This week I’ve done a number of updates to the DAW Chart.

• Updated the FAQ
  • I primarily use Cubase, Logic and Digital Performer. I haven’t used REAPER seriously since V6 was released.
  • Note Ease of use section in “Why is Ableton Live rated so low?”
• Ease of Use - Added category and following sub-categories.
  • UI Consistency
  • Immediacy
  • Out of the box Audio experience
  • Out of the box MIDI experience
  • Out of the box GUI experience
  • Out of the box general experience
  • Out of the box hardware experience
• Software Defaults removed. Rolled into the above categories.
• FLStudio updated for:
  • Scripting +3 - New Feature added
  • Themability +1 - New Feature added
• Logic
  • Stability +1 - Zero crashes with Logic in 2020 despite approximately 400 hours of wide ranging use.
  • Step Sequencing +6 - New Feature added
  • Clip Launching +7 - New Feature added
  • Included Synth Plugins, many other products -1 (Logic was already 10)
• Bitwig
  • Included Effects Plugins +1 - New EQ and Saturator Added
  • MIDI FX +1 - Arp updates, Selector Modes
  • MIDI Tools +2 - Selector Modes
  • Modularity, all other products -1 (Bitwig was already 10) - Grid additions in 3.1 and 3.2.
• Live
  • Customer Support +6 (I’ve had multiple fantastic experiences with Ableton lately.)
• Waveform
  • Manual -2 - Waveform 11 released with no updated manual
  • Community Support -2 - 3 poor experiences when asking questions with my anonymous account in 2020.
  • Bug Reporting +1 - New crash/bug reporting tool.
  • Changelogs -1 - No major version changelogs.
• Bias (Larger numbers indicate less bias, positive numbers indicate potential unavoidable bias)
  • Preference - Waveform +5, Pro Tools +1, FLStudio +4, Live +10
    • Waveform 11 disappointing
    • Pro Tools moving slowly
    • FLStudio’s frustrating Event Editor
    • Live unrecoverably corrupted two projects and all backups! (No other files affected on the system)
  • Connections - Waveform +3, Mixbus -1
    • Haven’t spoken with Waveform team in a while.
    • Continue to have great discussions with members of Mixbus/Ardour team on various levels.
  • Frustration - REAPER +7, Studio One +40, Live +20
    • REAPER 6 not working properly on my system despite the bug report being seen.
    • S1 and Live should have been rated as extremely frustrating for me.
  • Community Interactions - REAPER + 5, Digital Performer -4, Studio One +2, Bitwig +2, Waveform +4
    • REAPER community has been more coarse than usual. 3/4 interactions on my anonymous account have been poor.
    • DP’s Motunation has been chiller and more helpful in 2020.
    • Studio One’s forums continue to be disappointing and fanboyish.
    • Bitwig’s Discord server is run poorly. Strange rules that are enforced without thought. Very annoying.
    • Waveform’s forums have been less useful and more harsh recently.

I also added these update posts to an “Updates” category.

Meta

This update took approximately 47 hours to notate, refine, discuss with a variety of experienced users and repeat that whole process a few times :)

I’ve been working with this plugin for about 7 weeks, foiled twice by circumstances while trying to get this review out.

Wait no more. With part 1 of this review, I’ll be reviewing some of the controversy surrounding it and other plugins.

READ ME WARNING This posts loads 45mb of media WARNING READ ME

DISCLOSURE - PSP kindly provided this product to me for free as an NFR for review. If you believe this has biased this article, then I encourage you to call it out in the comments. Other posts in this series

• InfiniStrip Part 2 - Everything Else

Just a quick update - I’ve been dealing with Cluster Headaches (which I’ve written about before) and prodrome/postdrome symptoms for 2 weeks. I’ve been extremely sensitive to sound and light, and haven’t even touched an instrument or DAW in that time.

My wife covered the windows in aluminum foil and I managed to sit on my laptop (with minimum brightness, viewing at an angle) to get a variety of coding tasks done both for this site and elsewhere. Eventually you learn to work in bursts and keep notes, and it’s a great way to stay sane.

However, there’s been no music, woodworking or anything worth writing about. Nor have I been able to finish any of the 75%+ complete articles I have in my backlog. Worry not though, there is content coming.

These sequences of headaches shouldn’t last too long, and I’ve had 6-8 hour symptom free periods for the last two days, so I’m hoping that’s it for at least a few months.

Not looking for sympathy or even concern. I can cope, and everyone around me is awesome (especially my wife). I did have a number of people that were concerned about my absence from the admiralbumblebee realm and I wanted to “check-in”.

p.s. Yes I’ve been to the doctor. I’ve tried the bevy of mainstream and alternative medicines. If you want to suggest something then feel free. I’m open to discussion.

Waveform 11 Pro was announced a few months ago, and I’ve been using it as my “daily driver” for about a month.

I’m going to cover their highlighted features, and I won’t be holding back on the criticism.

This review is only valid for *Waveform 11.0.26**. The team is responsive to feedback and it’s likely that some complaints/criticisms will be rendered invalid over time.

DISCLOSURE - I was given this copy of W11 Pro for free for the purposes of review. If you feel that the review was improperly biased, please leave a comment.

This will probably get lost with the Waveform article coming out simultaneously, but the following updates have been made to the site:

• Index page headers/images are clickable - I can’t believe how long I went without realizing most people click the image to go to an article!
• Theme color boxes are clickable to jump to a theme.
• Changes to scripts for creating posts.
• Improved image template for post header images.
• Edited metadata for a number of posts.
• Researched alternatives to Youtube - Probably needs to be a post of its own.
• Support auto-outlining.
• Omnigraffle templates concepts for future articles.

Interview with André Kirchner of Black Rooster Audio about his company, development challenges and more? Many questions came from the EDMP community on discord.

Download Audio

This week I’ve updated some site features:

• Visual Assets - I commissioned ToriBearArt to make some new branding assets for me. The first is shown above. It’s a more complex rendition for larger format media. Some variations are in the works. I will be integrating the new branding over time, because I’m not a big fan of “relaunches” or “rebranding”. I’ll be making incremental changes and reacting to reader/viewer feedback as I go.
• Themes - I built support for multiple themes, with an indicator of the current theme. I choose ‘cycling’ between themes because I hate menus.
  • WHITE theme added.
  • Adjusted text color for dark theme.
• Various backend updates for my own sanity.
• DAW Feature Chart updated.
  • Latest Versions
  • FL Modularity
  • Project Navigation->Information Hiding
  • Arranging category added
    • Project Navigation->Arrangement Tools moved to Arranging.
    • Added -
      • Time
      • Harmony
      • Sequencing
      • Key
  • CAKEWALK REMOVED - I have no desire to continue evaluating this software.
• Reaper Script Showcase - Fixed some bad links and anchors.
  • Added Fast FX Finder
  • Added Wayback
  • Added Import Session Data
  • Added Quick Adder v2
  • Note - I tried about a dozen new scripts, and many of them didn’t work on macOS. It feels like the REAPER scripting community is becoming more OS-dependent by the day.
• FreeBees - New FreeBees!
  • Added LVC-Meter
• Drafts! - I’ve put work into 50-75% completed drafts of articles for periods when I’m feeling unwell, need a break, etc…
• Navbar adjusted to be cleaner.

I’ve spent some time working on music projects lately and I’ve found some interesting capabilities of the MFreeFX Bundle by Melda Production.

Most all of this works with the free version except for some of the analyzer features in MEqualizer.

macOS Catalina made accessibility worse for users that utilize their voice to type. This is a multi-faceted issue, and I will walk you through my daily hell.

(if you want to know why this matters to me <–)

I’m still 3 music-based articles behind, so I spent portions of this weekend putting together this article while I revisit Prolog. Not much I can do when the software I’m reviewing is broken or suddenly has a major updating looming.

I really should write more how-tos I suppose. Anyway, on to the rant.

Developing, testing, documenting and reviewing software has led me to one inescapable conclusion:

NOBODY ACTUALLY USES THE SOFTWARE

Ok, clickbait aside, a day doesn’t go by where I realize that there’s chasm between users, testers and developers. It has been particularly apparent to me lately, and it’s delayed the article I expected to have ready today.

More after the break.