Have you switched DAWs recently? Why?

[LPF83]

I noticed LoboLives mentioning a recent switch in DAW choice, and since I seem to be (kind of) in the middle of same process, I thought this might make for an interesting off-topic discussion.

I settled on Cubase many years back because I found many DAWs to be fine for "in-the-box" production, but Cubase seemed to have a few advantages that were important to me:

1.  Hardware -- External hardware support seemed better than some others I tried -- by this, I just mean I had less issues, latency, MIDI implementation etc with hardware synths with Cubase compared to others.
2.  Performance -- I actually did stress tests with a few days maybe 12 years ago to see how they handled dozens of instances of the same plugin, and found Cubase seemed to let me pile on more plugins before the issues began that competitors on same machine.
3.  Familiarity -- I had some familiarity with Cubase having been an Atari ST/hardware synth guy in the 80s.. maybe it was psychological but I vibed with Cubase more than others.
4.  Sound -- Some say it's the pan law of Cubase, but it always sounded better to me.. it was subtle, but there
5.  Longevity -- Steinberg set the VST standard and probably will for the foreseeable future

A couple of years ago I gave Ableton another try and have been warming up to it... partially for the main feature (session view) that sets it apart, it provides a scratchpad workflow for arrangement ideas that is hard to achieve in the same way in Cubase (or at least not as intuitive).  There is some truth to the saying all DAWs are the same, but I think that means "in what they do and not how they do it".

With Live 12 I now feel more comfortable calling it my new potentially primary DAW, so I thought I would list the reasons why:

1.  Latency appears to be fixed in v12
2.  Performance overall seems to now be on a par with Cubase, or at least with faster processors these days perhaps less of an issue, it's been a good 10 years since I compared the two...  My workflow is very hardware based and CPU doesn't run out as easily as it used to.
3.  As far as I can tell, the Cubase equivalent to session view in Ableton is the Arranger, which kind of accomplishes the same but does so very differently, and feels like an afterthought versus the soul of the DAW like Ableton.  The workflow is just not comparable.  Here's what's weird:  I hear a lot of folks saying they hate session view in Ableton and only use arranger view.. they might be missing the point and be happier with Cubase or another DAW with traditional layout.
4. The overall interface, speed of mapping custom keys, grouping things together, simplicity etc. I think is better in Ableton
5. Plug-in browsing in Ableton used to be terrible, its much better in v12\
6. Ableton releases updates much less frequency and VERY carefully considers new features.  I'm sorry but for someone with a primarily hardware based workflow this is huge.  I don't want to update my DAW every year (looking at Cubase with one eyebrow up) and get a bill for $100... hell, even if it were free I still don't want to deal with overly frequent changes.  If it were well-thought-out and tested in the first place it shouldn't need to disrupt my set up every year.  Cubase does this, holds their hand out for another $100 per year, and most of the times the new features are not something I need. 

Maybe I'm weird that less frequent updates are more important?   Admitted bias here:  more bundled plug-ins is not a huge selling point for me.  I prefer to use third party plug-ins that are specialized and free me up from any particular DAW rather than build a dependency on Ableton or Steinberg branded ones.

So, how about you?  Have you changed DAWs, and if so, why?

[Manbird]

Recently is relative, I suppose, but I moved from Pro Tools to Logic (with attempted stops at the Harrison Mixbus and Studio One stations along the way) a few years back. When I started in PT, it was on a laptop sold to me by an audio engineer/producer who also had a day job at Apple. He was my tech support and tutor. My peers were all using PT too, so it was easy to ask questions or share tips in real time. All studios I worked in then were running PT - it was everywhere and I learned how to work with it as well as needed.

Just before the pandemic, I bought a second-hand MacBook, which came loaded with an older version of Logic. I started playing around with it and found it quite fun. The included instruments were great, and Logic Drummer was pretty amazing... a quick-sketch song demo sounded immediately real. That second-hand laptop didn't last and I bought myself a Mac Mini, partly so to be able to use the latest version of Logic. I love it - Logic feels far more creatively inspiring and playful than PT. I still dip into Pro Tools for archival stuff, but I never have reason to hang out there for long any longer.

P.S. - the fellow who sold me the laptop w PT on it way back when wrote a great review of Studio One for Tape Op magazine. That review sold me and I grabbed S1 on the spot. Didn't like it - couldn't make sense of it!! Funny, cos when I told him I'd then moved to Logic he laughed - Logic for him, he said, made no logical sense. That confirms for me that for some of us, there's really a personality fit at play in the world of DAWs.

[LPF83]

Recently is relative, I suppose, but I moved from Pro Tools to Logic (with attempted stops at the Harrison Mixbus and Studio One stations along the way) a few years back. When I started in PT, it was on a laptop sold to me by an audio engineer/producer who also had a day job at Apple. He was my tech support and tutor. My peers were all using PT too, so it was easy to ask questions or share tips in real time. All studios I worked in then were running PT - it was everywhere and I learned how to work with it as well as needed.

Just before the pandemic, I bought a second-hand MacBook, which came loaded with an older version of Logic. I started playing around with it and found it quite fun. The included instruments were great, and Logic Drummer was pretty amazing... a quick-sketch song demo sounded immediately real. That second-hand laptop didn't last and I bought myself a Mac Mini, partly so to be able to use the latest version of Logic. I love it - Logic feels far more creatively inspiring and playful than PT. I still dip into Pro Tools for archival stuff, but I never have reason to hang out there for long any longer.

P.S. - the fellow who sold me the laptop w PT on it way back when wrote a great review of Studio One for Tape Op magazine. That review sold me and I grabbed S1 on the spot. Didn't like it - couldn't make sense of it!! Funny, cos when I told him I'd then moved to Logic he laughed - Logic for him, he said, made no logical sense. That confirms for me that for some of us, there's really a personality fit at play in the world of DAWs.

I've never tried PT, simply because it seemed to be strong in the same areas Cubase is (like mixing), with Cubase having the upper hand at the areas of production (like MIDI editing) that mattered to me.  I bought a copy of Logic Pro around 2013 and got reasonably familiar with it, and there was a lot that I liked about it - at the time I was also developing software for iOS and enjoyed learning about the Mac ecosystem.  But my career has always required me to spend most of my daytime hours on the Windows platform, and once I was no longer spending X number of hours per day writing Objective-C code, using Macs just for music became cumbersome.  So I decided whatever DAW I was going to invest in going forward was always going to have to work on either platform, Mac or Windows, so that my hardware options for the studio were always flexible; and that ruled out Logic and FLStudio (which at the time was PC specific and never good at hardware integration anyway).  I do prefer to stay on Windows for music these days because of the cost effectiveness of the hardware and the Wintel platform is the king of backward compatibility, so I don't have to worry about waiting for updated versions of software whenever Apple decides to change their chip architecture or whatever.  I am envious of MacOS ability to (as I understand it) run multiple disparate audio interfaces seamlessly without a limitation on number of inputs - but for my small studio that's more of a want than a need.

[LoboLives]

I’m Digital Performer full time now. Studio One was great but I found that it started to develop a lot of bugs. MIDI clock not being sent randomly and trying to score a film with it was problematic as the video would sometimes just go completely black and I had to keep reimporting it.

Digital Performer has been around forever and a day, it specializes in film scoring (used by John Carpenter and I found out recently Italian composer Claudio Maria Cordio), it’s insanely powerful and comes with a lot of great stuff plug in wise. The one thing I love is the idea of chunks, Audio to MIDI functionality, the conductor track (which allows you to slow or increase the BPM of a sequence among other things using markers, the Clips window is essentially Ableton’s performance capabilities if I want to just jam out, most importantly it sends MIDI time code so I can easily punch into a sequence and the sequencer in DP perfectly matches any external sequence I have going on my hardware. Bar 2 in DP will force my external sequencer to start at bar 2. This can be toggled on or off if desired.

I’m still getting used to it, especially when it comes to mixing and mastering. There’s not a lot of stock presets for the effects like there was in Studio One so it does require a lot of tweaking.

[LPF83]

I've read that Digital Performer has a lot going for it when it comes to film scoring, and the right choice of a DAW has a lot to do with what it's intended use case is.  I definitely wouldn't want to try film scoring with Ableton.