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[Tommy Peel]

I've been multitrack recording my band live for several weeks now using our Mackie Onyx 1640's FW card and am now in search of a good DAW to edit and mixdown these recordings. I've been using Ardour on my old Acer laptop in linux to make the recordings because I can't get my Macbook Pro to recognize the mixer and that part works fine. I downloaded Ardour2 for my Mac also and have been trying to use it to mixdown the recordings but I am having too many issues with it. It has a bad habit of locking up while I'm using it along with enough quirks that I'd rather find something else. I've seen many of y'all talking about using Reaper and it looks nice to me(from a prive standpoint as well as a functionality one). Is that my best option or is there something better out there? Does it offer an easy way to split up a 30-40 minute recording into individual songs for export after editing and mixing? I know it took me a while to figure out how to do it in Ardour(GarageBand made it impossible without creating separate projects for each song). I'd rather not spend much money on this right now because I don't see me/the band making any money from the recordings in the near future, but spending $60 on Reaper is doable if it will get the job done with minimal fuss.

P.S.
I've downloaded the Reaper trial and will give it a try with this week's recording.


Thanks,
Tommy

[Bob Leonard]

Tommy,
I have a retired 1640 that has become my interface to my PC. I run Cubase, which can be run on a PC or MAC, and which I purchased before Pro Tools was available as a seperate package. Latency is 5ms, and IMO the feature set and capabilities are as good as Pro Tools. And no, I don't regret not buying or moving to Pro Tools.

[Jerome Casinger]

I've been multitrack recording my band live for several weeks now using our Mackie Onyx 1640's FW card and am now in search of a good DAW to edit and mixdown these recordings. I've been using Ardour on my old Acer laptop in linux to make the recordings because I can't get my Macbook Pro to recognize the mixer and that part works fine. I downloaded Ardour2 for my Mac also and have been trying to use it to mixdown the recordings but I am having too many issues with it. It has a bad habit of locking up while I'm using it along with enough quirks that I'd rather find something else. I've seen many of y'all talking about using Reaper and it looks nice to me(from a prive standpoint as well as a functionality one). Is that my best option or is there something better out there? Does it offer an easy way to split up a 30-40 minute recording into individual songs for export after editing and mixing? I know it took me a while to figure out how to do it in Ardour(GarageBand made it impossible without creating separate projects for each song). I'd rather not spend much money on this right now because I don't see me/the band making any money from the recordings in the near future, but spending $60 on Reaper is doable if it will get the job done with minimal fuss.

P.S.
I've downloaded the Reaper trial and will give it a try with this week's recording.


Thanks,
Tommy

I was a cubase guy, but since I got the X32 started using Reaper, and so far I am happy I havent went back to cubase.  Yes I am more comfortable with cubase, but time will fix that.  I did 3 hrs of recording recently with no issues.  Splitting songs is easy using "markers", just look it up in the manual.  I read the manual for a few hours one day and learned just enough to be dangerous.

[Pete Bansen]

+1 on Reaper. 

[Spenser Hamilton]

+1 on Reaper.

Make that +2. I did the circuit of DAWs and once I found Reaper I'e never strayed.

[Mark Gensman]

I'm a staunch PC guy using Adobe Audition. Love it..it's worked great for years. I can record multitrack direct to my little netbook running Windows XP.

[Corey Scogin]

I moved from Cakewalk to Reaper last year and will never go back.  I won't consider ProTools for one big reason: the lack of "offline bounce", especially for live recordings.

To answer the question about splitting up songs... In Reaper, you can define regions for each song and name them and when you export, you can have Reaper render the regions and name the tracks according to region (and region number if desired). 

It's also helpful to create snapshots for each song to save the mixes.  When you're finished mixing each song and saving the snapshots, you can queue each of them up to render and then go grab a drink while the whole project renders.

[Frederik Rosenkjær]

+1 on Reaper.

Went from Nuendo 3 to Reaper 1.5 or something like 5 years ago (ie. in Reaper's infancy) and have not once looked back. Not once. Since the first day I tried Reaper, Nuendo was only opened for finishing ongoing projects. It was just so perfect for me.

It's all about personal preference, but if the interface suits you, it will do anything you want, and I find it perfect for the tasks you mention. And then it will just be your luck that the DAW you chose happen to also be cheap, extremely small and quick to download (and upgrade), stable, lean and hassle-free. I feel sorry for the people who have deal with dongles and hour or days long procedures of call/response authorization, sometimes even stalling the whole thing for weeks when something is not working in the copy protection, even though the DAW itself (= the hard part) is working fine on their system. I'm so glad not to have to deal with that.

[Mark McFarlane]

Tommy,
I have a retired 1640 that has become my interface to my PC. I run Cubase, which can be run on a PC or MAC, and which I purchased before Pro Tools was available as a seperate package. Latency is 5ms, and IMO the feature set and capabilities are as good as Pro Tools. And no, I don't regret not buying or moving to Pro Tools.

I'm a long time Mac Cubase user. There is a cheap 'limited edition' version. For me it was intuitive to learn coming from live sound and has been reliable through many version upgrades over 10 years.  I have a fairly simple workflow to chop long recordings into song-based projects.  Its not trivial, takes maybe 5 minutes to create each song.   

One value of Cubase is you can grow to a pro-level system. the VST plug-in format is supported by almost every vendor, so you can spend tens of thousands of dollars on toys to enhance your system.

Every DAW platform has its problems with certain releases, OSes and drivers,...

[Dave Scarlett]

Make that +2. I did the circuit of DAWs and once I found Reaper I'e never strayed.

+3 or4 or 5 on Reaper. System requirements seem to be the lowest of any DAWS, powerful and frequent updates just keep coming.

[ProSoundWeb Community]