Digital Performer...

personally, i never liked DP. i did use it a fair bit back in the day, but only because i was forced to. that may be part of why i didn't like it, but also, its interface drove me insane. it did work quite well though, once i got past that.

  arsenlives said:

10 years ago dp may have been the best for midi but thats a very difficult point to debate these days.

it still is the most complex midi sequencer i've used. If you know of any that have more quanitizing and automation features id love to hear about them. Protools, nuendo, sonar, renoise, logic all have inferior midi capabilities in this year of 2006. im eagerly awaiting

the difficulty level of debating this point

i think cubase is better. debate that.

  Dr. Elemeno von Hat X: PhD said:

i think cubase is better. debate that.

no debate necessary. i mainly use cubase/nuendo. Unfortunately the midi features in cubase are inferior to DP, however cubase is much more intuitive for me. So the winner of the battle for me was intuitiveness. Yeah Csound and Maxmsp are capable of almost anything, but are they fun and pleasurable to make songs with?

  Ghostbusters III said:

Yeah Csound and Maxmsp are capable of almost anything, but are they fun and pleasurable to make songs with?

Yes

midi is still a chore in PT, but the new version 7 real-time quantize, shift, transpose dealie they have now is really cool. DP has midi "plugins" which are flexible but not nearly as elegant. cuz when i want to adjust my midi notes, the first thing i think of is to go to the mixing board ... !?@

what type of quantization stuff are you refering to? i dont get too crazy with quantization since i do a lot of tracking of whole takes of songs and then edit them so quantization of audio is much different than midi. the only midi stuff i do is rather basic but id love to hear some neat ideas. i used dp a bunch back in the day but i pretty much use nuendo exclusively (not because i feel that its the "best" but cause i like it)

hammerhead ftw.

hi

I've been using DP since around 97 when it was just the midi sequencer Performer- it's pretty solid. At this point the program is transparent to me, like a blank piece of paper yet I'm still discovering new things in it. It's very deep feature-wise but the layout and workflow are pretty straightforward compared to other programs. I find Logic to be overly-complicated and Live is too simplistic and awkward for full production (it's midi doesn't even show midi event readouts). But, DP is not efficient. It can't handle nearly as many plugins or softsynths as Logic can, probably around half. DP's built in plugins are okay but I think other programs plugins are generally better sounding. They have to find a way to optimize the code so that it can handle more. Anyway, here is a list of some key commands that speed up the DP workflow.

http://www.paulbrownsound.com/mastercontrol.html

"MOTU Digital Performer 8 goes 64bit and windows!"

http://www.macmusic.org/news/view.php/lang/en/id/11097/

oh man. . . shit. . . now I have serious decision makings to make . . . .

Bah, just get Reaper instead man !

ha! Yeah, I've been on the Reaper tip for a while but my heart still (in many ways) belongs to DP. . . man, out of context, that could be taken really lisciviously.

Nice