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