Decision time - Reaper or Studio One

PolarityMan

Fez said:

The Plugins Reaper comes with are ok though the interfaces are very dated. A few quid for a Computer music magazine get's you a whole load you can download from filesilo.

Its pretty limited on the instruments front though. reaEQ and their midi trigger are both freaking awesome for free though. 

andy_k

We are very lucky now to have a wide choice of options, starting with Mac or PC, and continuing to DAWs and VST selections.
Some of these choices will limit how we can proceed, but at this stage most of the selections can achieve a very high quality result.
As a beginner, or if starting a fresh system, at least there are plenty of free options to get a taste of what a particular piece of software can do. Some of the bundled versions that come with our choice of interface can be useful, I think my Scarlett came with a cut down version of Ableton and a suite of focusrite VST fx.
I was already using Logic, so the VST stuff came as a nice bonus, but I never even seriously looked at Ableton, and at this time was being encouraged to learn PT as a requirement for a degree.
Logic is obviously Mac only, and around this time I also began to realise I shouldn't be tied in to a particular piece of hardware, I needed a back up machine, so I put PT on a Windows machine.
PT uses its own format for plugins, AAX, so some of the VST stuff that I had got used to, I couldn't use in PT, and some of the features that were included in Logic had to be replaced with other versions, which started to get a bit complicated.
At this point I thought I would have a look at Reaper, and once I began to understand how liberating it was I was hooked.
My initial thoughts that it  looked amateurish compare to Logic and PT dissipated when I saw that the interface was completely customisable with themes, and screens can be set up any way, I had got used to switching from mixer to track views in PT, and the different views in Logic, so this was an easy transition.
By this time I was using a mix of the 3 DAWs across PC and MAC, so it simplified things to concentrate on Reaper, and devote my time on the learning curve to it.
The resources to learn anything new on Reaper were more centralised around Kenny's videos, and the Reaper forum, which made moving forward easy, and every time I tried something new I began to see what an amazing piece of software it is, I had already paid for the licence and couldn't believe that when an update was released it was a tiny file, say 20 meg, and new features were being added on a regular basis. A similar update to PT was made maybe twice a year, and was a massive download which added very little to the experience, at least Logic updates w, which were also massive downloads, did offer more to play with, at the same time taking stuff away or hiding it.
Subscriptions had become a thing by now, PT was now wanting a monthly fee to use, so I purchased a life time license for PT12, and have only used it a handful of times since, but I find the Slate everything bundle invaluable, as it provides pretty much every studio tool you would need in one place, and I use it in every project.
I had also bought SSDrums to replace the drummer feature in Logic, and was using various free bass and keyboard VSTI's for my composition.
Reaper remained a constant throughout, and is now on version 6, which did change the layout a bit, but also introduced theming options built in.
The point of this long ramble is really to say, we have nothing but choices to make, but it is worth spending a little time thinking forward, to where you might be in a couple of years, what to invest in, and does it lock you in in anyway?
Subscriptions are a big part of software sales now, Waves  and Slate for example, and these can be good ways to get a lot of features, for a running cost.
Have a look at my thread about Pluginguru Unify for a piece of software that came out this year, and is what I think a gamechanger for music composition, a single plugin instrument that can do so much, you could do an awful lot with that one plugin alone on a fresh install of Reaper for very little outlay.
thanks for your patience.

MartinBush

Ok, so heres a bit of quick feedback.

I found that Studio One doesn't work on my laptop. Its Windows 7 - the usb interface said it worked on 7 so I presumed the Studio One it came with would too... nope!

So, after some very minor faffing, I got Reaper working and was amazed at how easy it is to use at the basic level I came in at. I'm sure there will be tons of learning, but in  about 30 minutes I was able to experiment with playing a few tracks and adding some plugin effects. Nothing worth sharing yet, but it was a joy really.

I'm still going through the comments above as theres some really useful stuff there. I just wanted to let you all know I'd had some success!

andy_k

A word of warning, if you are using this machine as a dedicated audio workstation, I would recommend looking into ways to keep it offline, I have been trying to use one of my older laptops that came with Windows Vista, over time I had tried different OS, and could not get anything to work correctly, so I found a  version of Win7 superlite, which is a cracked version that fits on a CD.
It worked like a dream, and I got everything working, except after a while I began to get windows licensing notices.
Eventually, it removed my wallpaper, and would not let me access control panel. It did this after just the length of time it took me to get everything working the way I needed.
I had disabled the wifi adapter, thinking that it was still receiving updates online, which brought up the licensing problem.
Win & is no longer supported-I think, and they are wanting people to upgrade to Win 10, my machine was doing what I needed with only 3 gig of ram, so I think win 10 is not an option.
In fact, yesterday I re-installed the OS, and have took it offline straight away, going to have another go as fortunately It kept my files in an older windows folder.
It is beyond boring, when you think it's all fine and copy protection comes into play, it was a machine purchased from new, and I had lost the recovery partition along the way, it came shipped with Vista, which was activated.
I found widows7 superlite on the internet archive, and I know it was a bit shady, but took a gamble, it seems that even though a 6 gig install was stripped down to less than 700mb, they either still found a way to keep copy protection intact, or windows update re-instated its own.
I am a very naughty boy, but I don't think you can buy software for a 12 year old laptop anymore.

Danny1969

andy_k said:

A word of warning, if you are using this machine as a dedicated audio workstation, I would recommend looking into ways to keep it offline, I have been trying to use one of my older laptops that came with Windows Vista, over time I had tried different OS, and could not get anything to work correctly, so I found a  version of Win7 superlite, which is a cracked version that fits on a CD.
It worked like a dream, and I got everything working, except after a while I began to get windows licensing notices.
Eventually, it removed my wallpaper, and would not let me access control panel. It did this after just the length of time it took me to get everything working the way I needed.
I had disabled the wifi adapter, thinking that it was still receiving updates online, which brought up the licensing problem.
Win & is no longer supported-I think, and they are wanting people to upgrade to Win 10, my machine was doing what I needed with only 3 gig of ram, so I think win 10 is not an option.
In fact, yesterday I re-installed the OS, and have took it offline straight away, going to have another go as fortunately It kept my files in an older windows folder.
It is beyond boring, when you think it's all fine and copy protection comes into play, it was a machine purchased from new, and I had lost the recovery partition along the way, it came shipped with Vista, which was activated.
I found widows7 superlite on the internet archive, and I know it was a bit shady, but took a gamble, it seems that even though a 6 gig install was stripped down to less than 700mb, they either still found a way to keep copy protection intact, or windows update re-instated its own.
I am a very naughty boy, but I don't think you can buy software for a 12 year old laptop anymore.

You can still download Win 7 legitimately from MS, google media creation tool  ... and all the drivers you need .....  but you will need a valid COA to activate it

The easiest and cheapest way is buy a bottom base plastics with a COA on it from Ebay .. cost about a tenner.

Fez

PolarityMan said:

Fez said:

The Plugins Reaper comes with are ok though the interfaces are very dated. A few quid for a Computer music magazine get's you a whole load you can download from filesilo.

Its pretty limited on the instruments front though. reaEQ and their midi trigger are both freaking awesome for free though. 

Agreed I have used the sampler a couple of times but the synth can't compete with some of the stuff that comes with CM Dune and the The Zebra are awesome.

thomasw88

duotone said:

thomasw88 said:

newi123 said:

I have both on my laptop currently. 

I`d used Reaper for many years, but recently bought a studio one interface that came with Artist (the version I think they all have). I really like Studio one in terms of work flow and particularly drag and drop. It`s really well thought out.

Only limitation on Artist for me was lack of 3rd party plugin support, which I paid the extra for. The Studio one upgrade for 3rd party plugins is around £80, and the reaper licence is a little cheaper.

Artist v5 upgrade is about £40 from an older version, and enables the user to use VST's.  So technically if he has the artist version it would be cheaper than paying for Reaper.. Albeit that there are some differences betwen S1 Artist & Pro.

Didn’t know that,cheers! £42.

Edit: Just noticed it’s for Windows 10.


  Out of interest why don't you upgrade to win10?  you can still do it free if you google it (using media creation)  or you can buy a licence key off ebay for a few quid.   I did that for a little bitsa desktop i put together and had 0 problems with the key so far.

duotone

thomasw88 said:

duotone said:

thomasw88 said:

newi123 said:

I have both on my laptop currently. 

I`d used Reaper for many years, but recently bought a studio one interface that came with Artist (the version I think they all have). I really like Studio one in terms of work flow and particularly drag and drop. It`s really well thought out.

Only limitation on Artist for me was lack of 3rd party plugin support, which I paid the extra for. The Studio one upgrade for 3rd party plugins is around £80, and the reaper licence is a little cheaper.

Artist v5 upgrade is about £40 from an older version, and enables the user to use VST's.  So technically if he has the artist version it would be cheaper than paying for Reaper.. Albeit that there are some differences betwen S1 Artist & Pro.

Didn’t know that,cheers! £42.

Edit: Just noticed it’s for Windows 10.


  Out of interest why don't you upgrade to win10?  you can still do it free if you google it (using media creation)  or you can buy a licence key off ebay for a few quid.   I did that for a little bitsa desktop i put together and had 0 problems with the key so far.

Yeah it’s something I should really do, but up until now I never needed to have 10. But in this case it would be useful.
When I bought the laptop it has a ‘download Windows 10 free’ sticker on it, although I’m not sure if there was a deadline to download/use this by.

MartinBush

When I got my new (old) laptop I tried to look up upgrading to Win10 and I am sure there was a charge, so I left it.

hollywoodrox

Paul of the studio rats seems to like studio one