Music Production
This is Music Production. A place to share anything and everything you want about your music making journey! Learning is the goal, so discussion is encouraged!
We have a mirror community at [email protected] !
It's a general instance, and it will provide us with better redundancy in case of outages and hiatuses! Everything I post will pop up on both, and you can cross-post your submissions to the other instance if you like!
Rules are as follows:
- Don't share other people's music without commentary, analysis or questions. This is not a music discovery community.
- No elitism or bigotry towards other people's music tastes. Be polite in disagreement.
I will update rules as necessary, but I promise we'll stay light on them and only add new ones after discussion!
Here are some useful examples of what a great post would be about:
(in no particular order)
- Stuff you made/are making. Get valuable feedback and criticism!
- Learning resources - videos, articles, posts on any topic concerning a production process, be it composition, sound design, sampling, mixing, mastering, DAW workflow or any other.
- Free plugins, presets and samplepacks. Giveaways and self-made stuff included!
- News about production software, releases and personalities.
- Questions and general advice about music production.
- Essays on your favorite productions. Inspirations and insights!
- Your physical analog gear! Let us know how it performs!
Good to know: As a general word of caution, avoid posting complete compositions, mixes and tracks on the internet before backing them up on a remote and reputable server. Even small snippets or watermarked tracks should be posted AFTER backing it up to cloud. Timestamps from cloud services will help you in case of theft. And, as a public resource, lemmy is not a safe place to post your unpublished work, so please make sure your work is protected.
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I'm using Ardour on a daily basis and looked into Reaper for a while. Reaper has some very nice stuff IMO:
I think Reaper is a great DAW, however (ymmv) i find it more complicated in almost every aspect. I have used Cubase, FL Studio, Nuendo, Qtraktor, Ableton and bitwig in the past and started using Ardour a year ago. Everything was very easy to understand, the only time i had to read the manual was when I wanted to integrate a midi controller that had no bindings avaible. The Mixer is great. It's intuitive, has a good UI and many features like pre and post fader plugins. Routing is super easy for me.
The only thing that's a bit clunky is programming midi. At least for me.
Reaper on the other did not had such a welcoming beginner expierence for me. I looked into it a few months ago despite being very satisfied with Ardour (because of fomo i guess), and it was not that easy to set up a project in the way i wanted to. Maybe i was to much into the Ardour workflow by then, dunno. But my final verdict was "Looks nice but I pass".
Hope this is of any help to you.
I've tried Reaper here and there and the workflow seemed a bit intimidating to work around. I've gotten so comfortable working in Ardour over the past few years and recent major updates have done a lot to improve things and add useful tools. Doesn't have as polished of a feel overall compared to Reaper but its quite cohesive.
Valuable insights. Thank you.
I gave Ardour an hour today. It doesn't come across as polished looking as Reaper but has everything layed out in a very straight forward fashion. I like that a lot. I will mix my next project there and see...
Good luck! Would really appreciate an update when you're done.
Thank you. Will do.
I really like it! When I started out in Reaper I watched lots of tutorials because I felt overwhelmed by all the stuff you can tweak. In Ardour everything feels much more down to earth, less polished, very straight forward. I didn't miss anything and will definitely keep working there. Maybe switch over to Reaper in a few months or so....
This track is my first result in Ardour:
https://dontoverthinklife.bandcamp.com/track/infin8y
Thanks for letting me know! So it's not worth it for me to invest more time to get familiar with Reaper, is it?
Nice work, ain't exactly my jam, but I can dig the sound. Especially when the ultra warm bass comes in... i really need a tape machine lol.
You mention that you used LSP Plugins for mixing and mastering? What's your take on them? To me they seem very professional and well made, but I'm not confident enough to trust my judgements.
Anyway, here is a recent song from me (you can also find me on bandcamp but I haven't got around to upload my newest stuff there): https://open.spotify.com/track/4mqpCr5l65NN1flCevEjdv
I think it comes down to how much you want to live in your DAW. If you work with MIDI too and want eye candy, Reaper probably has the edge. Plus their stock plugins are great. I also think the tutorials for Reaper are excellent! My use case is mixing & mastering only, so I don't need a lot of what Reaper has to offer. The fact that Ardour is open software plays a big role for me too.
Regarding LSP plugins: I was blown away! Very deep, clean UI, okay documentation, LV2 and for free??? I use their stereo EQ, m/s EQ, and compressor. Plus, still being developed. They just released new plugins and fixed bugs. I am 100 % happy with them.