| > I do think there is a big hole for a cross-platform DAW that's at least halfway decent well there's Renoise ( http://renoise.com ), which is IMHO, amazing. it's just that, it's based on the old-school trackers paradigm (like Fast Tracker, Impulse Tracker, etc), which not everybody likes (but is actually a great fit for cutting up breakbeats and stuff that fit step-sequencer like workflows). Enhanced with support for VSTs, LADSPA etc (and built-in effects of course) and a sampler interface to design instruments that kinda blows the socks off just about anything. so there's that. and I love it :) but I do agree there's a big hole for a DAW with a good piano-roll and "stretchy" timelines like the arrangement view in Ableton. especially the way you can navigate the timeline by dragging on it left and right, but dragging up and down to zoom, such an intuitive way to navigate in sonic material where you often want to be able to zoom from hawks-eye overview to dive straight down and adjust some detail in the 10s of milliseconds, and back. I don't get why nobody has copied this way of navigation, it's IMHO right up there with ableton's timestretch/markers features that make it great. Yes Bitwig copied it, but that's partially Ableton's team. Bitwig is crossplatform, btw. But I never could get it do what I wanted. But I had a sort of temporary/educational license which expired and wowww was that program ever completely useless in demo-version. Speaking of that, it's the main reason why I started using Renoise. It was the only program that was even remotely useful in demo-version (just disabled export-to-wav and render-to-sample, inconvenient, but doesn't make the program useless, you can always record your sound in another way). Of course I got it licensed by now, having had way too much fun with it. It's only like 85 euros (including tax), compare to what you pay for Ableton nowadays, which doesn't even run on Linux. Oh and we all know there's no "best" DAW, right? No shame in using multiple tools, each for which is best at what it does, and just bounce the audio through your OS audio framework (there's equivalents for JACK on Windows and Mac, right?) |