Hacker News Reader

Comment by marknutter | Hacker News Reader

Can any musicians in the know about music software comment on how this compares to say, Ableton Live?

I've used a lot of DAWs. Namely Logic, Sonar, Nuendo, Protools, Reason, Ableton, FLStudio and Reaper. And my conclusion is that Reaper is by far the best. Your opinion may be different, but give it a try. It has a free trial period and the full version is very cost effective. Add in the SWS extensions and the scripting support (I'm using python) and it becomes very powerful. Put the House of White Tie skin on it, add in some reamote slaves and combine with the fact that it is rock solid and never crashes... and you have, IMHO, what is currently the worlds best DAW.

As a Cubase user who generally likes Cubase, but is considering switching to Ableton for the primary purpose of using Macro controls... would Reaper be likely to meet me needs?

Specifically, I'm talking about having one "knob" or control that controls multiple parameters across multiple VSTs, with varying ranges. Can Reaper do that? The fact that Ableton can, and Cubase can't, is pretty much the only reason I'm thinking of switching.

And for those wondering about Reaper, it's from Winamp creator Justin Frankel. Dude makes some awesome software.

Could you elaborate a bit on what you can do with scripting in Reaper? That sounds very interesting.

You can use it for all kinds of things. I use it for automating repetitive UI tasks. Say, taking a high-hat track, finding a high-hat transient, splitting all the drum tracks on that point, grouping those drums takes into a group for editing and moving onto the next transient. That's a bit derived, but anywhere where you find yourself manually repeating UI actions over and over again, you can save yourself hours by scripting it. You can save your scripts as actions and then even bind them to a key.

Yes. I've used both extensively.

They share some qualities, but as the name suggests, Ableton Live is really geared towards live performance use. Logic is more for straight-up production. I mean, people use Ableton Live for production, but I think Logic is more flexible overall. (Because it's simpler, though, Live may be friendlier for people just getting into digital audio production.)

Also, just check out the interfaces: Logic is more for precision work, Ableton is all about getting to your actions quickly, as would be super-necessary when performing live and every millisecond counts.

I disagree. Live started as performance and it is often presented as such, but its studio workflow is not a second class citizen at all. In fact the general workflow is one of Live's strong points. I spent a lot of time with both Live and Logic and I rarely used complex software that is as intuitive as Live. In my opinion everything in Live is where you'd expect it to be. Devices are plain and straight forward, no brushed steel backgrounds or cluttered "science fiction interfaces".

This accessibility made switch to Live (again) after several years of Logic usage. You'll get great results with both, but after all I realized I value Ableton's straight forward workflow.

And then there's also Max 4 Live, which enables a whole other world of extensibility and tweaking.

The only thing I miss is Logic's low latency mode which is useful if your project becomes big and you need to record another track late in the production progress.

|The only thing I miss is Logic's low latency mode which is useful if your project becomes big and you need to record another track late in the production progress.|

To do this you can "freeze" a collection of tracks in Live. It essentially locks every action you've applied to a track (and perhaps even quietly renders them to temp WAVs) in order to free up computing power.

Of course I know about freezing, but low latency mode just bypassed several resource heavy effects/instruments with the click of a button - no rendering time, or (un)freezing required. It worked very well.

Since the later 8.x versions, Live has had a "reduced latency when monitoring" option which allows you to do just that.

I must have missed that - thanks, I'll look into it.

I spend about 8 hours a day in Logic Pro 9, and while I haven't used Ableton a ton, I get the impression that Ableton Live is more geared toward synthetic/electronic and live performance applications, whereas Logic is a more generally focused DAW that competes more directly with things like Pro Tools.

The one thing that has always kept me from Live (and this probably applies to .001% of DAW users) is last I checked it doesn't support score based composition. To me the easiest way to visualize my music is good old-fashioned 350 year old notation. My process is to compose by dropping notes on a staff, then either tweak the MIDI (to sound less mechanical) or re-record tracks live, after the composition phase has completed. In the past I have found three apps that handle this well: older versions of Cakewalk on windows, Opcode's Studio Vision Pro (tragically murdered by Gibson--something I'll never forgive them for) and Logic. I tried Digital Performer, and could never get the hang of their score view. I've also tried composing in Finale, which has great note entry, but lack anything further. I'm hoping that LPX doesn't munge the note entry too bad.

Indeed - I've been considering getting a DAW to hobby shop with, and have been on the fence between Logic, Ableton Live and Reason.

My (perhaps naive) impression is that Logic seems to be more geared towards recording live music, while Ableton and Reason seem to be more geared towards creating music in the program. They can all do both (recording live and create), but that's just my impression watching their demo videos etc (perhaps describing it as "core strength" vs "geared towards" is more accurate?). I'd love to hear from someone who's actually used one/more of them.

I use all of them daily.

First things first. What I quickly discovered was that Logic _sounds_ better. Just dragging in a sample from you desktop seemed to reveal that logic was processing it in a higher quality. A weird thing, and maybe it's placebo, but everytime I go back to ableton I notice this. Furthermore, the bottom line is, my productions just sounds better in Logic. Maybe it's the workflow it encourages, I'm not sure. All I know is that no serious audio engineer would use anything else than Pro Tools or Logic for a serious recording, and I agree. At least that's my experience.

Regarding Reason: In my opinion, it has some of the best synths in the business. Which is why i rewire into Logic. A couple of youtube tutorials on Thor and you'll be going strong.

Ableton, well, I don't care much for it. The only thing i really miss is how easy it is to manipulate audio in it. A lot of people talk about how fast it is, but the design always seemed to get in my way. Personal preference i guess...

This is totally placebo. Ableton is completely transparent for audio as long as no audio stretching is involved. You have to be careful though because if you don't configure audio clips the right way and do route them through the time stretching algorithms you will definitely lose some sound quality.

Probably Live's biggest problem in this regard is that it doesn't make it as clear as it could that this kind of stretching is going on.

Check the parameters of your default Simpler or clip in ableton before comparing the sound of a clip alone, I think you're missing something.

The Normalize on export function in Logic is works weirdly well too, especially considering you have almost no control over it. I almost always leave it on and in 5 years of professional composition work, have only chosen to switch it off once or twice-- and only because it was pushing some audio artifacts to the forefront that I had previously corrected.

I spent a lot of time as a hobbyist using Reason. I found it super fun to play with, but I ran into two problems:

1. I almost never actually finished anything in it. That's a problem for me in general, but Reason exacerbates it. There are so many knobs to tweak, that I often ended up mired in the minutia of tweaking sounds. I found it hard to stay high level and focus on the music.

2. Compared to, say whaling on a real guitar or keyboard, I found Reason sounded very "dry" out of the box. To get something that didn't sound cheap or reedy, I had to do a lot of set-up: make a synth or two, wire them through a few effects and EQ, tweak everything, add some reverb, tweak some more. I felt like I wanted to decorate a cake, but Reason forced me to go out and thresh some wheat first. This level of control is really powerful if you're into sound design, but made it hard for me to make songs and music.

Of course, your mileage may vary. As far as fun toy to play with, though, Reason is a blast. I spent many a happy hour tweaking and playing with little loops.

For me #2 is a feature :)

It does take a bit longer but you have more control of how things fit in the mix.

I used to use Reason (way back in version 3), and now am a full-time Logic user for all my music production. I'd say this is a pretty fair characterization, although I actually use Logic with VST/AU instruments to do essentially the same thing I used to do in Reason.

I've always thought the Ableton sound engine was pretty average compared to Logic. Ableton has always felt a bit muddy in its summing (IMHO!).

Ableton's summing is completely transparent, as numerous tests have demonstrated. It's really just basic float math. Ableton's reputation for muddy sound has a lot more to do with somewhat mediocre stock effects plugins and the audio stretching algorithms.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com