(disclaimer: most things in this post are exaggerated. please don't take things on the internet seriously.)
we've been getting bored.
we've been getting bored of them fl studios and renoises. we barely use the last anyways, too cumbersome (there's a reason why they were quickly replaced). and besides, we wiped our computer clean with a shiny new coat of shit—windows 11. what fun'll await us now...
PART -1. FL STUDIO
we have a storied history with FL. coming from LMMS around ~2021, it was a breath of fresh air to have an actually working DAW that wasn't designed to kill you. a working soundfont player, proper automation clips and samples, it was all we could ask for.
and then, a couple years down the line, fl studio 2024 hit.
it brought many wonderful features which i won't go into here because i'm not editorialising. but you know what it introduced? aggressive DRM. and now, whenever i put even ONE Saturn 2 with linear phase on my master, it immediately jumps to ~15% CPU usage instead of the usual 2% i'd get in REAPER despite being on the same ASIO driver, as it's probably-maybe-speculatively decrypting resources live all the while (along with the useless features and then some). also it likes to crash a lot now for some reason. stop cosplaying as Pro Tools.
it's our daily driver DAW, for god's sake. we have a competent CPU. why does it do this? why has our baby boy forsaken us?
so, i began to get sick of it. i'm a maximalist, and now i can't do what i could do before easily without breaking 20 million legs and shooting a dog. and that brings us here, now...
PART 0. BITWIG
i haven't been allowed to comment by my benefactors. not good, next.
PART 1. REAPER
REAPER is a rather divisive DAW for us. it's cheap, sure, but the thing that ticks us off the most is its verboseness. context menus upon context menus, knobs upon sliders, tables upon weird UI choices. and it's perfectly valid; you can't fit all of the features it has well in a DAW without burying it under weird abstractions. except that you can- but that's the beauty about it (d'aww).
we use it mainly as a post-production environment for mastering and mixing, and also some sound effects due to it not being bound to the hardware's audio channel count, and having r8brain with a featureful renderer and batch converter. but the problem is we only use it for that purpose. otherwise, it takes us 10x the amount of effort it'd take in FL or live to make a basic llia track. and that damn sample browser, [shudders]...
whatever. 5/10.
PART 2. ABLETON LIVE
ableton live, the platform for artists like autechre and the child of monolake. you can do anything you want in it! as long as you don't value your time.
it buries some features under its infamous options.txt, its macro implementation is horrible, and it has those cumbersome instrument and effects racks. it keeps scanning for... whatever, constantly, for some reason, AND THEY DON'T WANT TO FUCKING SUPPORT CLAP. the exporting is pretty lacklustre, too.
small fries: the people who use this DAW keep consistently pointing out FL's 10-effect limit, the (actually tame) track routing, yadayadayada, whatever. ableton is worse in this department, UI and UX wise. you can't bypass every effect at once, session view is basically useless if you ain't doing live shit (90% of people) or minor things, changing track gain is rather opaque, MACROS, the symbolism used is a joke, and sends suck to work with. i don't care if i have a 10-effect limit, because you have effect racks, and we have patcher. and patcher is honestly more usable...
the only reason i was drawn into it was M4L and corpus. the former because I Need More Tools, and the latter because we really like resonators. this has gone horribly, because as just like the DAW itself, they are both horribly obtuse (only understandable for M4L). but there's only one shining beacon i can see, even if it is a bit of a wank as well: the sample browser... and that's all i can say, because once you add a folder to Places, you have to wait around 2 hours for it to (incorrectly) tag your files based on sound-type.
maybe the developers are sleazing around and are only employed for a paycheck, maybe the codebase is a shitshow, i don't know, but development has been very stagnant. but trust me, it is WAY more usable than REAPER. so much so that it takes only 2.5x the effort now.
still, i'm trying to love this—no two users use it the same way. but i can't.
4/10. side-hoe.
PART 3. RENOISE
hard to use for us because we don't have a MIDI keyboard, and also because It Is A Fucking Tracker.
X/10. not for us despite having this one purchased legally.