The latest version of Garageband seems to have had a load of features go missing, so downloaded a trial of Ableton Live 9 intro. Seems pretty good so far and really quite flexible, but what’s anyone else using? Anybody using Ableton found the intro version limiting and gone to one of the ‘fuller’ versions?

Will be primarily recording guitar, but may introduce other things as well. Really fancy getting an electric drum kit, not that I can play drums, yet!

We have Cubase AI, forget which version, so blooming complicated…. For the simple stuff we do I shall stick to Audacity… 😳

Reaper is pretty good, and cheap.

http://www.reaper.fm/

If your just multitracking live performance then the skit for Audacity is a good (and free) one. Haven’t looked at Reaper for a while but for manipulating recorded audio it’s always been very good.

It you want an all round recorder/sequencer that will do MIDI (and a whole lot more) besides then I think Live is about the best there is. Only thing that stopped me using it was jumping to Linux.

Another vote for Reaper here

Been looking into Reaper. It does seem very good. Think I’ll do a trial

Logic or Reaper get my vote.

Or you could look at pro tools and enjoy owning the 11R that comes with it 😉

I’ve used Audacity, Cubase AI and Ableton Live 9 and they are all good at straight recording. The differences tend to come with how easy they are to use for bouncing tracks around and the effects you get with them e.g. there was a nice feature in Cubase where you could play a track in a loop and then record your guitar several times until you got the best take.

Audacity is the easiest to pick up and get running with if you aren’t using it all the time but possibly not the most powerful overall. Ableton is possibly the most difficult but once you get to know it it is great.

I can’t comment on the quality of the effects between Ableton and Cubase AI but I prefer them both over the stuff that you can get free for Audacity

But, before rushing out to buy one of the packages you might decide if you want to buy a USB audio interface first as you often get one of these packages bundled in, often with some extra effects such as a better quality reverb or compressor.

enjoy

I have a Zoom R16 16 track portable studio which came with Cubase AI. Record up to 8 tracks simultaneously , plus overdubs, then import all the tracks into Cubase for processing & mixing

If you’ve got a Mac, live near me, and want a copy of Logic 9, let me know… More than happy to lend you my discs…

Now Logic 10 is out Apple don’t really give a crap about the older software licenses. Logic 9 is the absolute mutts nuts too still (who really only adds a few things that most people would never use, and a different interface).

Logic can be a bit daunting at first, but it’s soooooo much better than all the alternatives quite frankly.

ProTools has a clean interface, worth a look IMO

+1 about the music interface & software bundle, got a copy of Live Lite with mine. Live suits my particular workflow the best, and I prefer it to Pro Tools or Logic. I starting to make music though with Music Maker. Good value for a beginner.

Another forum with some useful info and people with too much money and too little talent bickering over petty things