Back and forth we go. I spent 3 weeks studying Cubase 6 with the ASK tutorials. Very nice program except the pop up windows for editing. But I hate dongles. And Cubase is not Mackie friendly on my c4 - so there are issues.

So X1b is out seems to be working really well. The sampler video does a decent job of explaining the basics.

Time is the issue. I've wasted so much time on software that should have been spent composing and recording. Do I need two DAWs? Nope, just one reliable one that I can use to record.  Leaning towards staying with X1 - it's very good and can only get better.

jsaras


My experience with 8.53 was/is extremely frustrating and the numerous problems with X1 prompted me to try out Reaper.  I invested a few bucks to get the training videos and now that I "get it" I have to say that I am deeply impressed.  Even the alpha version of Reaper 4 is more stable than Sonar and it doesn't have all the unpredictable behaviors that Sonar has (weird envelope problems, clips sliding out of time because I tried to click on an envelope...yeesh). 

The only missing feature that I've encountered is that Reaper doesn't support clip-based effects.  I don't use that a lot.  Other than that, Reaper has a fully professional feature set, is deeply flexible/customizable and is only $40.  Unless Cakewalk pulls off something in terms of QUALITY that they haven't done in a long time with whatever the next update is, I don't see myself going forward with the platform for production purposes.

That said, Cakewalk folks have been a sizeable and loyal portion of my work, so I'll have to use it because my client base does...but even there, I'll probably pipe the audio over to Reaper to do the actual work using the ReaRoute driver( a driver similar to ReWire and is included with Reaper).

Cheers,
J

Jim Roseberry

The only missing feature that I've encountered is that Reaper doesn't support clip-based effects.

  
Hi J, 
  
FWIW, Reaper does offer per-item ("Clip" in Reaper speak) EFX. 
Open the Item Editor (F2) and look for Take-FX 
  
The audio side of Reaper is pretty capable 
IMO, The MIDI side of Reaper has a good way to go to catch up to Sonar/Cubase/Logic/DP. 
  
Reaper's great strength is that it's not dragging 10+ years of baggage. 
Reaper's great weakness is that it lacks 10+ years of refinements. 
  
The simplicity of Reaper is both refreshing... and annoying (depending on the task at hand). 
As Reaper gets more complex, it'll be harder to maintain the sprite/lean nature. 
I'm glad to have Reaper (it's basically replaced Samplitude in my toolbox)... and it'll be interesting to see where things go. 

Just to add to what Jim mentioned - In Reaper you can also "Show Item Labels" above the clips that give you instance access to per/clip effects via click-able buttons. (For those unfamiliar, clips are referred to as Items in Reaper)




DM