Interested in switching DAWs.

[G_3_3_k_]

I'm a Linux guy myself and also agree with this, it's just not worth the limitations and headaches. I use Cubase and Windows 10 for my DAW but use Linux for everything else as a dual boot on my flight sim machine. Most plugins have installers & authorization tools that many won't work with Wine, pro audio hardware drivers often aren't released for Linux and require open source variants, and I'm not sure if anything's changed as I haven't kept up but I recall there being a need to recompile a low latency kernel for pro audio use. But, I know some people enjoy the challenge

Even and MacOS Windows can have latency issues.

 

[Rev2010]

Even and MacOS Windows can have latency issues.

Of course they can but I've never had any major issues. Used to use a Mackie Onyx 1220 and had fantastic low latency with no dropouts at all. After upgrading my machine I starting having some issues with it and went over to an RME BabyFace Pro FS and have zero latency issues with it running at 64 buffers for around 4.2ms round trip latency. Just saying there was tons of talk about needing to compile a low latency kernel for Linux pro audio use.

 

[G_3_3_k_]

Of course they can but I've never had any major issues. Used to use a Mackie Onyx 1220 and had fantastic low latency with no dropouts at all. After upgrading my machine I starting having some issues with it and went over to an RME BabyFace Pro FS and have zero latency issues with it running at 64 buffers for around 4.2ms round trip latency. Just saying there was tons of talk about needing to compile a low latency kernel for Linux pro audio use.

There are some custom distros for audio. However, if I'm documenting an idea during a break at work, switching to a different distro defeats the purpose. However, I don't think I'd be recording audio to demo an idea. Probably just plugging my MIDI keyboard in.

 

[jaxadam]

how long ago did you try Ableton?

Like 12 years ago.

 

[TheBloodstained]

In my experience buying a new MacBook Pro and building a top-shelf custom Windows PC costs almost the same. I did it not too long ago. Yes, the pc was cheaper, but certainly not THAT much cheaper.

Anyway, I have no hands-on experience with Ableton Live, but my brother uses it and are really happy with it. I was tempted to give it a go myself, but I ended up with Logic a couple of years ago and feel pretty contempt with that.

I used Propellerhead Reason before that. It's a really cool DAW, and I've seen that there's some prominent names in the heavy metal realm that uses it.
I don't know how that would work in a live setting, but it might be worth looking into?

 

[thebeesknees22]

In my experience buying a new MacBook Pro and building a top-shelf custom Windows PC costs almost the same. I did it not too long ago. Yes, the pc was cheaper, but certainly not THAT much cheaper.

Anyway, I have no hands-on experience with Ableton Live, but my brother uses it and are really happy with it. I was tempted to give it a go myself, but I ended up with Logic a couple of years ago and feel pretty contempt with that.

I used Propellerhead Reason before that. It's a really cool DAW, and I've seen that there's some prominent names in the heavy metal realm that uses it.
I don't know how that would work in a live setting, but it might be worth looking into?

That's what I was running into when I was looking at making a top shelf PC as well. In the end i just stuck with a new Mac studio since I have a buddy that got me a good discount.

 

[G_3_3_k_]

In my experience buying a new MacBook Pro and building a top-shelf custom Windows PC costs almost the same. I did it not too long ago. Yes, the pc was cheaper, but certainly not THAT much cheaper.

Anyway, I have no hands-on experience with Ableton Live, but my brother uses it and are really happy with it. I was tempted to give it a go myself, but I ended up with Logic a couple of years ago and feel pretty contempt with that.

I used Propellerhead Reason before that. It's a really cool DAW, and I've seen that there's some prominent names in the heavy metal realm that uses it.
I don't know how that would work in a live setting, but it might be worth looking into?

That's what I was running into when I was looking at making a top shelf PC as well. In the end i just stuck with a new Mac studio since I have a buddy that got me a good discount.

I just bought a Laptop for 1100 that has an 8 core Ryzen 7, 64gb of ram, 2tb ssd, and an RTX 4050. I couldn't have got that level of performance from a Mac for the same money.

 

[l1ll1]

I've seen it happen to bands more than a few times. Still more reliable than a keyboardist, though.

Crazy. Haven't seen it happen in a live setting in a really long time. But maybe it's also my field of work (theatre), where Live has become the standard DAW/Player/MIDI operator/Cueing device for whole productions and I've never seen a show go down in any of the places I work in – or sessions I work on. But well, you can kill any system of course.

 

[l1ll1]

Yeah, Bitwig does almost all the same stuff as live for sequencing and looping. Again, made by one of the people that started Ableton. I like the linux flexibility. In other words, if I'm working my day job and get an idea, I don't have to reboot my machine. I can scratch it out, put the file on an external, and then I can use open it in windows when I'm done with work for the day. Same with Reaper. I learned and used pro tools a lot during school because I was required to turn in pro tools project files. I didn't like it. Don't care if its the industry standard. Feels really clunky to me. For a traditional DAW, Logic had a good workflow. I'm sure I'll miss it, but I can't drop the scratch for an Apple machine responsibly and have the kind of horsepower I need without having to freeze tracks all the time. I used to crash Logic all the time because I didn't want to commit to synth sounds until I was ready to mix. Ended up having to do that anyway by running the output of a software instrument into the input of an audio track to print it and then freeze the MIDI to make space in projects for all the instruments I needed. Now I have a ryzen chip and 64gb of RAM to work with. Took three years of not having a computer at all to finally convince me to get a PC. If good VSTs start appearing for Linux without having to use Wine to get them to run, I'll switch to Linux permanently probably. I hate Windows almost as much as I hate Pro Tools.

Just to get back to the ProTools thing:
I also don't care if it's the industry standard, I just think it's a valuable argument when you take into account the time you're gonna spend learning a new DAW and what you will get out of it. If you're good at ProTools, you can at some point maybe work jobs in Film/Sound Design/Audio Book studios/environments. Friend of mine just made the switch because of that reason and it paid of. And Ableton is the standard operating system for a lot of live shows (not only music, but musical, theatre, etc.). So there are opportunities as well. That was kind of my point. But I get it, first you gotta be comfortable with the DAW to have fun working with it so your preferences are key.

 

[SalsaWood]

IDK what problems they actually had, it could have just been their own fault or systems and there are a ton of Ableton live users. I think it's fine personally, but I don't need it.

 

[G_3_3_k_]

Just to get back to the ProTools thing:
I also don't care if it's the industry standard, I just think it's a valuable argument when you take into account the time you're gonna spend learning a new DAW and what you will get out of it. If you're good at ProTools, you can at some point maybe work jobs in Film/Sound Design/Audio Book studios/environments. Friend of mine just made the switch because of that reason and it paid of. And Ableton is the standard operating system for a lot of live shows (not only music, but musical, theatre, etc.). So there are opportunities as well. That was kind of my point. But I get it, first you gotta be comfortable with the DAW to have fun working with it so your preferences are key.

I think its mainly the VSTs that are the issue. Ableton will crash if a VST does. Where, as someone stated earlier, Bitwig sandboxes the VSTs. So a VST can crash, but the project will stay open and continue running. I'm not necessarily interested in working for people on productions. And even if you do, you can export stem files and send those over. Its a smaller file than a project file anyway. And its just audio. If they don't like the FX i'm using on certain things, I can rebounce the stems in a matter of minutes with the FX turned off.

Figured out the arming a stereo track vs arming a mono track thing. You have to set up your audio device in the software settings prior to opening a project file and create individual sources for each individual input you want to use. Just a workflow thing. Did some tracking. Its pretty easy to use once you understand the workflow differences and where things are located. In fact, you can use it very much like a standard DAW if you want. Its pretty full featured.

Next I need to figure out how to do time signature changes. From there, I'm off to the races...

 

[IGC]

Not claiming to be an audio engineering master here. I've used Ableton for quite some time it came free with my Toneport UX1 (~18 y.o.) which I used up until last year.
I've done some software upgrades here and there over the years and have grown pretty familiar with the system and love if. Only thing I've noticed is the CPU usage meter in the upper right go up to 28-30 when many tracks are going at once, like 24. But never has it crashed. None of the systems I've used it on are even close to the the spec of OP's new laptop.
I upgraded to 2i2 3rd Gen this year and trying Reaper for the price difference. I like Reaper, but I'm so much more familiar with Live.

Anyhow,
A bunch of those free plugins from the other thread over there, didn't work in Ableton, but some do. Same with Reaper.
Can't speak for Ableton in a live performance use situation, but it has never crashed on my lesser windows systems. With up to 30 tracks going at once.

 

[synrgy]

Live crashes when you do a lot of synthesis through it apparently.

Anecdotal, but, I've been on Ableton since version 6; recently upgraded to 12. Use it almost entirely for electronic-ish; tons of synths, both built-in and third-party (VST). FWIW, it's always been stable for me. Only crashes I can recall, occurred when I attempted to try some plugins that 'fell of the back of a truck'.

 

[l1ll1]

Anecdotal, but, I've been on Ableton since version 6; recently upgraded to 12. Use it almost entirely for electronic-ish; tons of synths, both built-in and third-party (VST). FWIW, it's always been stable for me. Only crashes I can recall, occurred when I attempted to try some plugins that 'fell of the back of a truck'.

Yeah, I have to double down on this. I do music and sound design for theatre plays for a living. My Ableton sessions are big, often more than 100 tracks, always more than 100 scenes, filled with big audio files, maxed out returns, multichannel sound, python scripts running to automate stuff via clips&scenes and the whole thing is running MIDI cues to the light and video departments. These sessions are built so a sound engineer of the theatre can just "step" through them night after night and everything is running organically and musically without anyone "hearing" the cues. They never (!) crash on me during shows, not even once.

I did a performance, where Ableton did not only control all music, lights, a turning stage, etc. but was also the mixer for all handheld mics, lavalier mics, room mics and several headphones. The piece ran for 64 hours straight and I never had an issue. And that was in 2018.

Ableton is solid AF.

 

[G_3_3_k_]

I'm entirely inexperienced with Ableton. With Bitwig being basically the same and being entirely cross platform, I still favor it since Ableton is not Linux friendly. Bitwig has software instruments built in to the program. So I'm not entirely unequiped. I also have a Linux friendly interface apparently. Since they are so similar, I might grab Ableton at some point anyway, just to have the additional features. But Ableton is a big ask at $250-$300 more than Bitwig when comparing the full featured versions of the softwares. So aside from Ableton's we'll say fixed stability at this point, what are the features of that you would say are must have's? Bitwig does all the tracking, sampling, looping, MIDI, and I think all of the sound design aspects of Ableton built in. I've heard there's some cool stuff in Max, but its open source. So a loved instrument could break on a future update. What makes the most sense to me, in a comparison that I read, was that Ableton is like a DAW with some intuitively built in instruments, and Bitwig is like an instrument with a DAW built in. I can work with either honestly, but the latter sounds more useful to me.