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Not to thread-jack, but are there any worthy open-sourced competitors to Ableton? I'm just getting into DAWs and was thinking of buying Ableton Live but haven't had the time to explore/compare other options. My musician buddies all tell me not to waste my time and just buy it.
If you want a DAW that is similar to Ableton and works on Linux, you should go with Bitwig, which is in some ways better and more modern than Ableton, but has a smaller user base.
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Knobs and sliders allow users to leverage their spatial and manipulation abilities to specify a value from a continuous range. You could also ask users to just type in a number, but that interrupts the flow and pushes some other data out of their short-term memory. Composers and audio engineers would probably prefer to keep that part of their brain free to focus on other things. Sliders can also be laid out in an arr…
To add to this, the precise value of a control isn’t relevant in most mixing and sound design operations, only it’s value-within-range. Most of the decision-making work is done by ear, not by number. The knobs (and sliders) give you a quick reference to “can I get a bit more out of this”. Virtual knobs (and sliders) invite experimentation where a numeric control or text box doesn’t (so much). You can play with them.…
As a UI and UX nerd, one thing I really love about the digital music production scene is that software companies writing DAWs and VSTs know their audience and strive to give power users all the tools they need to be as productive as possible. Knobs, curves, programming (Max for Live), integration with external tools. In other fields of software development instead we dumb everything down to the lowest denominator, an…
Interestingly, DAWs have always had flat UI designs, something that many HN commentators seem to frown upon.
I think it's quite the contrary. Look at the history of Logic, Cubase, Sonar, etc. For most of their time they didn't have flat UI. Ableton is the exception.
As a UI and UX nerd, one thing I really love about the digital music production scene is that software companies writing DAWs and VSTs know their audience and strive to give power users all the tools they need to be as productive as possible. Knobs, curves, programming (Max for Live), integration with external tools. In other fields of software development instead we dumb everything down to the lowest denominator, an…
> Knobs Can someone explain to me the point of a GUI knob? Is it just the analogy to physical knobs on mixers that makes people comfortable with them in GUIs?
You need knobs and sliders to convey information visually.
They did it. They finally added comping. I would be buying the upgrade if that was the only feature but there's so many!
For someone like me who uses Logic, is there a reason to use Ableton? Logic is only one $200 lifetime fee
Not to thread-jack, but are there any worthy open-sourced competitors to Ableton? I'm just getting into DAWs and was thinking of buying Ableton Live but haven't had the time to explore/compare other options. My musician buddies all tell me not to waste my time and just buy it.
DAWs, especially ones like ableton, are one of those types of software where they aren't that difficult on paper but the entropy of one is high enough you need a team of people to get going in the first place
Also, I think any "on paper" description of a DAW that makes it appear that they "aren't that difficult" can just be ignored.
This is the music I make[1]. The older, more piano-based songs are written in Overtone, and you'll here where they change up to be more textured and electronic sounding when I got into Ableton
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Depending on your use-case there are a lot of options to consider before investing in a professional solution like Ableton Live. - LMMS[1]: The go-to cross-platform FOSS DAW solution, with VST support and a healthy community. - Ardour[2]: Much like LLMS, it's a classic Open Source project that runs cross-platform and is quite fully-featured. - VCVRack[3]: A brilliant FOSS EuroRack Simulator. It has a built-in package…
Do you have a recommendation for someone on Linux interested in producing EDM/House that has zero prior experience/equipment? I have Reaper and Ardour, but a friend suggested Bitwig.
For example, Ardour really isn't designed around the sort of workflows that many people use for EDM/House production, yet it still has a reasonable number of prolific users who use it for precisely that style. Needless to say, the way they work is fairly different than someone using Bitwig or Live.
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Seriously. That alone has been one of the big things keeping me firmly in Logic Pro's camp. I'm also glad they're starting to add more instruments to the default package (notably, finally; a proper 'Upright Piano') - as the value proposition of Ableton Standard at $400 vs Logic Pro at $200 has been extremely one-sided in Logic's favour for many, many years now. I do understand, of course; I'm strictly speaking as a M…
Hard to compare price, Logic is crazy underpriced because it’s existence brings in so many Mac users. It undercuts other daws by a mile because of that. However, what you get with ableton live suite is well worth the money. It’s good value. But I’d still always run any DAW on a Mac. No audio drivers on windows beat CoreAudio on macOS.
It's true that generally speaking CoreAudio drivers are better, but then you have RME drivers on Windows which are just as rock solid.
Now if ONLY they added things all other DAWs have - say, a mixer where you could see all your attached plugins at once? Try mixing a 100-channel project with a few plugins on most tracks where you have to click on the track first to see which plugins it has. I'm completely baffled at why they can't just accept some standard designs that have become common practice over time and integrate them into the UI. (I'm aware…
I’m actually quite impressed with how Ableton came up with a UI that didn’t exist about 20 years ago and then stuck to it without trying to be all things to all people. The hardest thing to do is to say no. What’s even more impressive is that they did not start out doing any user research. They made what they wanted and (pardon the pun) it struck a chord. If they had not had the courage to trust their instinct, but h…
But for professional use, you do end up with a hundred or a few hundred track lanes in your projects, and mixing and tweaking the whole thing becomes an unavoidable disastrous chore.
If I understand this correctly, they planned on introducing it in Live 8 (hence a hidden flag in Options.txt which sort-of enables a preview of this feature but is extremely buggy), but it never fully worked out because they also introduced Racks with nested tree-like flow of plugins, which doesn't play well with a conventional matrix-like mixer view. That being said, I believe most pro users would be happy with a simplified solution like "if you fork a chain in a rack, its branches won't be shown in the mixer", which would cover the 95% of other simple use cases like, seeing where your compressors are at a glance without having to click on each track a hundred times...
There's many such things - like proper multi-screen support (e.g. with 3+ screens), which, hypothetically, could also couple well with a separate-window mixer view where they could introduce chain branching and all that (and become the first DAW to do that!). For pro use, there's lots of features like this that may sound boring but end up hampering your workflow a lot. It may not be as fun-sounding as 'yet another cool phaser bitcrusher spectral distortion plugin' but the reality is, professional users that they supposedly aim at do require core functionality that's been missing since the start.