Hi, I'm an Ableton user on Windows. I've gotten to the point where I need to work hard on vocals. I use Melodyne for that. And now I need a DAW that supports ARA for efficiency and speed. I plan to export a multitrack from Ableton and work in another DAW with Melodyne. Which DAW is easiest to learn for working with audio tracks? I used to use Cubase 5, but at that time I didn't work much with audio.
Prsonus Studio One is the single best DAW for ARA work. IMHO no DAW has ARA more ingrained into it, while Cubase is better for composing and Pro Tools for live tracking, it's S1 for ARA workflow editing. I use Vocalign, Melodyne, Dynassist, and Revoice Pro daily FWIW. I've used almost every major DAW over the past 25 years and the ARA editing and drag and drop everything were huge reasons S1 slowly bacame my top DAW. I do still use Reaper for heavy plugin use, Reason on my laptop for mobile creative work, Ensoniq PARIS for sound & EDS fx, and occasional Live with Push use for a different creative flow. As always to each their own DAW opinions.
Studio One is best for ARA indeed. Both Melodyne and Synchro Arts products. But for tuning and time-stretching vocals, Cubase's VariAudio is both more ergonomic and more transparent, with comparable power to Melodyne. Last edited: Apr 9, 2025
Yep, Melodyne and Studio One mesh brilliantly with ARA2. Melodyne even integrates into the S1 menus so it's like its built-in and the action happens directly in S1's existing audio edit window. It's like magic. Melodyne also blows Cubase's effort out of the water imho, at least for "normal" vocal work where you just need to tweak and correct a performance. Can't comment on using that sort of stuff for the Cher effect and similar. Not something I do. If you have multi-tracked vocals and/or backing vocals checkout VocAlign too. It's the quickest way to bring those tracks into syllable accurate alignment.
AFAIK S1 was designed from almost scratch to have the best integration with ARA (only Melodyne back then). At least since S1 v2 In fact Presonus and Melodyne co-created the ARA protocol
ARA(x) is a weird animal. It's supposed to be an "ease of use" tool and most every major DAW oem will say it has ARA (1 & 2) implemented into their apps. However, real-world, the success of these ARA implementations vary greatly from DAW to DAW. So much for the versatility of the tech... Last edited: Apr 10, 2025
Well, to be fair, it allows a new thing impossible before. Before it was 1. save track to wav-2.load in standalone Melodyne-3.save again after edit-4.load in the daw But since it's such a different beast, "vst-like" implementations are not very intuitive. Yet the alternative is the former, way worse
The only thing I've used ARA for recently is SoundRadix Auto-Align 2 in Reaper and it works easily and fantastically
here's an ARA chart with DAW versions, doesn't really matter which one you pick, they're all way different than Ableton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Random_Access
