JohnEgan
Just an FYI, I did some quick test with demo...
- Most all my VST, VST3 loaded and work OK with out doing anything but scan plugins, even most Cakewalk exclusive as well Sonitus ones after loading dll's as per Craig's posted tip, i didn't test all for sound but loaded into track and seem to function,all my Izotope stuff I tested for sound all OK.
Exceptiions were the Overloud and Nomad FX, those loaded but requiring those activation codes which may be forthcoming.
- all VI's seem to load and work, RapturePro (and expansion packs), Z3TA, DimensionPro, Addictive Drums/Keys, AAS, Cakewalk Instruments etc. haven't tried working with Melodyne yet.
It failed to load 1 out of my approximately 600 dlls (ot was a discontnued TDR plug, the old Feedback Compressor). All my Izotope and Waves plugins are fine.
The bundles version of Melodyne is Esssential. I have Studio and it works fine. The ARA inetgration is very good.
JohnEgan
Also more so,
- can drag and drop midi and audio tracks from Sonar, into MC8 retaining track names and track header info, also import cwp/midi file with info
Sir, I owe you a case of beer or whiskey for all the time that tip just saved me. I was positively dreading a laborious regime of renderings etc to port thing over. Awesome steer, thanks!
I'm about 60 hours into Mixcraft 8 Pro. Coming from a long time Cakewalk / Sonar background, with a healthy dose of hours in Acid Pro and a bit in Studio One, I am finding Mixcraft very easy to learn. I just opened up the Mixcraft "welcome" demo project and clicked / right-clicked my way around for around 20 minutes, and then was able to start a new project and do a lot of bread-and-butter audio and midi moves without consulting the manual.
It really seems that the developers have thought the GUI out very carefully. For me it serves its purpose just as well as Skylight. The feature set is also suprisingly deep, as becomes clear just from skimming the headings in the manual. For some reason (maybe from the GUI in the previous versions) I'd always assumed ignorantly that Mixcraft was a kind of adolescent DAW. I don't think that now.
The other thing that really impresses me is its stability on my system (5 year old Windows 7 Pro 64, i7 cpu 2.7 ghz, 16 gb ram, Focusrite Scarlett USB). I've been torture testing it, creating lots of tracks with individual instances of Kontakt with ram-heavy libaries, some running off arps like Cthulu, while slapping on resrouce hungry plugs like the Waves CLA series, Abbey Road Plates, Equivocate, Soothe, Seventh Heaven Reverb, TDR stuff in Insane Quality mode etc. It just works and works.
It has only crashed on me twice, each time when rescanning my plug in folders, Once, upon restarting, it said "I don't like that plug-in..." and the other time, the new plug did make it through. (I've since learned that the best way to add new plugs (after the intial scan) is to drop and drag a dll, from its folder in Windows Explorer, to anywhere on the Mixcraft interface. Nice.)
It's still sort of early days with Mixcraft, there's many tasks / features to try, but so far I'm quite happy. It's about as intuitive for me as Studio One, which I probably would have switched to a while ago as my main DAW, but it proved to be just too CPU-spikey / freezy / crashy on my setup. I'm spending myabe 95%+ of my DAW time making music rather than dealing with DAW issues. I am having an unsual amount of fun. Unless I hit some terminal problem, I imagine I'll make it my main DAW.