Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs)

My Two DAWs

Like any father with more than one child, you really can't declare to love one more than the other. That's were I stand on my DAWs -- my Macintosh DAW has many good features, but so does my PC DAW. As much as possible I have tried to make them equal, and generally speaking, I select software which is compatible with both platforms and which grants me a license to install on both. Of course, I don't use them together at the same time -- they're actually physically located in two separate locations in my home -- but my understanding is that I have a different feeling when using my Mac than when using my PC.

My Mac DAW

My first experience recording music on a Mac was back in college using Opcode EZ Vision and Deluxe Music Construction Set. EZ Vision was pretty cool, and since all the hot stars at the time were using Vision, I upgraded after graduation and used Vision through the mid-1990's. I actually have a surprisingly small back-catalog of songs recorded in MIDI; this is probably because of my switch to guitar in 1993 and focusing on writing simpler, more pop-inspired music. I'm a far better keyboardist than guitarist though, and my weak guitar chops limited the chords and keys that I could play. A bunch of the bands I've been in have been more rock-focused, but my own material doesn't necessarily fit that description.

I started work on my first professionally-recorded solo album/cd in 2004, and it's mostly been sitting around NOT being worked on. But I've done a bit of processing and editing and dubbing using at first a PowerMac G4 and then my PowerMac G5. Even though I've got a more powerful PC, sometime it's a bear moving things back and forth so right now the files are all Mac-based. Hopefully I'll get some new parts recorded in 2010 and finish up this record so I can get on to other work.

My PC DAW

I've been using a pc infrequently for writing and recording music since 1998 or so. I picked up the Steinberg Dance Production package because it included Mac & PC versions of Recycle (which I never use) and Rebirth (which I toyed with for awhile, but never made full use of). Surprisingly, while PCs are cheaper than Macs, and have more software available for music, I find that more of the work I do is on the Mac whether it's using ProTools to record or Cubase for MIDI recording. It's not that I'm not as comfortable on a PC, it has more to do with the fact that for most of the time I've had MIDI interfaces wired into my Mac, not my PC. That changes in 2010 because I'm moving from the Emagic-designed AMT-8 and Unitor-8 (which used to support Mac & PC) to models from MOTU (which STILL support Mac & PC).

My current PC DAW is an HP XW8000 with 2 * 3ghz Xeon cpus, 3gb RAM, and a couple of 500gb SATA drives. I just installed Windows 7 in October 2009 because I was tired of XP crashing and corrupting. At present my boot drive is a 180gb IDE but when I finally scrape up more cash I plan to migrate it to one of the 500gb drives using either Acronis Easy Migrate or Symantec Ghost or maybe even Clonezilla. Inside this box is an Emu 1212m PCI card and some kind of ATI video card, and the Emu card is connected to the 1820-style dock. A bunch of Windows 7 stuff doesn't work, and I discovered that I need to replace both my MIDI interfaces with something that's PC-compatible, which I am in the process of splurging on through the end of December 2009. The goal is to be completely operational January 1, with or without ProTools updates or $$$ upgrades to Cubase 5. I just bought Sonar 8.5 lite and that should get me going well enough for now.