Software Alternatives

I have no idea how much cubase costs but for about 300€ you can get reason, still my all time favourite software

Reason is versatile for what it is and very handy for midi-live-use. The lack of audio channels stays and item though. The NNXT can be used as a multitrack playback system but for recording you still rely on things like adobe's audition or so. Then my next thought is that you'd rather bounce your reason midi-content to track in adobe next to your other audio-tracks 'cause then you can use any vst's you want.

Mainly for cpu-reasons I hardly use cubase. I't would be fancy to use absynth, minimoog etc... Reason does what I want without a doubt (cpu-wise I mean) so an alternative alowing a vst-instrument would be welcome

Cubasis VST 5.0, light version of Cubase (costed me only 300 EUR)

Originally posted by : crap

Reason is versatile for what it is and very handy for midi-live-use. The lack of audio channels stays and item though. The NNXT can be used as a multitrack playback system but for recording you still rely on things like adobe's audition or so.

You can go around that by linking multiple mixers ;)

Originally posted by : ZARk

but those high prices are starting to hurt me seriously ...

I like reason a lot too, but if price is an issue, you can't go wrong with buzz machines since it is free:

http://www.buzzmachines.com/

It has the reputation to crash a lot (on my old PC it crashed a lot, but on my new machine it doesn't) and it's not the easiest software to use, but it gives you a wide range of machines and possibilities. It also takes VST's.

I made this song with it to give you an example:

B913 is a hoax

hasn't anyone ever worked with orion platinum? it's pretty sweet for beginners. costs about 200USD: link (I loved their drummachine)

I tried energy XT for a while, and I kind of liked it. It's very good with vst's and for midiwork. It's completely modular, so you can do bizarry signal chains in no time. The fact that you can tab different windows keeps the interface nice and tidy (if you start up the demo you'll understand). The audio side of it is rather basic though: no timestreching and it all felt very unintuitive. Energy XT 2 is supposed to fix those shortcomings though (that one would have timestreching). Upgrading to version 2 would be free for existing users.

You can use XT as a vst plug in as well. So if you bumb into a limitation of your host you can load up XT, do your thing and play the whole thing as a big giant vst synth.

It's really a beauty if you're into midi stuff.

If you do a lot of audio work you can look into reaper. It looks a bit like acid, and is still free for the moment (late beta stages). You could even combine it with XT: load xt as a vst, do all your midi work in XT and then do the audio parts in reaper. It's not the perfect work flow, but you can do anything you like for a fraction of the price you pay for cubase.

Before I forget: XT2 will also run on linux, and is rumoured to have native vst support.

There's also FLStudio ...

There's also the lowly sample-based Modplug Tracker 8)

interresting topic!

pushing this thread back up :)

i've made my move to EnergyXT

i've never been happier, it does exactly like i want :p

they working on v2 , which is a complete re-write, but runs smoothly under linux.

version 1.3.6 is stable, and i'm using 1.4.0 latest beta.

couple of 'downsides'

• no EQ on the mixer,
• no amplification on the mixer
• monocore application ( will only use one core from a dualcore)
• learning curve is a bit steep ( HIGHLY recommended to read at least the Beginners guide.), or if you lazy reader, nicFit has recorded some flash video tutorials :p
• need a couple of vst's to compensate for missing things.

thats about it. apart from that, you get many features found on expensive programs. it's totally modular, which is really fun.

some vst's might not work correctly with it, although most of the ones i tryed worked flawlessly :)