If You Weren't Using P5 What Would You Use?

I've been a long time happy P5 user, but I'm about to purchase a new laptop and since Cakewalk/Roland is no longer going upgrade or support P5 I'm thinking of getting another sequencer for the laptop. Does anyone have any recommendations? Like I said I love P5 but since there are no future upgrades down the road I'd like to keep P5 on my main DAW but get something that will keep growing with developments in the industry down the road.

the presonas studio one, what areas do you think it lacks in, i have never heard of this one.

To the op i was just gonna suggest ableton, seems plenty of people use it.


Wow that looks really good, just been reading about it, looks like theres another competotor on the market now, very interesting, look forward to hearing what poeple think of this one.

hey, Presonus has a demo now. nice. I think i will try it out.

I was still waiting on a demo for sonar 8.5, but nothing available yet.

Thanks for the info, I'll check out Presonus. I've been using Sonar for years and love it, but P5 was and app I used initially when I got into digital music production and its just an awesome tool, it certainly has the best arpeggiator out there, one of the things thats missing from Sonar and one of my favorite aspects of P5.



xylyx


You'll probably get the usual suggestions of Ableton Live and Sonar (even more so, with the recent 8.5 update), which are good suggestions depending on what you are looking for workflow wise. One other possible suggestion which you won't likely receive is Presonus' Studio One...it has a very nice workflow to it and could potentially fit in with a P5 user's work methods better than any others. One downside is that it is not a cheap investment and lacks in one or two areas, but for a v1 release it is impressive.

xylyx

rcross: The only problem with those sort of things is that they are just assessing on a feature by feature basis. Workflow is an important factor in these sort of things, but it's impossible for something like that site to cover, as it's such an individual matter and therefore difficult to assess. Let's face it, P5 would have done terribly on that site, but when it came down to the workflow for those who 'got it', it didn't matter so much...

Yes, you are right. And as I said, it is just one way to look at it. On the flip side, one can often  adapt their workflow, while feature set is not always easy to work around. The reason I brought this up, is that this chart figures price into account.
 
Back to the original topic, I would recommend either Sonar 8.5 or live, then FLS. Either requires tweaks to the workflow, and, as I mentioned in the other post, price is deciding factor in here.

ye a iv read a few post were they say this is just really a beginners ap there are no routing capabilties and stuff like that so if you want to go deeper then you cant, i cant actually get on the site at the minute to quote what has been said but it seems this would be an entry level daw atm, but it will still be interesting to see how this one progresses.

I dont actually use stuff like that but for the price i would expect to be able to do everything and be able to grow into it rather than be restricted.

maxthecat

Thanks for the info, I'll check out Presonus. I've been using Sonar for years and love it, but P5 was and app I used initially when I got into digital music production and its just an awesome tool, it certainly has the best arpeggiator out there, one of the things thats missing from Sonar and one of my favorite aspects of P5.

Sonar 8.5 has an arpegiator that can import P5 patterns
the Sonar 8.5 matrix view can play P5 patterns.
Sonar 8.5 step sequencer 2.0 is also really nice to use

 If you can manage a pattern based workflow with Sonar more power to you. Most people who find the transition 'natural' tend to linearally record at least some tracks and are most comfortable using Sonar mixing features.

 Live has the same pattern based focus as P5 and even its recording follows the pattern basdd model. And Live continues to build momentum with Akai APC40, the announcement of Max for Live and now the Novation $199 controller for Live.

  How is it Live generates so much buzz with other hardware vendors and Cakewalk in partnership with Roland hasn't?

wrench45us


 If you can manage a pattern based workflow with Sonar more power to you. Most people who find the transition 'natural' tend to linearally record at least some tracks and are most comfortable using Sonar mixing features.

 Live has the same pattern based focus as P5 and even its recording follows the pattern basdd model. And Live continues to build momentum with Akai APC40, the announcement of Max for Live and now the Novation $199 controller for Live.

  How is it Live generates so much buzz with other hardware vendors and Cakewalk in partnership with Roland hasn't?

Because Cakewalk and Roland hasn't done anything cool yet. All there is now is a control surface and interface no one can afford, and a cheaper version no one really likes.

Cakewalk puts out soundcards more expensive and worse than cheaper alternatives, and no one pays attention to them anyway.

Other than that, Edirol has controllers that lag behind the competition (the PCR-300 not having multiple banks...come on...) and a bunch of other crap no one cares about.

It is their own fault, and when added to a "keep-up-with-the-Jones' coding on the software side and the terrible marketing to go with it...

Well, what do you expect?

The guitar recording heads are still happy, and that is all that matters.

Sonar is still a tape recorder still trying to be Project5.

They could certainly do more on the hardware side, and they choose to offer stuff no one either wants, or can afford.