Both of these look pretty cool (especially for freeware). I’m learning too much other shit to thoroughly appreciate them at the moment, but maybe the time is now for somebody else? Can’t wait to give these more attention in the future at least.
I guess they’re both technically DAWs, but even my favorite VSTs are technically DAWs now. Every daw needs a daw!
that was pretty messed up of them. I think you’re using FL Studio? Working for some and not for yourself has got to be frustrating, and then get blown off by support is even worse.
IIRC Roo is on Cakewalk. Someone ought to do a DAW plugin compatibility tier list, those are hot now right?
The GleetchLab maker has some interesting stuff on their website for not a lot of money. Nice find.
Fuck it, I a downloading the Gleetch Lab demo…seems like a great tool to feed my samplers or vice versa.
Aye, Cakewalk here. I’ve looked into others over the years but on a quick swing by generally found their midi handling to be inferior though I freely admit that may have been my lack of familiarity. May have changed now but I’ve not been looking around since Bandlab took over Cakewalk. They regularly update it better than Gibson did so I’ve had very few issues with it since.
I will probably never change my DAW for the same reason but…FL Studio’s piano roll/MIDI sequencing is fucking fantastic.
I think that’s where it starts. I’ve been trying to put this into words lately, and the best I can come up with is that FL Studio is a like a modular synth with no modular interface. Like, it has a baller “Midi module” between the step sequencer and the piano roll that you can use to control any VST as a competent “module” (with full control over midi routing in and out of that module and full control of audio routing out) which goes into a mixer “module” that can do all sorts of crazy stuff (about the wildest I’ve done is used the volume of one sound to control the amount of another sound sent to a reverb, but that’s frankly amateur hour in the mixer). I mean, the formula controller by itself that comes up when you want to control X by Y is a pretty powerful VCA, and you have essentially an infinite number of those at your disposal. And all of this is before you even touch Patcher, which I’ve only had to break out 2 or 3 times over the past decade.
I think where my comparison breaks down is that unlike a modular synth, you can’t see all these connections, they’re just there for you to manipulate if you know and you want to. That’s either a really good thing or a really bad thing depending on how much you want/need to see to understand your options. But it’s all that stuff that I miss when I try another DAW.
Demoed Ableton more than once now, and I will admit it’s default sample handling is better than FL, but for MIDI and audio routing, FL wins hands down. When I want to duck everything by the Kick in FL, I have 3 ways to do that easily (automation clips, 3rd party duckers, or using Peak Controller and Balance). I can do any of those to a whole mix in about five minutes, and I can duck every single mixer channel as much or as little as I please. Ableton by contrast expects you to either mix everything into a single ducking bus and duck it all by the same amount, use a 3rd party ducker and either never leave a 4/4 kick pattern or do a separate midi sequence matching the kick for each individual instrument you want to duck, or use an M4L device made to solve the first two problems by the community. And it’s like that every time I go to do something. Sequencing an arp. Sending an instrument to multiple busses and then mixing those back together before they go out to the master. Hell, having a dedicated track sequence window (in the form of the playlist) so that I can always look at my whole song and see the structure to get an idea of what I have and what I still need. Can’t wrap my head around Ableton’s loop structure by comparison.
Live and FL definitely have that one thing going on; if you started with one (and really love it) you’re definitely going to hate how the other one handles routing. I like FL as the occasional design tool, but I absolutely have to pump everything back into Live if I’m going to really do something with it.
Damn, someone told me that was free (or maybe it was a few months ago).
Yea, every time I am at someone’s studio and they are using live I’m like W T F is going on in this software lol.
As for Gleech Lab, its only 20 Euro, so if it turns out its decent to good, that is pretty cheap. It’d be nice if you could run it in a DAW but I think part of the point is that it doesn’t. And the hardware lover in me kind of likes that.
I only switched DAWs once, but it was from Ableton Live to Bitwig which is hardly a huge jump in many ways lol 
(but a big one in others)
How’s Bitwig doing these days? I remember it launching but never really tracked it. Did it get popular and is growing?
So much that is spot on about FL Studio here…I think it is going to be a sleeper classic where people in 10 years are gonna be like…why were we not using this DAW?
I believe it’s growing steadily, if not very quickly. I remember when it was 1.0 and I bought it at a silly price but didn’t end up using it. around 3.0 I got serious with it, and a guy named Polarity does a ton of videos for it, as well as another guy named… audiodigital? I forget, now.
Moving to 4.x was a surprise to me as it was on 3.4 or something at the time, but there was a trade show coming up that Bitwig was attending 
I love how modular it is. I can put a reverb into the reverb’s tank, I can put a resonator bank into the vocoder, or anywhere else really. It’s pretty wild for sound design, and it lets you view Session and Arranger at the same time even. The 4.1 beta just dropped with some note MIDI devices that do all kinds of things, like taking a few notes in a clip and turning it into a whole ass melody, Euclidian stuff, randomized stuff you can then force into a scale, and more. And you can pretty much modulate any parameter of anything with a large number of modulators beyond simple LFOs. I love it. Their upgrade model is a little on the pricey side, imo, but apparently it’s working for them. $170 for a year of updates; I usually wait until it’s on sale for $130 or something. You keep whatever version it’s on when your sub runs out (and mine is December of this year, eep…)
Still using Bitwig, but not so much right now, still on an old version and I’m still faster with Ableton, so I’m mostly using that for quick stuff since I don’t have so much time for music rn…
Depending on the question if Bitwig or Ableton gives me a better Black Friday deal for upgrading to Bitwig 4 or Live 11, I might use it more often in the future… but it would have to be a really good deal since Live now has better MPE support (compared to Live 10) and Bitwig did not introduce a function equivalent to the “Capture” option in Ableton afaik…
The Grid is still my fav modular synth and the modulation and expressivity options in Bitwig are still best imho, I’m just mostly too busy to really dive into building new sounds in the grid rn and most synths I made patches for already have good modulation options without considering the DAW…
I bet Ableton will price Suite upgrades at $229 like always, and Bitwig will be $129 and you might be able to score another 5 or 10% off using Polarity’s code POLARITY (but I don’t know if codes work on discounts).
Brainworx OG Master Desk plug in for free until almost the end of November! Don’t’ sit on this, their stuff is great.
