A Problem With DAWs

There are a lot of problems with DAWs. Many are unstable, most are difficult to learn and counter intuitive and they are digital so you can kiss that naturally warm sound of tubes and tape goodbye.  The problem I speak of is there is no standardization. They are all laid out differently and contain different nomenclature. I suspect this is to purposely make the learning curve hard so that users will stick with the DAW they know even if it has some serious short comings. You stick with what you know especially if you are a pro.

Creative people like artists and musicians are right brained whereas geeks are left brained and unfortunately it's geeks who design most software. Adobe PhotoShop's design was probably a combination of left and right brained people because it works well and is fairly intuitive.

DAWs force creative compromises. Let's say that you want to make meter changes in a song. For any geeks reading the meter changes mean going from one time signature to another like in the Beatles song We Can Work it Out where it goes from 4/4 to 6/8 and back 4/4. Slowing tempo and speeding it up again is not even possible with some DAWS. This is why at this point the best use of a DAW is for mastering but KISS Keep It Simple Stupid and mix with your ear but if you are a geek that's impossible. 

I've heard music created by geeks and it's sterile and hardly clever. Today's music, well most of today's music is sterile and that is why the shit the Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber is popular but you many Justin Bieber or Taylor Swift songs can you sing or even want to sing?

A DAW in the hands of a geek is a very ugly thing. A DAW in the hand of a right brained person endowed with creativity and commonsense is frustration and and toxic to the creative process.

Geeks just don't get it and they will never get it and that's why DAWS tend to suck and as a consequence so does today's music.

Because this blog is called Mixcraft Sucks I will mention Mixcraft. The biggest disappoint about Mixcraft is that it is intuitive and them power it lacks would not be a bad thing if it were stable. Mixcraft is like a 90 horsepower sports car. You know that a Corvette will blow its doors off but you don't care because it is still fun to drive and may potentially even beat the Corvette on a very tight road course. But your 90 horsepower sports car uses more gas than the Corvette and is extremely unreliable. That's Mixcraft. Put the power and reliability of the Corvette into your underpowered and unreliable British sports car and you will have a real winner. Put the reliability of Reaper into Mixcraft and put the ease of use of Mixcraft into Reaper and you will have a DAW even the most analog oriented musician can live with. BTW, Corvettes are easy to operate, fun to drive and very reliable.

Neither a fixed Mixcraft or an intuitive Reaper will ever be the Cadillac of  DAWs but they can become the DAW of choice for most PC users and don't let the assholes from Acoustica tell you that the reason Mixcraft crashes, freezes and has horrible latency issues is because of a problem with your PC. Install Reaper and you won't have latency issues or crashes. Reaper has a horrible work flow and it's user hostile but it is very stable.






Currently I am testing Adobe Audition and so far it sucks as a recoding platform.

Since most DAW suck and since the companied who sell them are making obscene profits here is a little tool that will make trials last forever. It's called Run As Date.

NirSoft's RunAsDate is a small, free tool that lets you run applications using a different time and date stamp than your Windows system, yet without changing your Windows system time. It can change the date and time of multiple programs running simultaneously, each with different time and date settings. We can think of several reasons for wanting to do that (debugging log files, for example) so in any case, it's a useful capability to have around. However, it's not designed to extend shareware trial periods, which use different means of keeping track of such things.

Read more: RunAsDate - Free download and software reviews - CNET Download.com http://download.cnet.com/RunAsDate/3000-2094_4-10717342.html#ixzz2ak7Q9opv

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.

James Andrew 

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.

merlijn1998 

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!

David Pierson 

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.

By the time you upgrade your computer you can and still not be sure Mixcraft will run properly on it you can get 

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