Best FREE DAW

JonathanAnon

Hi guys,

Had Cubasis VST 5.0, needed to change. Tried Reaper(strictly not free if you're being pedantic), Rosegarden, Quartz Audio Master and eventually settled on Linux Multimedia Studio for the last couple of months. BUT, it's not great for when you want to play in MIDI along with the track.

For a free DAW, it is amazing. But I'm just wondering is there anything I'm missing. The other lads have ProTools, the M-Box standard setup. But I am mean and dont want to spend money. I was gonna go Logic and pay for it, but then I found out it's MAC only.

opinions please.

ICN

Yup - You're mean alright Mate.


Why diddle yourself?

dav nagle

Get Pro tools and an mbox

frobisher

Reaper. Why, based what you've posted, would you even consider anything else?

JonathanAnon

frobisher wrote: »

Reaper. Why, based what you've posted, would you even consider anything else?

I dunno, I didnt take to to, I put about two hours into it. I couldnt manage to get my MIDI keyboard to work with it, and I didnt have much success with it.

Anima

ICN wrote: »

Yup - You're mean alright Mate.


Why diddle yourself?

What a shiity post, how does that help the OP?

Give Reaper a better chance, just because you don't understand how it works doesn't mean it doesn't do what you want it to do. I see a lot of that sort of attitude on these boards and its pretty laughable being honest. Every DAW does the basics in its own way, realistically they're all same when you break it down.

Anima

I dunno, I didnt take to to, I put about two hours into it.

Two hours? It can be a long process to learn a DAW, thats why you learn one well and stick with it. Don't expect to be expert after two hours in fairness...

frobisher

I recently moved form Cubae SX to Logic but I still have a copy of Reaper loaded. Just take your time with it and us the tutorials, iirc these are a separate download to the program. It is a straight forward but very powerful piece of software. I still love it!

JonathanAnon

Anima wrote: »

Two hours? It can be a long process to learn a DAW, thats why you learn one well and stick with it. Don't expect to be expert after two hours in fairness...

Well you have to understand, I had about a day to look at all of the free DAWs. I was getting nowhere with Reaper, when I had pretty much got every one of the other ones fully working. I guess my question is: LMMS and Reaper aside, is there anything else I should be considering?

squibs

strictly not free if you're being pedantic

Forget pedantic - reaper ain't free full stop. It costs $50 or $225 for commercial use. They are hoping people will respect the way that they send out the software uncrippled and that they will repay that trust by paying what is owed if they use the software on a regular basis.

It's still the best of the budget stuff out there, though the midi implementation is still weak. Have tried a lot of the linux stuff lately, LMMS being the latest, and while it is impressive as an open source project it doesn't compete with the high-end commercial stuff. Some of the "amateur" products from steinberg, cakewalk, etc are cheap too without compromising much on the feature set.

mp3guy

Ardour for linux.

i57dwun4yb1pt8

reaper

and spend a week or two at it .
2 hours to check out a daw , are you kidding ?

JonathanAnon

DaDumTish wrote: »

reaper
and spend a week or two at it .
2 hours to check out a daw , are you kidding ?

2 hours EACH I had all of the others I tried fully working within the hour.

Just downloaded it again now, I will take another look.

brow_601

JonathanAnon wrote: »

2 hours EACH I had all of the others I tried fully working within the hour.

Just downloaded it again now, I will take another look.

I wrote a user guide on Reaper for college, not too much detail but it may help to get you started if you're interested?

shayleon

been using cubase for many years now, but from all the reviews i read about reaper - it's awesome. give it another try.
cheers.
Shay

JonathanAnon

I found out how to do what I needed to do using LMMS. It's not perfect (or as easy as Cubasis was), but certainly a workable solution. Pity there is not so much documentation for LMMS. Maybe I'll put something together myself. Give something back ;-)

Only one more glaring omission in LMMS is the lack of an export to MIDI file option.

PaulBrewer

JonathanAnon wrote: »

Maybe I'll put something together myself. Give something back ;-)

Nice one, Squire !:)