[LAU] FOSS DAW recommendations

[James Harkins]

Hi,

So... now I feel like the careless person who flicked a lit cigarette into the vat of kerosene and just walked away :D

I'm actually a regular user of Audacity, but I think it's more of a sound file editor than a DAW. I love it for trimming, normalizing, fade in/out, noise reduction and glitch repair. I don't love it for multi-tracking, cross-fading and tempo-synced editing. If Audacity has true nondestructive, clip-based editing, I haven't found it. To me, it's like: If you want to trim your nails, you use a fingernail clipper. If you're doing topiary, you use other tools, up to and including a chainsaw. Audacity is the fingernail clipper -- pretty close to ideal for the things it does well, but it doesn't do everything well.

I don't often need multi-tracking, cross-fading or tempo-synced editing, but when I do, that's when I want a DAW. There, it seems like it's pretty much Ardour or go home. Contrary to some suggestions, I'm not scared of routing dialogs or submix channels. (I particularly enjoyed the comment about being "savvy enough to operate Supercollider" LOL :D .) It worries me a bit when David K. says "It's when you start editing that things get awful" -- because, tight, tempo-synced editing is exactly the time when I want clips whose edges you can edit easily and instant cross-fades.

Ages ago, I used Digital Performer on Mac, and courses at my school now tend to use Cubase (the latter of which... sheesh, Steinberg are really tone deaf about interface design). I know my way around. Complexity is fine. Stability is a higher priority than a simple interface -- given the choice between a beautiful, easy interface that crashes often and a complex interface where things "just work" once you learn them, I'll go with the stable, complex interface, every time.

hjh