Do you use traditional DAWs alongside trackers?

[Vojvodinosaurus]

Jó napot kivánok!
Since i can't afford Ableton, FL, Cubase, let alone Ardour, i currently use LMMS occasionally for more complex songs and i also use Audacity 2.4.1 and Wavosaur. I can tell you lmms is pretty capable a for free and open source daw but i feel like it may never be on par with FL Studio, REAPER nor Ardour. And that really sucks.
Audacity has pretty cool effects and generators, and it looks like both lmms and audacity can use the same ladspa effects (well in audacity theyre not pre-installed) up to 0.4.15 i believe this is the last version
and lmms 1.3 is also still in alpha and i feel like that daw doesnt have as bright a future as i would expect. :\

oh and if you actually use Ableton, Cubase, FL Studio, Pro Tools etc then you must be rich

[Saga Musix]

I occasionally use REAPER for MIDI recording (which I then import into OpenMPT to continue working on the song). It's a very affordable DAW beating many of the much pricier competitors by a large margin.

oh and if you actually use Ableton, Cubase, FL Studio, Pro Tools etc then you must be rich

Not really. You might have to save up some money, true. But many of these products have e.g. student versions with slightly reduced functionality for a greatly reduced price. As an example, when I was a student, I bought WaveLab Elements for I think close to 100 Euros, while the full version would have cost multiples of that, and it has served me well for many years. You also often get stripped-down versions of those programs for free even with some of the cheapest hardware MIDI controllers.

[Vojvodinosaurus]

REAPER is awesome indeed. I was thinking since i wanna use some vst3 plugins in near future and if lmms doesnt get vst3 support by the time, i should try out Cakewalk. It was very well received by Audio Tech TV and that is one of the reasons i wanna get it.

[LPChip]

I've used EnergyXT aside of OpenMPT for quite a long while, which is a pretty capable sequencer. I've made a full album in it too. Nowadays I use BitWig Studio which is much more capable. OpenMPT is in its own league but with Captain Plugins's Sattelite, you can bridge the gap and intermix both which is neat.

Thusfar I have not really found a reason to do this other than doing a collab, but in most cases just using OpenMPT in those instances is definitely sufficient. Each have their pro's and cons.

[Vojvodinosaurus]

Bitwig appears to be cheaper than FL Studio? I mean entry-level version costs €100 while full costs €400 and for the latter price i could buy a brand new (semi)mid-range laptop in my country

[LPChip]

I did buy the full version, but I waited for summer to get it for a discounted price. As I own a company and produce music for it, I bought the license there as investment, which is something I also do for good plugins that I need to work more efficiently or get better quality. In the end, it'll pay itself back. The 100E version is more limited, but I would be able to make the music I do with it anyway as the advanced things it adds are (although really really nice) not mandatory for production, unless you need more than the tracks (channels) that version brings. I seldomly go over 10 tracks, and that version has 16 I think. There's even a cheaper version for even less money with only 8 tracks and even less internal tools and sounds, made for students that will really help you to determine if this is software you would want to use, and you can buy an upgrade license in case you want more. So you can buy the 8 track version very cheap, see if it is enough, if not, upgrade to the 16 track version and pay the difference as if you had bought the 16 track version in the first place, and if you want even more, do the same for the full version.

[QuantumRain]

FL Studio has become an essential tool for me, and I also use Audacity (primarily for quick recordings).

However, I can't do without the plain and simple get-the-fucking-job-done sequencer in OpenMPT. No distractions, just you and the letters and numbers. Love it.

[Newbie]

Vojvodinosaurus if you are looking for a free full featured traditional Daw, why not try Cakewalk by Bandlab (formerly known as Cakewalk Sonar) https://www.bandlab.com/products/cakewalk? I know it isn't Open Source unfortunately, but it is free. Another one you might want to try is Tracktion Wavefrom 11 Free Edition https://www.tracktion.com/products/waveform-free and you might still be able to download Tracktion T7 Free Edition as well.
If you want something simple just for sequencing MIDI that you can then import into OpenMPT, check out Sekaiju https://openmidiproject.osdn.jp/Sekaiju_en.html and something even simpler is Midieditor https://www.midieditor.org/ , there is also Aria Maestosa which now has the ability to record from a MIDI keyboard https://ariamaestosa.github.io/ariamaestosa/docs/index.html, another one if you don't mind installing the Java runtime on your windows system is called Frinika https://frinika.com/

As you can see there are a lot of free options.

[Vojvodinosaurus]

thanks for suggestions music enthusiast, i'll probably try cakewalk but i already have lmms and have no complaints so far

[krsplatinum]

I tried a bunch of other programs aside from Modplug:

- Renoise
- Famitracker
- Audacity
- PreSonus Studio 1
- Fruity Loops
- Ableton Live

The 1st 2 on this list are also sequencer/tracker style music programs.
The 3rd 1 on this list is more like a generic multitrack audio recording tool.
The last 3 on the list are technically workstation computer programs,
those last 3 include a "piano-roll" feature (unlike the sequencer/tracker style)
which is the main distinguishing component of a "Digital Audio Workstation"

And that also differs from a "MIDI-style" computer program, too;
Although there weren`t any MIDI-style programs on my list.
A MIDI-style program tends to emulate sheet music,
instead of a piano-roll or sequencer/tracker notation.

Those 3 different types of music notation
{ "MIDI"/sheet music , piano-roll/"D.A.W." , sequencer/tracker }
are going to be important to understand the difference between each of them,
in the future at some point.

It`s like the difference between:
guitar tablature or drum tablature, sheet music for piano, fingering charts for brass and woodwinds.
Except those are all primarily on paper, rather than on computer.

[Vojvodinosaurus]

Those 3 different types of music notation
{ "MIDI"/sheet music , piano-roll/"D.A.W." , sequencer/tracker }
are going to be important to understand the difference between each of them,
in the future at some point.

So if i understand correctly: sheet music/MIDI program (e.g. Rosegarden i believe) is the most limited, DAW (e.g. FL) is most complete while tracker (e.g. OpenMPT) is somewhere in the middle, more limited than daw but more complete than sheet/MIDI. Am i right?

[Saga Musix]

I don't think you can "sort" different types of software linearly like that. Each of these software types tries to solve problems in a different way, which may make achieving one particular thing more easy in one type of software while doing another thing might be much more difficult to achieve. For example if your goal is to write sheet music for an orchestra, doing that in a software that natively works with a staff view will of course make things much easier than first writing the score e.g. in OpenMPT and then converting it to staff view afterwards (you will probably have to rework half of the notation). There is also nothing that makes trackers inherently more limited than a traditional DAW. Just because OpenMPT is lacking certain features doesn't mean that they must be missing in any tracker. See Renoise as a good example of that.