We have recently released the fifth version of our popular . This analysis rates 5 of the most popular DAW’s — Cubase, Pro Tools, Sonar, Acid Pro, and Live — on 130 different factors. There are two different overall measures, a combined functional rating (5 being the highest) and a value rating which is the functional rating divided by the price. The main change in this analysis is the addition of Ableton Live. The ratings of the other products have all been published before. Every time this analysis is published, I get a few of the same questions which I’m going to address here, namely: (1) Since Pro Tools is the industry leader, why does it rank low in functionality? (2) Why don’t you include Apple Logic? Since we are now including Ableton Live, I’m sure I’ll be getting another question: (3) Since Ableton Live is so popular why does it rank low in functionality? So I’m going to address that also.
In this analysis Pro Tools LE and M-Powered are used for the basis of the rating. We include products that are roughly in the same price range. Pro Tools HD Systems (Pro Tools TDM) has more functionality but also has an entry level price (including hardware) starting around $10,000. In particular Pro Tools LE and M-Powered do not include surround mixing and are fairly weak in video. Cubase, Sonar, and Acid Pro provide good functionality in both of these areas.
Pro Tools, despite recent advances in Version 7, is still lacking in some basic MIDI functions. Two big holes are the lack of drum maps and at least a basic score editor. Historically, the weakness in MIDI is fairly easy to explain. Whereas Cubase and Sonar started as MIDI sequencers, Pro Tools made its bones in the early Nineties when The Next Big Thing was digital audio. Now that virtual instruments are giving new life to MIDI, Pro Tools has been busy playing catch up.
Finally, one gap that, for me at least, is difficult to explain is the lack of real-time pitch shifting and time stretching. Thousands of hip-hop artists and remixers use the Pro Tools Beat Detective because it is the only tool available. However, compared to any of the other products the Beat Detective is labor intensive and the quality of the results in many cases is not as good. If you’re skeptical about this claim, here is an excerpt from our Digital Producer tutorial that compares the Beat Detective with Acid Pro.
The good news about Pro Tools is the price. At a street price of $249 it is one of the lowest. We are using the price for M-Powered. The prices for LE are higher but also include one of the DigiDesign audio interfaces (M-Box, 001, 002, etc.). M-Powered is limited to M-Audio audio interfaces. However, if you like M-Audio (and I do) and use it for other pro audio software, you can add M-Powered which has the same functionality as LE and is compatible with other Pro Tools systems at a very modest price.
Another question I get quite frequently is why we don’t include Apple Logic. There are quite a few DAW’s on the market, and we only include the most popular ones. How do you determine what’s popular? The best measure, of course, would be sales. However, nobody knows the overall sales of these products. So several years ago we developed a good proxy measure, Internet search activity. Both Google and Yahoo provide data on Internet search activity which accounts for over 90 percent of Internet searches. The is published quarterly and is an average of the rankings of the past four quarters. As you can see from this summary, Apple Logic usually does not make the top 10 in the popularity ranking.
However, we finally decided to include Logic, because this is probably a case where the mind share of a product is greater than its market share. Professionals in the music business overwhelmingly use Macs. And even though most people still use Pro Tools as their primary DAW, Logic Pro is a popular additional tool if for no other reasons than its Mac affiliation and strong lineup of virtual instruments such as the EXS24, Sculpture, and Ultrabeat. Thus we plan to include Logic Pro in future analyses and also create a new training course for it.
Ableton Live is another DAW whose mind share is probably greater than its market share. One fairly simple explanation of this is Ableton’s business relationships with Avid. Most Pro Tools customers and many M-Audio customers have a copy of Live Lite because it is bundled as a freebie with many Avid products. Live has also been creeping up in our Popularity Index and has been in the top ten for the past several quarters. For all of those reasons we decided to both include it in the DAW shootout as well as develop a training course for it.
Live is a popular product primarily because of two rather unique features: the Session View and the Instrument and Effects Rack. Session View was primarily designed as a real-time performance feature. You can arrange your project into Scenes. A Scene is designed to be a slice of all of your tracks at a given point in time. Then you can launch each scene in real-time. For those of you who are familiar with Cubase Play Order Track function, a Scene in Live is conceptually very similar to a Play Order Part. The main difference is that, whereas you have to stage Play Order Parts in advance in Cubase, in Live you can launch Scenes on the fly. Although the Session View was originally developed for real-time performance, many composers report that they use it as a tool to help them flesh out musical ideas.
The other popular feature in Live is the Instrument and Effects Rack. The Rack allows you to group multiple levels of virtual instruments and MIDI and audio effects either in parallel or in series. Most DAW’s support the serial chaining of effects. These are typically referred to as inserts. However, the idea of applying a MIDI track in parallel to several virtual instruments is fairly unique. I am aware of only one other product that supports this feature, the Propellerheads Reason Combinator. This feature allows you to layer virtual instruments to produce complex, rich patches. Here is a simple example from our training course of using the Instrument Rack to combine Native Instruments Absynth with Live’s sample player, Simpler.
Despite these two popular features, it is clear that Live is still a young product. Like Pro Tools LE and M-Powered it does not support surround mixing and is weak in its video functionality. Live’s MIDI functions are also pretty basic. There is only one editor, a piano roll editor, and patch maps are not supported. If you’re using virtual instruments, the lack of patch maps is not a big deal. However, if you’re trying to use Live to drive an external hardware synth, having to enter numeric codes for patch and bank commands can be very frustrating. Finally, while we didn’t deduct points for this in the analysis, I was also disappointed by the quality of Live’s pitch shifting and multiband compression. Live has some unique and fun features, but I wouldn’t rely on it as my main DAW.
I have come to realize that advertising on the web is a genetic dead end. Before you start raising your hands, this is not going to be a rant against online advertising or even an analysis as to why online ads are on the outs. Web advertising is as vibrant and growing as anything online, but I am sure that for a time, so was the Saber-Toothed Tiger.
The real problem with advertising is that we have all grown immune to it. Despite what the recent upsurge in Facebook application ads might tell you. Even as a publisher, I am always amazed that anyone clicks on ads at all. It seems more an oddity of statistics than real human beings actually caring about the products being sold in our collective sidebars.
Why don’t we click on ads, well, the issue might not be as complex as some would make it out to be.
Our Aversion To Advertising
It’s Stale. The biggest reason that people don’t click on banner ads is that they all look the same. Every advertiser known to man seems to believe that the best way to design a banner is to make it as obnoxious as humanly possible. This usually involves some kind of blinking text, flash embed or auto-playing sound. While likely to draw attention to the ad unit, I would venture to guess that this sort of shilling only serves to detract people from clicking through.
A big reason is that if I see a terrifying ad, I general assume that site attached to it will be equally terrifying.
Trickery. More endemic than the lack of design in online advertising is the tendency for advertisers to try to trick users into clicking. I would like to see some conversion statistics on users who were fooled into clicking on an ad. My theory is that they are obscenely low. More problematic than the fact that most users are smart enough not to be tricked is the fact that unscrupulous advertisers have driven users to install software to block out advertising all together.
Why worry about sinking into some Adsense minefield when you can rest easy by blocking the entire thing. Publishers rant and rave about users “eating their bandwidth” by not clicking on ads. Maybe they should consider that the reason these scripts are installed at all is because users want to retain control over what they view, something that some advertisers would love to take care of them.
Click-Thru As A Proxy For Engagement. It astounds me that click-thru is still seen as the be all and end all of user engagement. People click on links out of curiosity, not brand loyalty. All that click-thru implies is that you have managed to expose a user to a concept. What the user does after that exposure is the real value of the ad. If I click on an ad, hate it and then immediately leave. Where was the value in the advertisement?
The Solution
The solution to this issue, I feel, is to look at advertisement as another form of content. You want to get users to engage with your advertisement the same way they do with their favorite YouTube video. Instead of tricking them to click on some silly banner, why not set up a marketplace where publishers can syndicate your “advertainment” for their sites?
I think the best example of this type of thinking are the movie trailers that Google occasionally pushes. These ads are extremely high quality and they provide content that a user might look for on their own (i.e. trailers). The result is a highly engaging ad that attracts instead of repulsing users. Not only that but the trailer makes its point without forcing the click thru. You are delivering your information without annoying your audience.
The point is that advertising must become more interesting if it will ever regain the place it has lost in the hearts of consumers. Focusing only on driving clicks is making advertisers lose sight of what they should be focusing on, converting those clicks into customers. Instead of strictly playing the numbers game, it might be time for big brands to realize that they have the power to regain a foothold in the market by designing online ads that give users a reason to lift their ad blinders.
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If you read my previous post GNU Wget, The Ultimate Command-Line Download Tool, you might be noticed that I cant use the word “wget”I cant even use that word here or anywhere. I guess this is just some nasty WordPress bug.
As my previous post it took me more than 2 hours scratching head wondering what wrong that I can’t post to my WordPress powered blog. At first I thought it was Post2Blog, my new blogging tool (I just start using Post2Blog in the past few days) that cause that error, I get error 404 every times I mentioned the word “wget”. Then, I switch to my other blogging tools, BlogDesk (this is my long time favorite blogging tool before I found Post2Blog), The Journal (this is not “pure” blogging tool hence it is named the journal LOL), Ectoand last but not least WordPress build-in web-based write post function. All of them give error 404page not found!, I repeat ALL OF THEM, even the web-based will redirect me to default WordPress error 404 handling page LOL. So, I guess this might be serious problem.
Here is some screen shot taken.
Error from BlogDesk
bugs, Bugs Report, experiment, I love experiment!, Secrets that you dont know, solved, wordpress bugs
