Welcome to your musical software lessons
My name is Eilish San and today we're going to finish
the DAW comparisons by making a final summary
of every single DAW we have seen so far
First let's start with the area that, for me,
is the most important when it comes to working with audio,
and it is the quality of exported audio
We do not want a DAW that, after working
hard with it, lowers the quality of our work,
when we can have another one that gives us
a superior quality
First I want to highlight two specific comparisons,
Podium in my case made the exported sound
several tones lower than the original,
so I strike it directly off from my list,
but you can test it does the same or works
correctly with your equipment if you want
Then we have the case of Bitwig,
I could not make a comparison with Bitwig 2,
but Bitwig 1.3 certainly exported the sound
with a rather poor quality
If I can do a comparison with Bitwig 2
soon I will upload a video to update this,
for now we will mark it as bad assuming that
the audio engine is the same in both versions
In the other comparatives we found the worst
audio quality in Cakewalk Sonar Platinum,
Ableton Live 9, Acid Pro 7 and Pro Tools First 12,
while Cubase Elements 9 and Tracktion Waveform
had a superior audio quality than the rest
Let's go to the second most important point to me,
MIDI
If you do not use MIDI in your work maybe this point
will not interest you, but really nowadays
more and more virtual instruments are used
and less real instruments are recorded live,
in any musical style
Also, if you work alone at home and want to release
your compositions created in your own home studio,
chances are you do not know how to play or don't have
all the instruments you want to use in
your compositions, which is why it's always useful
to have the best tools possible
to work with MIDI
As I have said more than once, a fundamental point
in my opinion is to be able to write the MIDI in score,
since that way you are getting used to it and learning to read
and write in score if you do not already know, which will serve you
in the future if you need to play the music from another
person written in score, which is the most normal
In addition, writing in score is much easier
than in piano roll once it's mastered, since you don't have
to go up and down on the piano to write
octave intervals and compare the grids with the piano
on the left to know what note you are writting,
in a score you have
all the notes at a glance
The DAW with score editor are Cakewalk Sonar,
Digital Performer, Samplitud, Mixcraft, Cubase and Reaper
I have to say that, with the exception of Cakewalk Sonar and Cubase,
the rest of the score editors
are a bit tedious to use
Also, except for these two and Reaper,
the rest are limited in the number of clefs
that you can use, in Samplitud you can not use
the neutral cleff to write percussion instruments
and in Digital Performer and Mixcraft you can only use
the G, F and double score - G and F - clefs
Of course, you can always use external software
to compose in score
and then export the MIDI to your DAW
In that case, the DAW without score editor
with the best MIDI functions are FL Studio, Reason
and Waveform, to emphasize in all three the possibility
of applying a specific groove to humanize MIDI
in case you want it to sound
closer to real live music
Then there is the use of external plugins
Both in audio and MIDI you need to have
the best possible plugins to handle the audio waves
or to have the best possible virtual instrument
and the best effects
Currently the most standard and compatible
with almost any DAW,
at least in Windows which is what we are seeing,
is to use plugins in VST format
In addition, there are many free VST plugins,
many of them of very good quality,
that you can find on the Internet
Of all DAWs there is only one that does not support VST,
Pro Tools, so if you do not need to use Pro Tools
due to some obligation, because you work for a
recording studio that uses it, because you already bought it
or for whatever reason, I advise you not to use
Pro Tools as your DAW in your home studio
If you want to use it or you have no choice,
as I already told you in its video there is a way
to use VST with Pro Tools through ReWire
and the application Plogue Bidule
Of the rest, Ableton Live, Acid Pro and Samplitude
only allow a plugins folder to scan,
so if you are going to use any of these DAW
remember to make shortcuts from that folder
to the other folders where the plugins you use
are installed so that it founds them
In addition Acid Pro is only compatible
with 32-bit plugins, and nowadays
it is increasingly common to create 64-bit VST
On the contrary, Cubase no longer supports 32-bit plugins,
so if you have plugins you want to use
and do not have a 64-bit version, watch out for this,
or look for a 64-bit alternative
which you will need sooner or later
It is also necessary to mention the additional capacity
to trigger different loops for each track live,
what is called Session mode
We only have this option in Ableton Live,
Mixcraft and Bitwig
Finally there are two additional notes to add,
the first is for Reason, where we can not
create punch in and punch out areas,
and another for Bitwig, where we can not insert
time signature changes, to sum it up, both lack
an essential functionality for a DAW
If we remove every DAW with negative points,
we are left with 6 out of the 14 compared
Now that we have a selection of the best,
let's talk about prices
Digital Performer is priced at $ 499
FL Studio comes in three different prices,
€ 189, € 289 and € 786.24, depending on the number
of additional plugins you want to buy
There is a fourth price of € 89, but it is a version
that does not allow audio recording, so I will not
take it into account, since these videos are
mainly focused on singers who want to create
a home studio at home, so the main thing
will be recording their voices in audio
Of course, if you are not going to work recording audio,
it might interest you
Mixcraft comes in two different prices,
$ 89 and $ 179, again depending
on the number of additional plugins
Cubase comes with three different prices,
€ 99.99, € 329 and € 579, but in this case
it does not depend only on the number of plugins
you want to buy, but the number
of functionalities is different in all three versions,
ie, in the € 100 version you do not have
a complete Cubase, although possibly
enough for a home studio
Reaper comes in two different prices,
$ 60 and $ 225, this time the only difference being
if you are going to make a commercial use of the software,
like using it in a recording studio, or not
And finally Waveform comes with three different prices,
$ 99, $ 150 and $ 200, again depending
on the number of additional plugins you want to buy
Clearly, I'll discard Digital Performer,
since for a little more you can buy the full version
of Cubase, Cubase Pro, much better
in all points compared
Among all others, what to use?
If you want to use Session mode,
the option we have left is Mixcraft,
that if you do not want additional plugins,
for example because you already have yours
and do not need extra plugins,
it has an affordable price of $ 89, about 75 €
That you do not want Session mode because
you're not going to use it for anything?
Then we have two options,
get the cheapest within the good,
or the best quality possible
The cheapest DAW is Reaper,
being only $ 60 for personal use, about € 50,
which is basically what you will do
in a home studio
The highest quality position is between Cubase
and Waveform, let's pause a bit at this point
The minimum price for each is similar,
€ 99.99 from Cubase versus $ 99 from Waveform,
about € 83 with the current currency exchange
On the other hand, Waveform gives us the complete DAW
for that price, the other two options being
packages with additional plugins
Cubase instead gives us a reduced version,
having to buy the other editions
to have all the software functionalities,
as a greater number of inputs and outputs,
number of audio tracks, MIDI and instrument, etc.,
and of course additional plugins
It is true that Cubase comes with score editor,
and possibly also the best score editor
in a DAW currently alongside Cakewalk Sonar,
so in this point Cubase has a great addition
It is also true that you need the Pro version, of € 579,
to have the complete professional score editor,
although with the basic it may be enough
if you just want to use it to write MIDI notes
to convert them to audio
But on the other hand, the audio quality of Waveform
is slightly higher than that of Cubase,
and for a slightly lower price gives us
the complete DAW, with no limit of inputs,
outpus, tracks or VST in use
In addition, although Waveform has no score editor,
it has many other very powerful MIDI tools
Also remember that Cubase is no longer compatible
with 32-bit plugins, in case your VSTs
do not have a 64-bit version
One last note, Cubase is available
for Windows and Mac, while Waveform
for Windows, Mac, Linux and Raspberry Pi,
so if you are like me changing between
Windows and Linux, you will have fewer problems
to use the same software
on both platforms
If you do not want to compose using the score editor,
it is clear that the option is Tracktion Waveform
If you want to compose with score editor,
which is my sincerest advice, I would say go
to the comparative page of Cubase versions
and see if the limits of the Elements version
meets your needs
If that version isn't enough for you,
before paying € 329 or € 579
for the better versions, I would buy Waveform
and use an external MIDI editor to compose the MIDI
separately and then import it into Waveform
If you want to use a score editor
and you need really advanced tools
to create the scores, most likely the integrated
score editor from any DAW won't be enough for you
and you'll need a dedicated score editing
software anyway
Personally, both to prevent the limitations
of the Elements version of Cubase from limiting
my work in the future, and to have the best quality
possible, I will stay with Tracktion Waveform
as the best DAW to use, and I will use
an external MIDI editor for my compositions,
as I'll show you in an upcoming video
With this I finish the comparatives,
at least for now,
if I have missed some DAW that you want me to compare
or you have any doubt or thing that you want to share
remember to leave it in the comments
I hope that you like this video, that you find it useful
and I'll see you in the next video
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