FL Studio is my main DAG (Digital Audio Garbage station). Everything I produce finally is put in here:




The same for
Live: Electronic Garbage
Logic: Orchestral Garbage
Reaper: Acoustical Garbage
.
.
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If you want to produce Garbage you have lots of choices.

 

I thought that the photo was a doctored photoshoped goof. I would NEVER have used it if it was someone's actual likeness. I will delete my post immediately.

 

Why No Presonus choice ?? PS1 v4

 

I haven't tried Reaper, Live, FL Studio or StudioOne, but I had Cubase waaaaay back in the day, and other than the eight jillion VST plugs they give you, I didn't like it much. The MIDI is lousy on it, at least to me. What I really don't understand is the love for Logic. I downloaded it recently, just to have it in case somebody hits me up to work on a Logic project, and after messing around with it for about ten minutes, I have decided that it's a 2 GB tumor on my hard drive. First of all, it refused to load an alarming amount of my AU plugs after an hour or so of validating (at least ten of them caused an outright crash during validation). Not a big deal, as I can just run the invalid plugs via Patchwork, but since I've tested these plugs in other DAWs and audio editors (where everything passed validation with flying colors) and run them with zero problem, I have to assume it's a Logic issue, not a plugin issue. Then, there's the DAW itself, which feels more like a phone app than a serious recording tool. I haven't delved deeply into its inner workings yet (and may never), but it took me a while just to figure out the half-assed navigation setup. I recall back in the olden days, when eMagic still owned the software, that Logic had a bad rep for being overly complicated, but Apple seems to have made everything here both overly complex and almost cartoonishly simple at the same time. It blows my mind that serious professionals make music on this thing.

What I really don't get is that people prefer Logic over Digital Performer on the Mac. Is it because Logic runs like a phone app? DP loads all my AUs (and it now runs VSTs, something Logic can't do), has better MIDI than Logic or Pro Tools and looks, feels and operates like a professional piece of software. It can do everything Logic can do, except dump 3 TBs of EXS samples on your main hard drive. My only caveat with DP is the audio side, which is just okay (they've probably got two or three more iterations before smoothing out the kinks, assuming they're still even around by then) ... but I've got Pro Tools for the audio stuff.

 

Is anybody here really taking this post seriously?

 

if you went the mac route, i would recommend logic pro x and fl studio.

 

Don't use a DAW, go right to tape.

 

Presonus Studio One 4 Professional
what else

 

Like everyone else says, it should come down to trying them all and decide. However, that's a little like, go figure yourself, and you're looking for a starting point. The choices at first are daunting. You want integration with your hardware, and any of your choices will give you that. It all comes down to usability. If you are a composer more than a mixer, which I suspect you're not, then Ableton Live and FL Studio shine at helping you compose, especially if you don't play instruments outside your computer. Reaper is more of a mixing tool. I'm not saying it can't help you compose, but it's more mixing oriented, in my view. Logic is like a combination of both. My choice? None. If I compose something, I go for a guitar. I use Pro Tools basically because audio editing and mixing is easy for me there and I know it like the back of my hand.

Bottomline? Choose just ANY one of them and own it. Learn it like it's the only one and stick to it until you develop a workflow that unleashes your creativity. It's very unproductive to be reading manuals, watching tutorials, consulting here, and trying to make a song.

EDIT:
On a second thought, some users complain that FL Studio has been buggy, especially the Mac version. I wouldn't start there if that's true. Live and Logic work flawlessly apparently, and Live has this "drag, drop, and forget" kind of workflow. You might wanna weigh in that factor. Reaper is an all rounder, and I'd use it if my system were slow and buggy. Reaper is built like a digital tank.

 

Last edited: Aug 12, 2018

Wait, wha? Even in C5, it has the best MIDI functionality of all DAWs out of teh box. Or in teh box. Or whatev. Just the multiple ways of doing the same thing is extraordinary...

 

Ever use DP? It's actually a lot better than Logic for MIDI, and absolutely better for film/TV/game composition. I'll grant you that it lacks various fun cartoon doodads that you can click on when you want to fake MIDI chords or whatever, and you can't download Apple loops or 60 TBs of crappy-sounding samples or synth patches like Logic can, but since I don't do EDM, most of that stuff is wasted on me, anyway. Surprisingly, DP actually uses AUs (both VIs and audio processors) better than Logic does, and you can actually set things up the way you want them to without having to drill through what appears to be an account screen for Credit Karma just to set up a VI or route audio. If you like Logic and it works for you, that's great ... but having tried both, I can, for my part, safely say that Logic does not have the best MIDI functionality of any DAW.

 

Last edited: Aug 13, 2018

C5 was a reference to Cubase not logic. It's Cubase which has the best midi functionalities - imo by far - according to @famouslut

 

Reaper is great if you want to tweak stuff, and setup stuff but NEVER compose any music...

 

Studio One has come of age, all of the Cubase you need but without the old bloated smelly codebase...

 

Oh! Sorry for the misunderstanding on that one! I haven't actually used Cubase since maybe 2000, when it seemed like its main attraction was having a shitload of bundled VST plugs (most of which were, admittedly, pretty decent compared to the other DAWs available at the time), so I have no idea whether or not its MIDI functionality improved since then ... but I remember it not being that great. However, even as lousy as I remember it being, it was waaaaaay better than Logic is now.

 

Last edited: Aug 13, 2018

They're just different daws. I like my Cubase as much as my S1 4 or Reaper but I don't use them for the same purposes.

I don't pull out the big gun if I don't need to. If I need easy and fast (but limited) I go for S1. Or live...Sometimes FL20. It depends on my mood and the weather.
For more serious work - most of the time - I just go for the adequate fully loaded tools. Cubase or Reaper. Sometimes Samplitude. The weather decides.

 

No dice, I don't always get @famouslut linguo and abreviations myself but since I know he is an avid Cubase user (and fan of its midi tools) I figured.
I agree with you on DP btw, I tried it a bit I was impressed by its midi implementation indeed. The rest didn't seem as strong for me and if I remember correctly I had issues running a few of my vsties correctly in terms of setup, audio output etc (I think it was something regarding Geist, can't remember), and I called it quit...

 

Honestly, I would have to wholeheartedly agree with anyone who has suggested that you test them all out. It may seem some arduous task, during which you may get less done than you normally would, but in the long run, you'll be glad that you did.
That aside, since I have used all of the choices to some degree--predominantly FL and Reaper--I am going to have to go with....Studio One. I say this because, basically, S1 is what I find provides the best workflow between my recording style, which tends to be a lot of bouncing back and forth between my 16 pad and my keyboard, all the while, doing quick-edits and lite mixing to see if I need to do another take, change parameters on an instrument or change the instrument altogether.
Studio One works best for me because the way it's setup fits how my brain flails about, which is why, as I mentioned initially, you should test out more than a few DAWs before you settle. I think everyone here would agree that the DAW you choose is just about the most important decision that you can make since it plays a huge role in how excited you are to even be making music.
So, test some out....just maybe test out Studio One along with Ableton, Logic, Reaper and FL.
(If I had to choose, in order, my preferred DAWs from your list I would put Reaper at #1, then, Logic, Ableton and FL, purely based on my experience using them and how each one....felt, I guess. I would have actually put Logic at #1, except that I don't find that it is as good as Reaper when it comes to accomadating my 16 pad/keyboard stuff. Again, that's just me though....)
Good luck.

 

I've never tried using VSTs with DP, so I'm not sure how well they work with the program -- since they just implemented VSTs in the last version or so, I'm sure they have a way to go before it works properly. Same goes for the Windoze implementation. It actually messed me up, because v8 stopped reading Mac project files unless they had a ".dpdoc" suffix added to them (so they could be read on Windoze computers, I reckon), and I had to go add them to all my project files manually. And I keep hearing that a lot of Windoze users are having issues, so I can see how it hasn't caught on there yet. The AU side is pretty solid, though. It runs a lot of AU plugs that Logic refuses to.

DP's audio editing and mixing is "just okay" at best, though it used to be a major pain in the ass. The audio editing is really awful, as it creates some sort of weird sub-file every time you do a non-destructive edit, instead of just adding markers like other DAWs. You wind up with seventy sub-files every time you cut all the silences off of a toms track, for example, and your audio files folder becomes impossible to navigate until you delete all those unnecessary files. Rather than wait until v12 or however long it'll take for them to get their shit together, I just decided to do all my actual audio work in Pro Tools.

 

Cubase 9.5 pro