked out but can never seem to get a workflow going. Is there a real benefit to Logic in comparison to Live? Are there still any benefits to rewiring Live with ProTools or Nuendo? I know this is all a matter of opinion but I am just curious if I should check out these other programs. When I tell others that I use Live as my DAW, they wonder what I'm doing, because the impression they have is that its a Mixing Utility. Its just my main instrument (which is what I tell them)

Is there anything out there that I MUST have?

your way ahead of your time..., dont worry about the others dino's

Chris J · Post by **Chris J** » Wed Aug 24, 2005 8:47 am

dave999z wrote:
Angstrom wrote:1 + 1 = 10

if they got that wrong - we are in trouble!
Seriously. The algorithm is not that simple. And when you get lots of tracks and other processing going on, you lose bits. Back in the day there was a like a million post thread about this on the Cubase board--how the audio engine in Cubase SX blew away the one in the previous version, VST 5. You actually lose bits in the audio processing when too much is going on.

You people all probably wonder what i'm smoking. I don't claim to understand it. But some pretty knowledgeable audio and software engineers chimed in and agreed that rather than merely choking the processor, some programs ignore bits.

Dave

same here, I don't understand it in depth, but it's clear that when you add two or more digital sources you need an algorithm to sum them up, and each program has its own, hence different sound on SX, PT and live.

dave999z · Post by **dave999z** » Thu Aug 25, 2005 6:48 am

Chris J wrote:same here, I don't understand it in depth, but it's clear that when you add two or more digital sources you need an algorithm to sum them up, and each program has its own, hence different sound on SX, PT and live.

Yeah I think ProTools is the gold standard (but if you do midi work and/or can't afford Digidesign hardware, then fuck ProTools), which is why people get so hyped about lightpiping 8 channels into ProTools, where they can mix them in style. Cubase SX uses the same engine as Nuendo, which is on par with ProTools (my video/mastering friends tell me). Logic is there too. Not sure about Performer. I'm sure Live is not there though.

But what the fuck do I know (I'm just a hobbyist). I listened to Sasha's Radio One Essential Mix and it was fucking deep and pumping sounding (at 320 kbps MP3, probably stolen from an even less high fidelity stream). I'm not familiar with his setup though. Maybe he is using Live but mixing outboard? And sending through a finalizer or something? Whatever. This isn't a Sasha thread. (But they all are eventually. Anyone with any MAC/PC comments should feel free too.)

Dave

What are the benefits of other DAWs?

Re: What are the benefits of other DAWs?