Reaper, hands down! I was actually just testing this out between studio one and ableton. With reaper I can have waaaaaaay more plugin stacked up with out having to freeze tracks. And even ozone 7 on the end of a chain of slate plugs on the masterbus with no sputtering out. The other 2 DAWs cried to sleep when I threw ozone on.
Sorry kiddies, copycat EDM templates only come for FL and Live.

Also, REAPER just released a full blown tutorial on their site and REAPER mania channel on youtube for ver5 made by Kenny Gioia, the same guy who did all the reaper tutes for groove3. No excuses now.

 

Last edited: Mar 21, 2016

Logic works fine. I'd say that has better performance than others, but I have not tested all of them in my Mac.

 

Recently compared Reaper with Ableton and Bitwig on my machine:-

This comparison includes a Serum patch(quite heavy). [Win10] [x64] [ASIO4all] [Latency-512]

Reaper 5.20 - Max 7 instances without a glitch.
Ableton 9.6 - Max 4 instances without a glitch.
Bitwig 1.3.8 - Max 4 instances without a glitch.

Here we can see that Reaper performed excellent.
Just for curiosity, Is there anyone who can compare Reaper 5 with Cubase 8 ?

 

Yeah, as much as i love ableton, it performs quite poorly. That's why we need that freeze/flatten shortcut.

 

i find working with samplitude really fast and pretty glitch free... if you are using just in-built effects or/and freezing etc, it is excrement off the proverbial shovel.
i don't have any awful probs with others really, but reaper is a second choice ( for efficiencey and stability. other daws i use have probems when certain amount of tracks and processes start to slow them down and cause problems. the worse thing i have tried is ableton, particularly painfully slow when trying to launch max devices etc. if i have to say most stable on my system at least i choose Samplitude ( i have to admit that Reason i have NEVER had a crash with it, version 5.. but does that count as a daw equivalent to say reaper, sam, cubase et al.. : )

 

Sonar is right with Reaper ...this is same setup computer,bit,buffer.sample rate ... 12 of Nebulas heaviest reverbs 4 on each track with same audiofile... ive said it many times Sonar hangs right with Reaper on CPU handling of plugs...i use both these DAW's to do all my heavy work ;) they both shut down on 13 of these reverbs and will both Run 12 with small glitches here and there ;) this is my home machine not my studio setup but its the same on all my setups ;) on the screen shots here sonar is at 90% cpu and Reaper is at 93% ... they bouncing between 90 and 94 % on both DAWs... they handle the same

 

Last edited: Jan 4, 2018

Tested every daw that i could find on windows. The most lightweight cpu and ram-wise are reaper,traction waveform and sonar. I mainly use reaper and waveform now.I expected ableton to be heavy on cpu but its ok. All had the same song with the same vsts and fx.

 

I agree on Reaper part, my first DAW that I seriously started to use was Ableton but couple of years ago I moved to Reaper, and I have no regrets whats so ever, CPU usage was plain mess with Ableton and super poor multi-core utilization just drove me away from that.

I could never get my Ableton Live CPU usage to go to 100% or even over 60% when cracking and distorting like hell when using couple of dozen VST effects and that was with 4790k.

Now I got Ryzen 7 and I can drive it to the limit with Reaper without much of problems on projects that use 14GB of RAM. Though 4790k was totally choked on those projects

 

Reaper would be my daw of choice, it's CPU usage is light as feather

 

+1 Reaper

The installer is small, and the beauty is you only add the plugging that you need.

 

Same here. I must thank Kenny Genoia for his tutorials +1

Reaper can adjust to you. Customizable.

 

are you for real, ableton is not a real DAW?, you are not a real producer then

 

may i ask you Reaper guys to do me a favour?
SHOW me a video with sound (lots on Omnisphere 2 would be fine, like 10 Multi Instances loaded with 8 voices), where Reaper runs without glitches and their own PERFOMANCE METER shows 75% or more ???
i am a Reaper user since Reaper 3 and somewhere at 35% it always starts choking, unsusable for heavy midi Vst instruments usage,
Maybe i missed some trick in the setup?

here a screenhot of something i mean with C9 and 13+ Omnis running with full loaded Multimode
https://prnt.sc/gm8wwp

 

Last edited: Jan 4, 2018

First of all what kind of H drives you using and where are all your samples located??? like HDD,SSD,PCI SSD ??? you running your samples from another drive right ??? >>>have you optimized your computer to for music production ??? thiers a ton of things can be done to improve your setup >>> https://www.sweetwater.com/sweetcare/articles/pc-optimization-guide-for-windows-7/
https://www.sweetwater.com/sweetcare/articles/pc-optimization-guide-for-windows-10/

These links are good place to start for anyone that needs a boost >>> i could write a book on optimization for any workstation but these links will help get you started \m/ from windows into the Bios thiers alot to change to improve the way windows handles Audio ;) My short version >>> check the links ! just doing these will take your computer glitches from 60% glitches up to 90% befor things start falling apart haha ;) by the way bro my setup is Ryzen 1800x so nice setup you have there ;) BTW >>> i use and own Cubase,Sonar and Reaper... Cubase falls short on plugin handling an CPU... as much as i love Cubase Reaper and Sonar kill it for CPU usage

 

Last edited: Jan 4, 2018

My meter in reaper seems to be quite right.
The point is try this setup with (nearly) any other daw you will get maybe 6 instances of your setup to work without glitches ,if you are lucky. Belive me I tried something simmilar. Reaper is really potent.
Cubase is my daw.
But i am attamped in the moment to switch to repaer because of a rearoute setup with mixbus. If i find a way to automate "sends" switching with a toolbar click and reaper gets finally ARA I will be very attemped to switch...

 

a lil bit off topic , but , is there a way to make the Reaper PopUp Windows (eg plugin window) dark ?!

 

Yes ARA would be the Icing on the cake with Reaper...

 

thx for reply, but pls consider me an advanced Computer user (40 yrs experience).
Meanwhile guys, just open several Omnis in MUltimode (8 voices) in Reaper and crank em up with chords of 4 parallel notes in loop.
show me a working Reaper screenshot with 70+ %
I AM WAITING!

 

I can defiantly hit reapers performance meter to 50 -75 % without getting clitches, crackels or drop outs. I know this cause this is the normal cpu usage i have with my standart projects i do on my notebook. Sorry i dont have the time to make a video. And i dont use omnisphere on my laptop.

 

Right on bro ! >>> im in Doubt that the challenge can be met by anyone using Omnis in multimode ... and not get some clicks and pops... i can nail 90% cpu using plugins on Audio tracks>>> but wen im using many sample libs i still get pops and clicks wen i reach the 70% margin on intel 5820k system or my Ryzen 1800x setup....