So you’ve got the gearbut do you have the software to lay it all down with? You can’t paint without a canvas.

Perhaps you’re looking to switch to a more popular, supported digital audio workstation? Some say it’s all about the musician and that the recording software doesn’t matterwe agree, but to a certain extent. Give somebody like DJ Premier or Danger Mouse a vintage Boss drum machine and they can probably still make a hit. However, in our opinion you need the proper software to give you the full capabilities of the song you’ve worked so hard on building inside of your head — something to really transfer those ideas into a reality. You also need to optimize your workflow to simplify the process of making music so you don’t even have to think anymore — you can just create.

With that being said, picking the best DAW can be dependent on a few factors. Let’s review the top 10 best digital audio workstations out today and help you pick which DAW is best for you. What is a digital audio workstation (DAW)? A is basically a blank piece of paper and the necessary paint brushes for an artist to create their works of art on. All you need to bring is some sounds, your talent, and most of all, your creativity.

A DAW is a computer program designed for editing, recording, mixing and mastering audio files. You can record your various instruments, MIDI controllers and vocals, lay down the tracks, rearrange, splice, cut, paste, add effects, and ultimately finalize the song you’ve got cooking for the world to hear. Professional, semi-pro and home studios use DAWs as their backbone for making music if their main focus is to have a digital setup. Aside from those who use real instruments, we do know of some well-known musicians who still use analog setups, such as and with real mixing boards and the like, but a majority of people nowadays are strictly computer-based or at least have a hybrid studio to incorporate both (why not?). This trend only continues to grow as technology advances. Aside from a computer or of course, a DAW is the most important piece of you’ll need to get the ball rolling for those masterpieces waiting to be created.

How to choose your production software To us, choosing your DAW is like picking which soda to drink. Either way you go, it won’t necessarily be wrong especially in this day and age. As you can see in the comments, this decision brings much debate (rightfully so, and we’re glad it does since it allows us to continue to evolve and learn about music production as a whole — keep them coming). However, taking into consideration your personal needs is very crucial.

Here are some important aspects to keep in mind during your search that we recommend. Your budget – We always list this first in our music equipment guides because it’s a pretty big given, but it’s always something to think about. Our opinion and mind state is to think of this as an investment. Typically a 4-5 year and beyond one (like buying a car), so you’re going to want to get it right. We’ve been using our DAW now for more than 10 years!

Why fix what isn’t broken? With that being said, there is always out there you can check, but we do recommend that if it takes saving up a few more hundred dollars, it’s worth it to wait. You want to think long-term, but before you do drop that money most of these companies offer free trials (which we’ll provide).

What is your experience level? If you’re starting out, you don’t want to get too crazy in terms of a DAW, such as going with Pro Tools right away (they have entire created for this software after all).

You want to start with something that you can easily understand and use in order to get your music-making skills going. In that case, we’d recommend our newly published guide. Getting an expert-level software from the start can not only take months to learn but also be daunting, ultimately discouraging producers from continuing to sharpen their craft. Don’t get us wrong, if you’re the type to want to go big right away, be our guest. However, as stated in our article, we do recommend starters begin with something a bit smaller. On the other hand, if you’re a bit more experienced and you’re looking to take a step up, going the extra yard and getting an expert-level software such as Pro Tools may be hard at first, but an ultimate investment when thinking of the future. Which brings our next point.

The ever-popular debate of will always be a relevant one. If you already have your music computer, great. Otherwise, you’ll of course need to invest in a powerful enough rig to support the DAW that you end up choosing after reading this article, which will always entail you choose your operating system afterwards.

If you want our opinion — it doesn’t matter. We’re more if Windows types of people, whereas our friend we just worked with a few weeks ago says Mac only. This is entirely subjective.

What will really come down to the choice is if you don’t have your OS yet and have already picked software to use. Some software come Mac-only, whereas others (and most, for that matter) work with both. We’ll let you decide this one!. Think about the future, too – If you are a beginner, take the previous bullet-point into consideration, but keep the long-term in mind as well.

Starting with a beginner software is great for right at the beginning, but it may get boring after your first year or two and you need to keep in mind that you’ll eventually be good enough to use more functions of the software. For children or youngsters, starting at a beginner-level is most recommended, but if the DAW you chose at first has a low ceiling, you’ll eventually have to make a switch and learn an entirely new software (it’s what I did with Acid ProI had to eventually move on to Ableton which took me some time to learn — although I did understand the universal basics of music software, so it wasn’t too bad).

We’d go with something in the middle – a software that will take some time to learn, but will ultimately offer some valuable advanced features down the road when you’re ready. Although in the end, even the “beginner” programs could last you quite a long time (well-known musicians still use software considered to be ‘entry-level’ such as FL Studio). Do you perform live?

A few of the software we list are more optimal for performing live, such as giving us some easy integration with, control surfaces and other live performance-specific gear and features. Gets a bit more tricky and you’ll want to make sure all of your tools flow well together.

Regarding software, there are some more live-tailored features in some DAWs, such as saving presets, matching the interface with what you’ve got in front of you, etc. Some are just more geared to live performances, while others being for when you’re deep inside of the studio well-past midnight.

Ultimately however, any software is fine for performing live. Stick with what you’ve chosen – The more familiar you become with software you’ve picked, the quicker and easier you workflow is, the more confident you become, and ultimately, the better your music sounds. Think you’ve learned a DAW to its fullest? Learn it again. Look into hot keys, extensions, etc. You want to be able to immediately put an idea into play to keep that work flow going. Join message boards or subreddits about the software to brainstorm with others.

The more you know about your software, the easier it is to get those thousands of ideas circulating in your brain during your production onto the piece of paper. It’s an investment, but once it’s as smooth as butter, pumping out that music becomes even more beautiful as times goes on (it almost becomes second nature, such as driving a car). Don’t fix what isn’t broken. Relax! It’s 2018 — the digital age is here, and most of the production software out there is up-to-date and very popular. Either way you go with the 10 we’ve listed, you’re getting lifetime support, huge communities with message boards, and YouTube tutorials on any of the software you choose. You can’t really go wrong with one or the other, even if you’re a beginner.

So don’t panic. There are also many similarities with software so if you do end up switching to a different DAW later down the road, it won’t be completely foreign. Our picks for the top 10 best music creation software Below is our list for top 10 best DAWs out there.

Take into consideration the level you’re currently at, where you plan on being for the future as well as the overall capabilities you’re looking for. Visit their website or the purchase link we provide for more information. We also tried to throw in the free trials and a few video overviews. We hope this guide has helped continue your music creation journey — keep the questions and comments coming at the end of the guide, we’ve really enjoyed the discussions throughout the years. If you’re looking for some smart device DAWs instead (some, but not many, home studio artists are starting to go with this route due to convenience, although we still don’t recommend it right now), check out our article since we made a separate guide altogether for that subcategory. Recommended level: All levels Operating system: Mac or Windows Full versions ( ) Since it’s introduction in 1999, has been steadily growing as a very popular DAW and for good reason. We know we’ve gotten scrutiny for listing it first, and everybody is entitled to their opinions.

However, we feel this is the best digital audio workstation for most of our readers. Here’s why (and just a few reasons, considering it would take days to explain the power of this) — you’ve got the standard multi-track recording (an unlimited number of audio/MIDI tracks for songs) and cut/paste/splice features, but what’s especially great about this software is the seamless MIDI sequencing software and hardware. We’ve had so many fusses with our MIDI controllers getting mapped to our sounds through the DAW (back when we used Acid Pro in 2005-2010), but ever since the switch to Ableton it’s been extremely headache-free.

Another huge plus is the included sound packages included. Although this really depends on your preferences and whether or not you have your gear and sounds up to speed, it comes with 23 sound libraries (about 50 GB of sounds), so you can make music right out-of-the-box (great for starters). To finish off our description for the beloved Ableton, this thing is the absolute best music software for performing live with. We’ve experienced very few glitches (the biggest fear of performersit can make or break a set). What’s even better is that Ableton has paired up with some brands to create gear specifically for the program, often matching interfaces with the software for easier pairing and remembering of sounds.

Although this is an extremely simplified summary of the software, you can’t go wrong with Ableton Live, regardless of your “level” (how do you even categorize that?). We recommend trying it first to see what it’s all about — you then have two versions (intro for about a hundred bucks or standard for half a G — try intro first before you go all the way up). Recommended level: Beginner and up Operating system: Windows only This is one of the best DAWs for those looking to start out and get their feet wet in the music making world.

Has been out and about for quite some time, being one of the most popular software to date. It’s got your standard protocol with pitch shifting, correction, time-stretch, cut, paste and the works, but it’s interface is especially well-suited for the beginner.

It’ll take a little bit of reading to start going, but once you’ve got the hang of it you’re good to go. There are plenty of YouTube videos out there dating back to 2005 giving tutorials for pretty much any feature you need explained. Their latest version includes over 30 synth software for out-the-box usage, so if you’ve just purchased a controller and want some sounds to start fiddling with you don’t have to spend much money. You can use MIDI keyboards, record into it with a, do your standard editing and mixing — it just gives you what you essentially need in music software with a simple interface. There are some advanced features as well, so once you become familiar with it you can delve further into these to attain a solid learning curve for the future, too. It’s very user-friendly, especially with adding some virtual instruments and playing them on MIDI.

Another perk is it works great with PC or Mac. The retail price is also a lot lower than others out there, so it’s definitely budget-friendly. We’d recommend getting this if it’s for somebody younger as well. What made this program famous in our opinion and still does is the fact that today (if anybody is a fan like us).

Whether you are an at-home audio hobbyist or a seasoned and professional Pro Tools operator, everybody yearns for the optimum working environment to produce music. Over the next few weeks I’ll take you through the various components of the digital audio workstation and offer some suggestions for maximizing its performance. This is by no means the end-all-be-all of how-tos on the subject and I invite all of you readers out there to contribute to the body of knowledge with your personal expertise. As for me, I can only speak from my own experience as a professional audio engineer.

So please offer your opinions or questions in the comments below if you are so inclined. I should admit right off the bat that I am a supporter of Macintosh computers and Pro Tools in the professional environment. The realities of the professional world decree that this is how you must go if you wish to have a successful career. I do swing every which way: I have done high-profile professional projects on Microsoft computers, Nuendo, Logic, Cubase, and tape.

By and large, however, contemporary creative demands as well as the desire for portability and universality demand a Macintosh and Pro Tools combination. Mac or PC: Forget the I/Os, forget the gear (for now). Heck, even forget about the talent. In today’s music production world, you cannot record anything of any kind without a good computer. For the audiophiles out there, I too am a tape guy when the opportunity presents itself.

However, the availability of the medium coupled with budgets and real-world artist demands often preclude the use of our beloved reel-to-reels. So before you choose between Pro Tools and Logic and Nuendo, you have to pick the optimum machine to support those programs. When the question is posed to me there are three main distinctions that I like to draw: 1) This one is kind of arbitrary but is necessary exposition because, when talking about technology, you will often get the conscientious objector who takes issue with the nomenclature: a Macintosh computer is a PC.

PC stands for personal computer, so the question really comes down to Macintosh or Microsoft. That kind of has a nice ring to it, so I’m curious why the debate is framed in such a manner. Apologies to those Linux supporters out there, but Linux isn’t even a wildcard in this tournament. 2) A much more substantive and important distinction to draw is that Apple produces an operating system (Macintosh) so that it can sell its computers. On the other hand, Microsoft produces computers so that it can sell its operating system.

For a raw MAC which contained a variety of oxygenic groups, HNO 3 treatment enhanced the relative amount of highly oxidized groups such as carboxyl and carbonates, which disfavored the deposition of silver particles. Acid and base treatments were employed to modify the surface oxygenic groups of MAC, respectively. Surface functional groups for mac. The coating morphology was found to be closely related to the surface area and surface functional groups of MAC. The MACs’ Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) surface area, surface groups, and silver coating morphology were characterized by N 2 adsorption, elemental analysis (EA), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), and scanning electron microscopy (SEM), respectively.

This is a subtle difference, but very important. When your Macintosh computer crashes and you need to rebuild from scratch, you can use any OS installer on your computer. Mac doesn’t even ask for a serial number. That is because Apple is in the business of selling computers and the OS itself is simply a construction so that they can sell them machines themselves. That means that every component that is in the machine has an express purpose, specific to the operating system. Likewise, every line of code that exists in the operating system has an express purpose in the functioning of those components. On the other hand, when your Microsoft (or rather Microsoft-based) computer crashes, you’ll need to have your officially sanctioned serial numbers and identifiers because Microsoft’s sole desire as a company (for our purposes) is to sell an operating system.

Not the computer. If you actually go to the Microsoft store, you will not see a single computer “made” by Microsoft. The actual computers that run Microsoft Operating systems are produced by Dell, Asus, Lenovo, and. shriek.

even Macintosh. Of course, the high competition for producers running a Microsoft-based platform means that the price can be significantly cheaper, but ultimately that means that the company creating your computer has little at stake in how the operating system functions with the computer itself. 3) The third distinction deals more with what your computers are actually doing: The computer and the operating system itself has no idea what operations you are performing. Whether it is a Mac or a Microsoft or Linux, no computer has any real idea whether you are watching a movie, editing a family video, touching up a photograph, or recording death metal. It is just doing calculations.

The real question when dealing with music production is how quickly can VERY LARGE chunks of information accessed, transferred, and put to use. Macintosh realizes this. For a very long time, the talking point about Macs was that they handled big calculations and files better than Microsoft. While this may be true from an OS standpoint, a processor or hard drive or stick of RAM doesn’t know whether it’s running on OSX or Vista. The real distinction is that with Macintosh, you can accept as a given the fact that the components within your machine are top of the line and designed to handle tasks that require large computations and throughput.

Macintosh knows that their demographic has long been “creative” types rather than business professionals, so the OS and machines are all designed to handle labor intensive processes. Microsoft on the other hand, after a certain baseline, frankly doesn’t give a damn about the components that are in the computer. There are Microsoft computers out there on the market that are designed only for web-browsing and word-processing. And rightly so, Microsoft has a huge and broad market that caters to businessmen and soccer moms and even creative types, so some machines handle large computations and have max throughput while others do not. So from these three distinctions, it should be clear that you can buy a Microsoft, and with the right tweaks and customizations, it can perform equally to a Mac or better. There are plenty of options available due to the gaming community (which overwhelmingly uses Windows-based computers) and these add-ons will likely be cheaper due to vast competition in the Microsoft peripherals market. However, this will require more thoughtful consideration on the part of the consumer than buying a Mac with a very small set of top-of-the-line variables.

I do agree with most everything you say except for the fact that Linux is not even considerable. There are major players out there that state that the main DAW for linux (Ardour) is comparable in many ways to Pro Tool. Furthermore, EXT4 has proven much faster than the OSX file system and wine can provide near zero latency with products like Guitar Rig.

All in all, the only thing preventing Linux from coming into play in the pro audio world is the will for professional producers to try it out like they do with OSX when they consider changing from microsoft to apple. That said, Linux still has the same issues as windows when it comes to choosing hardware but it usually makes better use of the hardware it is running on. I don’t think you’ve characterized the PC vs Mac reality properly in your article. First of all, Microsoft is very vested is working well on all platforms.

They don’t want an image of being unreliable. Quite frankly, the fact that they have achieved the level of hardware support that they have is quite an accomplishment – you don’t have to install drivers anymore.

Just install windows on any system and connect to the internet, and it will set up all the hardware for you. Also, in the last part, Macs do not have top-of-the line components. At best, they are mid-grade components (processor, RAM, etc.), and to upgrade them the ‘Apple’ way is ridiculously expensive. I work on both mac and PCs.

The Macs always underperform, especially for the price, regadless of the application (3d rendering, compiling, rendering music with ableton). It is fair to say that you use a Mac because you like OSX. However, if you think it’s better than any given PC for the price you’re completely delusional. I used to be Mac fanboy. Windows 7 changed my mind. I bought Logic studio when Apple first released it but never had a mac powerful enough to run it. I cannot tell a difference in stability between Windows 7 and OSX(not talking about needing anti-virus software in Windows here, just having like 60 windows open with 20 programs running at once and the computer DOES NOT lock up).

Mac Pro For Music Production

Personally I think Microsoft finally making a stable OS that runs that good on piles of different systems is one hell of an engineering feat compared to Apple making OSX to run specifically on systems they engineer it to run on. In Windows I now can leave programs open for a week at a time(just like I did on the macs that I owned) and they don’t crash! I still have trouble accepting that because of the difference between Windows XP and OSX.

In fairness though, Windows XP is more comparable to OS9, but that is only because of hearsay because I never really used OS9. Something that almost NO ONE ever takes into consideration is that anymore, about the only software that determines whether you run one system or another is Logic, Fruity Loops, and Sonar. It seems that everything else is Hybrid software. So if you run Pro Tools, Cuebase, Reason, Native Instruments stuff, EastWest sounds stuff, Live, etc etc, then you could use EITHER system. So if Windows 7 runs just as stable(or at least it sure does seem to), why not build a PC with MORE power than the 12 core monster that Apple sells maxed out, for about 2000 dollars as opposed to 12-15,000 dollars? If security is a really big deal to you(or just install Norton or Mcafee), install Ubuntu on a separate partition and use it as a web browser, and only get on the net in Windows for updates to your software.

As stable as Windows 7 has been for me, the more I use it I simply can’t rationalize spending the money on a Mac. Nothing against Apple, just pure economics.

Actually my only 2 complaints are that they refuse to make either a touch screen iMac(which Sony beat them to that about 2 years ago), and not a mid priced tower. I had a mirrored doors G4 and that computer was built like a tank. I miss that old assed computer:(.

In another life, I made a living selling component parts to the subcontract manufacturer who built Apple computers. The components are not junk, but they aren’t particularly premier quality, like mil-spec or high-temp or failure-rated parts. However, Apple is very specific about their qualified vendor list and do not tolerate part substitutions at a manufacturing level. Apple likes a lot of control over the manufacture of their hardware! On a different note, I do some part-time DJ work using a Sony Vaio straight out of the 1/8″ jack. The onboard converters are VERY good on the Sony and the sound quality is excellent. At a recent wedding gig, a customer brought her MacBook Pro for me to play her playlist for her.

I was surprised to find that the Apple converters were very obviously inferior to the Sony in quality, noise floor and signal strength. I agree that, if you spend your money wisely on good hardware, you can get a better Windows-based computer for a lot less money than going with Apple. There’s a lot of hype and posturing that Apple sells in addition to their hardware and OS. You people are crazy.

In my business my shifts are 10 hours long. I mix music and music video on a virtual board plugged into A 8GB 17″ 2012 Mac book pro. I also own 5 windows lap tops. I have used both at an abuse level that only someone who has to change songs every 3 minutes. Here is a simple test why don’t you open identical programs on both a Mac and Pc of equal ram and possessors.

Now open a cpu meter and you tell me what you see. I see the Mac’s cpu usage staying low and the computer stays cool.

The Pc’s meter will ping at the red line and the computer gets hot as hell. This is when using Virtual Dj as the main program and several others such as web browsers and downloading from youtube at the same time.

The Mac is more stable and faster hands down. Plus the Mac has thunderbolt. I have 3TB’s or 3,000 gigs of music and music video. Try and run that stability for 10 to 20 hours straight on a usb external hard drive. If you think Pc is equal to Mac for mixing music and video you probably don’t do it for a living. If you do your probably just can’t afford the Mac because your probably not that good!