My DAW is better than yours! (Friendly DAW Wars debate)

[mks]

Okay, I've been full time in flstudio the last 6 months, or more. And it is becoming ever more apparent that for me, sends is where my shit gets muddy, but that sends are an incredibly powerful tool. In the day, I'd have half or more of my sounds just going out to master, hehe, no mixer at all.

But now:

I have a sound. It goes to a mixer track, I process it, I send it out to three other audio tracks. Each of those I fx and process. Bring those three audio tracks into one audio track, that I fx and process, and then blend that track with the original track in a final track that represents that sound.

For starters. There are all kinds of other things that can come and plug in to or out of that signal chain.

I'd just like to be able to route tracks between each other easily without having to resort to sends and reconfiguring my inputs and outputs when I decide I want a one-to-many or many-to-one relationship. The agnostic "track is a track" approach is just so intuitive and simple. There's no need to continue with the old hardware paradigm when you have the option for such flexibility in digital.

Hmm, I've been doing some experiments and I have had no problems doing what you guys are describing. In fact there seem to be several ways including arming several audio tracks at once, duplicating tracks and then sending those to a buss or using an instrument rack. I'm using the one-to-many example here. The many-to-one is of course quite simple by selecting your tracks and hitting ctrl-g.

Although wait, that looks like a universal setting, not a track by track basis?

Yes, it is for all of the sends associated with that particular return track but I believe it can be overcome by choosing to route audio to sends only in the routing dialog box on the individual track, if I'm understanding what you wish to accomplish correctly. You could also duplicate your return (which I just found out that Ableton does not support by the way), so you would have to create another return track and load your fx set to the same settings with one set to pre-fader and one set to post-fader. But I think that there is probably a better solution to that.

Though perhaps one thing that can be learned from all of this is that certain techniques may be easier on different DAW's than others but I think it can all be achieved by thinking your signal path through a bit.

[SunkLo]

The grouping thing doesn't work if you wanna send tracks to multiple busses though.

The racks are a good solution, especially when it comes to sound design. I'm sure you can do 95% of routing in Ableton, it's just not nearly as simple or convenient as it could be.

[mks]

The grouping thing doesn't work if you wanna send tracks to multiple busses though.

Hmm, I hadn't thought of this. I must explore more!

[titchbit]

Although wait, that looks like a universal setting, not a track by track basis?

so make another return for the tracks that you don't want the pre-fader thing to apply to.

The grouping thing doesn't work if you wanna send tracks to multiple busses though.

remember you can always use a dry return track as a bus by ticking sends only. that is the second easiest way to make a bus in my opinion (after groups), easier than using audio tracks. with returns, you can send multiple to them and send one track to multiple returns.

[mks]

remember you can always use a dry return track as a bus by ticking sends only. that is the second easiest way to make a bus in my opinion (after groups), easier than using audio tracks. with returns, you can send multiple to them and send one track to multiple returns.

I had just come to the same conclusion and was coming here to post it. I think that this might be the best way for sending a track to multiple busses in Live.

[titchbit]

definitely. audio tracks are a bitch.

[rorz9992]

I know Reaper gets a lot of love on here


But do any 'known' producers actually use it?! The only people I know who use it are bedroom producer nerds who spend more time on the DJTechTools forum than they do producing

[Genevieve]

Dom & Roland >.>

[rorz9992]

Dom & Roland >.>

Who???

[AbsoluteLucidity]

Dom and Roland = A Drum and Bass legend who switched from Logic to Reaper

[smalltock]

FL, Studio One and Logic are so much win, Ableton would be too but it crashes too much, Bitwig isnt even out yet and you assume its asscheeks, Reaper is ight. LMMS is like a said a fail clone of FL4, I hate the shit out of Darkwave, Audacity is NOT for Sequencing, and idk the rest

Late response, but they're all shit
I don't like a single DAW, but I use what I have: free/open source shis and FL Studio. My post was more of a joke than anything else. I thought I made that clear with the terminology :S

[nowaysj]

Late response, but they're all shit

I've been thinking about this. As far as media applications go, in this day and age, THEY ARE FUCKING AWESOME. They are highly optimized, they work very well with plugins from various disparate companies (vst's). Working with Premiere CS6, a video app... it is like the fucking stone age man. Interface is just so undeveloped, doesn't work with plugins worth a shit. In that regard, daws are really actually very advanced.

But daws as music making tools... they fucking suck. They really do. As creative, expressive, flowy environments, they blow. They could be so so much better. One of the reasons why I like flstudio so much is that it is fast. I know a lot of that speed is from me being really familiar with the interface, but I've worked in most of the daws out there, and learned them well enough, they all have +'s and -'s, but flstudio is the fastest. For me, for when I'm vibing, that is hugely important.

[titchbit]

the fuck do u mean fast. like it has less lag/cpu usage? or better shortcuts? or

[nowaysj]

Naw, like from idea to realization of that idea is fast. It is kind of their motto nowadays, but it is actually true. People in other daws are like I have this template and that template, yeah, you need templates because it is a ball ache to do anything in your daw. I start blank slate, and in a half hour I can have a the core of a song setup with all kinds of busses/sends, the whole shebang. Just think it do it, fast fast fast.

You know, sometimes you have ideas, what if this did that and that other thing did this kind of thing, and so you engineer it, it takes an hour and it is kind of meh... you're like fucket, I just spent an hour doing this, might as well use it... fuck that. If you can make an idea happen in a couple of minutes, and then it sucks... chuck it and try 10 other things until you find the thing that is like, Hells of yes, that is the thing.

That kind of fast.

[RmoniK]

Naw, like from idea to realization of that idea is fast.

That's true for any DAW you're comfortable with though.

[nowaysj]

No, no it's not. I've become comfortable with several daws, none of them are faster than flstudio.

[ineffable]

Then you didn't become comfortable enough it seems

I actually like FL but the workflow just doesn't work for me.

[rorz9992]

I heard Ableton is the most intuitive DAW and you can get your ideas down fast as fuck, can anyone confirm!?

[wub]

I can get my ideas down quickly in FL because I know where everything is. Fluidity of use is down to experience of the user as much as anything else.

[ehbes]

I heard Ableton is the most intuitive DAW and you can get your ideas down fast as fuck, can anyone confirm!?

Different for each person. For me reason is the quickest, but I know for a fact that others will think otherwise