PreSonus Studio One - no longer my recommended DAW

Bod

Sporky said:

Bod said:

monquixote said:

If you want the ultimate perpetual try FL.

You pay once and get free upgrades forever. 

I really don't know how they play it these days, but I was an early adopter of FruityLoops as it was in the late 90s and was sucked in by the "free upgrades forever" offer.  In 2003, they launched FL Studio as a new top-tier product as a chargeable upgrade.  No such thing etc...

I've not paid for an GL upgrade that I can remember, and I started with Fruity Loops and am now on the latest FL Studio, so if they did charge it was only that once. 

I've just logged into my account for the first time in (probably) 20 years.  I don't have the full FL Studio product, and they moved me onto a feature-restricted FL Studio "Fruity Edition" when they released the upgrade.  £130 to upgrade to the full thing.  I must have jumped ship after that.

monquixote

I have to say though it's pitched more as a modular sound designers playground as much as a DAW I could not love Bitwig more. 

The performance is great, it's very stable, they frequently release powerful updates.
It's a small company, but they are all ex Ableton and clearly know what they are doing.

octatonic

TTony said:

To be completely fair to PreSonus, they've offered to refund my upgrade purchase of S1 Pro and suggested that I could use that refund to pay for (most of) a Hybrid+ subscription, which I can then transfer back into a perpetual S1 Pro licence at the end of the initial 12mth Hybrid+ subscription period (its effectively an escape route, allowing people to "pay monthly" but then have a perpetual licence at the end of the 12mths).

If I take that offer, then I *might* effectively get a free upgrade to a later version of S1 Pro if they release a new version during the 12mth period.  But anything that I create with the additional functionality in Hybrid+ during the 12mths would be lost if it's not supported in the perpetual licence version available in 12mths time (thus pushing me towards sticking with the subscription basis, which I absolutely do NOT want).

But if I take the first part of the offer (refund the upgrade cost), then the incremental cost of Logic Pro would be considerably less.

Think I'll download the Logic Pro trial later today.  Main questions will be whether I find the UI sufficiently familiar and whether my library of S1 creations can be opened in Logic Pro.

Moving between DAW's is notoriously tricksy.
I do it on an almost daily basis and no one has figured out a great way yet.
There is a new partnership potentially that will allow it but DAW makers need to opt in and most have not.

The best way to do it is to render everything as audio and import into the new DAW.
You can export the midi data as a midi file but you will still need to set up all your virtual instruments from scratch.

Really though how important is it to open old files in the new DAW?
I do it because I move between Pro Tools and Logic a lot, all the midi sequencing gets done in Logic, all the mixing and most of the audio editing gets done in Pro Tools.

Once something is done though I never really need to go back to it.

I would ignore OMF and AAF myself.
They don't work as well as they should and are a hassle from beginning to end.
Unless you are working in broadcast video the benefits over just doing a straight audio export are minimal.

octatonic

monquixote said:

I have to say though it's pitched more as a modular sound designers playground as much as a DAW I could not love Bitwig more. 

The performance is great, it's very stable, they frequently release powerful updates.
It's a small company, but they are all ex Ableton and clearly know what they are doing.

It is starting to look really good.
I need to spend some more time with it.

fretfinder

Doesn’t anyone use GarageBand, or is that just too basic to be considered seriously? (Even for a technophobic hopeless beginner like moi!) 

octatonic

fretfinder said:

Doesn’t anyone use GarageBand, or is that just too basic to be considered seriously? (Even for a technophobic hopeless beginner like moi!) 

It is fine to start with but it isn't powerful enough to mix.
If Logic is oil painting then GB isn't quite crayons but it is on its way there.

@TTony definitely download the Logic trial but also doing a few songs in GB might be a good way to start with the Logic approach.

TheBigDipper

fretfinder said:

Doesn’t anyone use GarageBand, or is that just too basic to be considered seriously? (Even for a technophobic hopeless beginner like moi!) 

I started with GarageBand on iOS. I then bought a Mac and a copy of Logic Pro because I was convinced I'd want to be really good with a DAW and therefore wouldn't want to be restricted by GB on macOS.

I lied to myself. I hate being my own engineer and only use it for song demos or sample arrangements for bandmates. But there were (at the time and maybe still are) a couple of things about Logic that I do use which GB on macOS did not support.

- Tempo changes. If your music has more than one tempo in the same tune, and you're not just recording "free tempo" audio but using a click track or software instruments, I think you need Logic for that. It also has the delightful ability to take an audio demo (say a stereo audio recording of your band ) and import it so that you can see how your drummer can't keep to a tempo or how much the lovely ebb and flow of your tune plays with the timings. 

- Time signatures. GB used to only support 4/4, 3/4 and 6/8 IIRC, and it was set at a project level. Logic allows you to program changes in different sections of the same song and supports far more variations. 

If it wasn't for those things, I'd probably have stayed with GB on macOS, which is free. But I paid £149 for Logic (in 2015) and it has been upgraded for free several times since then. It's paid for so I'm OK about using it despite being a very primitive user only scratching on the surface. 

TTony

octatonic said:

 definitely download the Logic trial but also doing a few songs in GB might be a good way to start with the Logic approach.

I started with GB long, long ago.

Used it reasonably happily for a few years, just doing simple things.

When I wanted to do more involved things, I looked at Logic as the obvious upgrade path but it was only available as download (I had various conversations with Apple support) and I only had very poor broadband connections back then, which ruled it out.  I also needed a better interface than I'd been using with iPad/GB, so ended up buying a PreSonus interface+S1 bundle which worked well for many more years.

But I'm now downloading my 90-day free trial of Logic.  90days should be enough time to do a reasonable compare/contrast against S1.

[edit]
Although I've now hit that standard Apple blocker which I mentioned right at the outset.  I can't install Logic without first updating OSX from 13.3 to 13.5.  I'm always wary of OS updates as - invariably - something will break in other applications and/or features will be "improved" in a way that I don't find improving.

RichAC

Bod said:

RichAC said:

I’m an outlier in that I use Reason, which is very much aimed at electronic music (but does audio ok). Similar to S1 in that you only get all the good stuff if you subscribe - I bought a (legit) 1 year subscription heap at Plug-in Boutique.

I've used Reason quite a bit, but since they released VST plugins I feel that development of the DAW side has fallen by the wayside.  I own a current licence and often dip into the effects and instruments via VST, but never use the main app now.  I won't subscribe though.

That’s a fair critique, although it does for my modest needs. There’s a lot of chatter in the Reasonsphere about updates for the sequencer elements, which are definitely under-developed.

I had some major GAS for Logic recently, but it doesn’t run on my 10 year old Mac Mini… and to be honest Reason does all I need.

idiotwindow

TTony said:

octatonic said:

 definitely download the Logic trial but also doing a few songs in GB might be a good way to start with the Logic approach.

Although I've now hit that standard Apple blocker which I mentioned right at the outset.  I can't install Logic without first updating OSX from 13.3 to 13.5.

Having a minimum requirement of Ventura 13 rules out quite a lot of fairly recent hardware (at least recent from a Mac perspective) – essentially anything pre-2017, including some Retina MacBook Pros. These are otherwise quite decent Macs so you can see how Logic Pro can be used to drive Mac sales that might not have happened were it not for people wanting to run this particular software.