are there any DAWs better than ableton live?

im pretty comfy with live after about 1 1/2 years of use. i love it so much. the tempo/warping/pitching capabilities are just incredible. i do see however how awesome ableton live is not, in that over time ive begun to see its faults and small and some not so small improvements that need to be made

im fully aware of max/msp and supercollider and whatnot. i know how amazing they are. at this point in my life, im not ready to take on a program like that though. its just too much for me to learn right now. so my question is, are there any DAWs, in the sense of live, cubase, logic, countless others, that are better than ableton live? by better i mean able to do more...example, live is better than FL because of its amazing tempo matching/time stretching intuitiveness. for this alone, live owns FL

im not really looking for responses like, "hey man its just whatever works for you". im looking for objective facts which makes one DAW better than another, like my FL to live comparison

ive heard nice things about other DAWs that im jealous about. like i hear that in (cubase i think) that there is this amazing midi mangling tool that lets you do awesome reversing thing in a piano roll. that is amazing, but live doesnt do it. ive also heard in soundforge, you can make sloped automation lines, that is small, but still, live cannot do that. these are the kinds of things im looking for

im not sure what will become of live when version 8 comes out with max/msp built in, it might just be so undeniably amazing that it will reign over all other DAWs, but until that time, lets just talk about what we have available now

thanks!

you can mangle midi pretty good in cubase/nuendo

you can also do pitch enveloping to audio files which is lovely

i dunno the best thing for anyone to use is whatever they find the most rewarding sound wise

if you feel limited by abelton than by all means try something else

but i tend to think there's a reason you can run abelton as a slave to nuendo/pro-tools and not the other way 'round

jussayin....

ableton is geared more towards live stuff... hence the name... so yes it is lacking some in the production side of things... though i do use it for everything and havent found anything at all limiting about it. What exactly do you want to do?

pisstake

Ableton lives seqencing screen just isnt flexible enough yet to be considered a main DAW.Its too small and fiddley. I can wait for the max msp update but i can rewire max in to any of my DAW's already anyway.

lol at thread

i downloaded Reaper yesterday - looks alright from the brief play i had with it last night. gonna try and integrate my laptop into my recordings a little more for a laugh.

Microsoft Songsmith is better then live because it provides auto-accompaniment, pitch recognition, and auto song completion in any style you want, and Live does not do these things.

your favorite daw/os/plugin sucks

but seriously...

Reaper is good for the price (free, basically)

If you're doing very detailed sequencing, I've heard cubase and logic are good because you can view/edit multiple piano rolls at the same time - something that Ableton and Reason and some others cannot do

Brian Eno raves about Logic and I assume he knows what he's talking about.

these days all the major packages are pretty good, it does come down to preference I think. I know you didn't want that answer though.

I really like Ableton because of that Slice to MIDI function, it's very powerful and handy imo.

Better is so subjective, ableton is great, and especially great for live.

cubase is great, really great for slicing up audio and midi bits into little mangles etc

but logic is where its a for me, so clear, so well laid out but SO much depth. logic can do all the normal things a daw can do in a very intuative way, but add the environment and hyper editor to that and you have a an incredible program.

it takes a few reads of the manual to get to grips with the more complex side of logic, but once you are used to it you can do ANYTHING. things you though not possible at all. the hyper editor is great, its kind of like an interface you can use that looks like a fruity loops old school style step sequencer but you can use it for note programming, automation, track commands or anything.

the environemt allows you to do anything oyu want, press a key on the keyboard to trigger arpeggios accross all instruments, skips to certain sections of the song, turning on and off loops, even changin song file, the possibilities are endless, but hard to work out how to do them for a beginner.

ignore all that and you have a fully featured DAW that can record bands with ease and fluidity as well, my boss was working with faithless recently and he said they like to have a pro tools engineer and a logic engineer to help with tracks, nothing else. I almost got some work with massive attack recently and they wanted a 'logic programer' not a producer, they wanted someone who was a logic guru as there 'programmer' so they knew they could do what they want. its the standard for midi editing, like pro tools for recording.

but that said all the others an do similar, just not as expandable as logic.

So have you guys ever considered what kinda possibilities there are if you don't stick to just 1 daw?

yeah the possibility of my sound card getting confused and crashing is roughly 100 percent.

I don't think he meant using more than one at the same time..

As much as i love ableton live (i really do love it) it's kind of weak when you're trying to write loads of stuff in midi, which is the only thing i'm using it for now. I really like the idea of having more than one midi sequence open at once to edit, so i guess it's time to have a look at cubase.

Ableton live is a fantastic program though, really intuitive and really flexible.

in Fruity Loops you can set the background wallpaper to porno jpgs... dont think you can do this in other DAWs . ergo, FL is the best

^

this.

to the original poster

if you would like to 'move up' from ableton there really are only a few places to go.

Cubase and Logic, you could also try Protools but i personally think its an outdated piece of shit

  Awepittance said:

to the original poster

 

if you would like to 'move up' from ableton there really are only a few places to go.

 

Cubase and Logic, you could also try Protools but i personally think its an outdated piece of shit

hehe, I dunno, for recording bands pro tools is great IMO, head and shoulders above MOST of the competition.

But for electronic music, yeah I agree, its shit.

  welcome to the machine said:

  Awepittance said:

to the original poster

 

if you would like to 'move up' from ableton there really are only a few places to go.

 

Cubase and Logic, you could also try Protools but i personally think its an outdated piece of shit

 

hehe, I dunno, for recording bands pro tools is great IMO, head and shoulders above MOST of the competition.

 

But for electronic music, yeah I agree, its shit.

i just think it's interface is really old school looking, i agree it's great for recording bands but there isn't much it can do recording wise that Cubase and Logic cannot. shame so many companies still make exclusive TDM plugins for it.

i love just slicing samples, making beats or concrete type stuff in protools but i would never cash out for it just to do that. too bad protools free doesn't work on newer computers.

ableton sound quality is weird. i've made drums sounds in ableton and rendered them as samples to use in another prog. after sequencing with that and recording back into ableton they sound better.

to be on topic though, if you love ableton right now then why don't you marry it stick with it until you actually feel like you outgrow it. everything has pros and cons and more of a hassle switching daws than just adding a new vst or something. i got kind of tired of trying to work out how to use ableton for live stuff because of issues switching presets and running out of processor power and i've been way less productive due to trying out other hardware/software (and am still using ableton a bit anyway).

  Awepittance said:

i just think it's interface is really old school looking, i agree it's great for recording bands but there isn't much it can do recording wise that Cubase and Logic cannot. shame so many companies still make exclusive TDM plugins for it.

yeah, but I think there are a few really useful things that pro tools has that none of the others do. Playlists, groups, fades, beat detective style correction are all handled better in pro tools IMO, though i wish they combined playlists with take folders ala logic, that WOULD be a useful set up.

but it is prohibitively expensive and digidesign seems like a bit of a greedy company (pay hundreds extra for omf, mp3 etc WTF?).

I'm a logic user first FWIW, but I do find the little extras in pro tools indispensable during a big session.

All mayor DAWs (Cubase, Logic, FL8, Ableton, Pro Tools, etc) have the same sound quality.

Don't fall for that marketing bs.

whats a mayor DAW?

a Digital Audio Workstation made by the mayor

  pissflaps said:

All mayor DAWs (Cubase, Logic, FL8, Ableton, Pro Tools, etc) have the same sound quality.

 

Don't fall for that marketing bs.

not true, they all have different summing engines and sound slightly different, but if you can't make a track sound good on one you can't make a track sound good on any of them. The differences are very subtle, but well documented.

its one of the reasons people sum through a desk, and why you can spend thousands on a summing amplifier. But its a concern of pro's in big studios, not people producing tracks in the box or recording demo's for their band.