💾 Archived View for thrig.me › blog › 2024 › 10 › 26 › dreadful-daw.gmi captured on 2024-12-17 at 10:42:08. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
A problem is that Digital Audio Workstations are complicated software that allow you to do complicated things, and with that comes complexity. Another problem is the learning curve required, where you probably should spend some amount of time first learning the software, which I mostly have not done. That being said, all the DAW I've tried annoy me in various ways, so a more ideal DAW might be bits from here but not those bits from there. LMMS is usable, but probably lacking in features. GarageBand and Logic make entering notes and playing and repeating the music difficult (compared to, say, FL Studio), and for both these and especially FL Studio trying to setup automation runs along the lines of "what? arrrgh! no, no, no" as you fiddle with a line to try to get a volume drop but instead it combines the points or draws a curve with lots of points. LMMS is much better on automation: curves or discrete steps are easy to enter and manipulate (though does set inappropriate zoom levels for different automation types). Reaper I totally bounced off of, and could not get it to do playthrough of a synth nor record from a synth into a track. Maybe Reaper is more like Audacity than a sequencer? Yesterday FL Studio had gotten a gap before a pattern, and "snap to beat or line or whatever" retained that wee little gap, so I had to zoom in on the pattern, disable snap-to, and manually move the pattern to start on the beat. Snap-to hadn't ever been disabled (pretty sure about this, but maybe I clicked on something or hit a wrong key?) so where had that wee gap come from? Maybe there's a key combo to "move pattern, removing any wee offset from the start" or I don't know. Logic meanwhile started repeating a pattern as I tried to drag the pattern next to it away from that now repeating pattern, the two had gotten stuck together somehow. And so forth.
I also suspect that DAW want big monitors, and I'm only running them on laptop monitors.