My Top 5 DAW Features & Functions

All about the tools and techniques involved in capturing sound, in the studio or on location.

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Re: My Top 5 DAW Features & Functions

Post by muzines »

ManFromGlass wrote:Back in the day I had a fully loaded JV 1080. Some kind soul, (or anal-retentive person :thumbup: ) took the time to enter every single patch name in a multi instrument in Logics environment

Before you give glories to that painstaking effort, It's actually not that hard - just copy the patch names column in the PDF manual or patch listing, and paste them into the multi-instrument.

With SoundDiver back on Win/OS9 days, you could even get them automatically as Logic and SoundDiver would talk to each other, but on the Mac this didn't make the transition to OSX...
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Re: Reaper: My Top 5 DAW Features & Functions.. BUT...

Post by Eddy Deegan »

Matt Houghton wrote:
Eddy Deegan wrote:You drag with the right mouse button to select an arbitrary range of notes. Exactly the same as ... wait, no other sane piece of software on the planet. Why not a rubber band icon?

I know what you mean about the Reaper defaults— some are frustrating at first if you're migrating from another DAW. But for me, this default works really, really well. Perhaps it's because I'm using a trackpad? A one-finger tap moves the playhead, a one-finger click/drag creates a note or selects a single note (with the usual Shift and Cmd modifiers to increase that selection, as with pretty much every piece of software ever...) and a two-finger click-drag marquee-selects multiple notes. It seems pretty logical to me, but as with everything in Reaper, it's really easy to change — the Mouse Modifiers in Preferences, like the Actions, are searchable...

Thanks Matt - I was having a bit of a crisis last night with something I very much needed to get done and it seemed Reaper was fighting me every inch of the way! Got there in the end and it is easier with a couple of things now I know how it does them (and to be fair, that's my fault for not knowing them in advance).

I still think the MIDI functionality is behind the audio, especially in terms of editing, but thanks for shining a little sensibleness on it :thumbup:
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Re: My Top 5 DAW Features & Functions

Post by Drew Stephenson »

They do say that Reaper is a journey from Aaargh! To Aah!
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Pro Tools: My Top 5 DAW Features & Functions

Post by Sam Inglis »

Despite it being one of the most widely used DAWs, hardly anyone has posted their favourite Pro Tools features and functions, so I'll bite.

(1) It's NOT customisable.

The more I use it, the more I think this is a strength rather than a weakness. Pro Tools has an amazingly deep, consistent and well thought-out system of key commands that you can't change. And I don't want to. They have been set up by people who know the program far better than I ever could. I will become a more effective user by learning those shortcuts than by trying to devise my own.

(2) Audio editing.

This has already been alluded to. Pro Tools just got it right first time and although vaguely similar features have been added in other DAWs, like the Range Selection tools in Cubase, they don't have the same beautiful simplicity.

(3) Mix and Edit groups.

See above.

(4) AudioSuite plug-ins.

Yes, it is still really useful to be able to apply audio effects off-line in a really simple way. No it's not the same as bouncing or rendering a real-time effect. And there are processes you can apply using AudioSuite that aren't possible in real time.

(5) Mono / stereo / surround handling.

A variant on (1) really. I actually dislike DAWs where a single track type can be a container for mono, stereo, MIDI, surround or whatever. It's just confusing and you never quite know what you have on any given track. Pro Tools just has mono tracks that scale up through stereo and mullti-channel, and it's really clear what the track contains and what any plug-ins are doing to increase or decrease that channel count.

One related tiny feature that PT gets right and nothing else does... want to split a stereo clip to two mono ones or vice versa? Simple, just drag it onto a pair of mono tracks!

(6) The Import Session Data... option.

Makes it super easy to import exactly what you want from an existing project into the one you're working on.
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Re: Reaper: My Top 5 DAW Features & Functions.. BUT...

Post by ConcertinaChap »

Eddy Deegan wrote:Don't get me started ...

I don't think we need to :)

I think there's the makings of a great Reaper Techniques article there.

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Re: My Top 5 DAW Features & Functions

Post by Matt Houghton »

blinddrew wrote:They do say that Reaper is a journey from Aaargh! To Aah!

Yep. That's spot on. I've always maintained that moving to Reaper from another DAW requires a significant upfront investment of your time, and some non-urgent non-critical material to use while you figure out your workflow. Then the many pennies start to drop and you wonder how you lived without it...
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Re: My Top 5 DAW Features & Functions

Post by CS70 »

Terrible.dee wrote: AUDIO EDITING IN PROTOOLS

Yep, only ONE DAW has acceptably implemented the editing of digital audio....ONLY ONE!!

Whatever it is that you smoked, must have been pretty good! :D
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Re: My Top 5 DAW Features & Functions

Post by Eddy Deegan »

Matt Houghton wrote:I've always maintained that moving to Reaper from another DAW requires a significant upfront investment of your time, and some non-urgent non-critical material to use while you figure out your workflow.

(My emphasis)

Yep, that one I can attest to, as I learned it the hard way last night. That was 100% my fault of course :D
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Re: My Top 5 DAW Features & Functions

Post by Drew Stephenson »

Thus are the best lessons learnt.
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Re: My Top 5 DAW Features & Functions

Post by Eddy Deegan »

It was emotional! :lol:
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Re: My Top 5 DAW Features & Functions

Post by Rich Hanson »

Was there much grinding of teeth involved? :D
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Re: My Top 5 DAW Features & Functions

Post by Zukan »

You Targ you!

I can't find 5 good reasons to use one DAW over another.

Dim I be, clever I be not.
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