Monday, July 1, 2013

Some Facts and Opinions About Mixcraft

UPDATE! Apparently this blog caught the attention of on the folks at Acoustica and now Mixcraft is a very stable DAW. Mixcraft 6.1 works quite well even when you push it hard. Finally Mixcraft has reached its potential. Let's hope they don't fuck things up when they release Mixcraft 7.

For me reliability is paramount and now Mixcraft is very reliable. The plugins that come with it are as good as the industry standard and you get lots of them. I have gone back to Mixcraft because I have not found another DAW that I like better. Other DAWs such as Cubase, Pro Tools, Presonus Studio One and Audition may work out their bugs but don't count on it. Go with what works. Mixcraft is now one of the few DAWs that work well.

WARNING TO ARTISTS: DON'T USE TUNECORE CLICK HERE

Mixcraft is a DAW. DAW means digital audio workstation. On the surface Mixcraft seems pretty good. It has a very user friendly GUI and the learing curve is not steep but that is where the good stuff ends.  Mixcraft is as buggy as a roach motel. After several weeks of evaluating Mixcraft 6 and trying to deal with crashes, freezes, driver and latency issues what at first glance seems like an answer to the many shitty and hard to learn DAWS reveals itself as piece of poorly designed software with more issues tha your average fat girl drama queen.

Latency is that annoying thing that happens when you record on many DAWs. Here's an example. You have just recorded a drum track and now you are playing the bass track but as you are plucking the strings what you are hearing in your headphone is not in sync with the drums. That's latency and it sucks.

Acoustica, the company who sells Mixcraft would like you to believe that 40 - 80 millisecond is acceptable latency. It isn't. It gets sleazier. Mixcraft's marketing implies that Mixcraft will run seamlessly on nearly all computer and that's a lie.

With most computer when you fire up Mixcraft you will get this warning and sugesstion.

The problems with this are many and this is the is them main reason Mixcraft sucks. With the sound cards that come in standard in most computers you cannot adjust latency low enough to record without MixCraft crashing. The other thing you can do is use a USB interface but that will become a matter of trial and error with no guarantee that it will work with Mixcraft and no gurarantee that Mixcraft will even find the device driver.



You can go to the Mixcraft forum for support and you will be told to download ASIO4ALL. It doesn't work. When you present a problem the geek droids will immediately blame your computer but if you do a Google or a Bing search you will find that you are not alone. Mixcraft latency issues are a problem for everyone unless maybe you are lucky enough to find the mystery soundcard or find the right USB inferface with the right drivers. Ask Mixcraft to what that sound card is ad you will get wrong answers and non answers.



Maybe if you are a computer geek you can get around the bugs in this shitware or maybe if you had enough time you could. Trial software may not reveal its flaws during the short trial but you can download a nice little free program called Run as Date from Cnet that will allow you to run trial software indefinately.  I don't know if it is legal to do so but since RunAsDate is on CNET I'm guessing that it is. Is it moral? That's between you and your morals but as I see it when a company can make billions of work on a product that cost them less than $100K to develop all I can say is fuck those greedy cocksuckers. IMO software copyrights should expire are a few years or a certain number of downloads.

Acoustica will tell you to upgrade your sound card  or by a very expensive USB interface that will cost you more than a stand alone digital multitracker like a Boss or a ZOOM multitacker that will double as a DAW controller.

Here is what Mixcraft users are saying about Acustica's bullshit suggestions.

If you are running Win7 you can use exclusive mode to get the latency as low as 3ms. This does nothing to solve Mixcraft's terrible plugin delay compensation however, which makes mixing a multi-miked drumkit using parallel compression a lottery.

i have a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2, and with my ASIO driver, i still got a little bit latency. but when i dont have latency, i have a lot of noise, and after a few seconds, the signal is gone. Help please!


I think mixcraft, has a huge problem with its converters. How can the same .wav file when converted down in audition sounds great, but mixcraft boxes it in and really makes my mix cheap sounding.
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16 comments:

  1. Mixcraft is the Dracula of DAWs... It SUCKS!

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  2. Mixcraft should never have been released.

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  3. Reaper seems to have solved the latency problem.

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  4. I have used Mixcraft on three different computers with differing OS's, XP, Vista64 and WIn 7. Have experienced none of the problems you list and made some pretty good recordings.
    A poor workman usually blames his tools !

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  5. Reaper most certainly solved the latency problem you cum drinker. Read it and then go back and suck some more Acoustica dick. http://wiki.cockos.com/wiki/index.php/How_to_Compensate_for_Interface_Latency

    I made the mistake of getting Mixcraft and I am running a quad processor with 8 gig of ram and an ASUS Xonar Essence STX sound card and the latency is still awful. My freind has a an old mac with Garage Band with a 1 gig processor and it runs flawlessly.

    I have both Reaper and Mixcraft and other than the pretty look Mixcraft sucks. I has more crashes than a demo derby. It's trash.

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  6. Pretty sure my c2d from 2007 would have some issues if this was the case.

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  7. It's too bad that the geeks at Mixcraft can't get their shit together.

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  8. You all seem pretty angry about this with no actual answers. Thanks.

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    Replies
    1. The problem is your ram and Hardrive I recommend upgrading you ram to the maximum you can install and upgrading your Hardrive to a solid state drive both upgrades will boost you computers speed and will allow programs to open and run faster and it will improve there performance
      The latency in mix craft is cause by hevy cup and ram usage

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    2. Mix raft has latency issues caused by loads of ram and cpu usage I found that to limit latency to a minimum for me was to close programs that used a lot of ram and cpu I could tell the ram and cpu increased because in the right hand corner of mix raft the cpu and ram level meter changed from red to green I had a windows 7 computer with 320 gig Hardrive and 4 gigs of ram I upgraded it to a 80 gig ssd solid state drive and installed 6 gigs for me it made mixcraft run with little to none latency the only time I had latency is if I had programs open that used a lot of ram

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    3. Latency is not caused by RAM and CPU issues. The fact is Mixcraft is pretty efficient when in comes to resource usage. The best Mixcraft can do using Wave RT is 20 ms regardless of system resources. In exclusive mode it will do 3 ms.

      When I use MC it uses about 8% of my system resources.

      Mixcraft is vastly improved and now I highly recommend it.

      Mixcraft had a ton of bugs but it had some good feature like the plug ins, the ease of use and the price. The other good thing is all the tutorials.

      I kicked Acoustica's ass and they woke up and they fixed Mixcraft. It is stable, efficient and has an easy learning curve. It has finally reached its potential.

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  9. I've never had any problems with the audio drivers and use interfaces I've used other daws they have the same latency issue as soon as I upgraded my Hardrive and ram the latency when to a minimimle like I said in the previous post I only had latency if I had programs open that used a lot of ram

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  10. Reaper is far far far worse than Mixcraft. You can get 3 ms on Mixcraft if you use exclusive more of if you use a USB mic or interface in exclusive mode.

    Since I started this blog Acoustica woke up and fixed Mixcraft and if is pretty much bug free.

    Reaper is fucking joke. Reaper is not for making music it is for geek to go onto forums and talk about all the bugs they are dealing with and their pathetic work arounds.

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  11. ...Well all you ram heads i have Mixcraft 8 and it kicks serious ass with no latency problems I know of yet 8/15/2017 anyone else got Mixcraft 8.....comment please

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