What genre are you going for?
Never used to PreSonus before.
I have Reaper and Fl studios (I dont use fl studios much...)
Reaper is really cheap, very solid in my opinion.

If you ever need to go a step further like producing professionally for others and for yourself of course, then learn some "industry standards" like Cubase or Pro Tools.
Well there are no industry standards for me, each program is ok if you know how to use it, but if you are looking for clients well... they think that you OUGHT TO have pro tools or cubase or you suck... Sad but true..

If you really want something cheap/almost free but with a great price to value ratio then go with reaper. It's easy and more than enough for an one man band.

Take care

Hi Lordser5,

Like both pianoman3291 and Paschalis l. said, [="http://www.reaper.fm"]Reaper[/]="http://www.reaper.fm"]Reaper[/] is really solid and inexpensive.

I have heard very good things about [[url=http://="http://www.presonus…"]Studio One[/]="http://www.presonus…"]Studio One[/], a software you might want to consider!

Hope this helps.
-T

Are you using PC or Mac?. How involved do you want the recordings to be?. Software like Garage band and Cubase Sequel are good for basic recording built for newbies.. Very easy to use.. They have a lot of useful stuff built in and pre configured for fast songwriting workflow..

Audacity is free. Reaper is really good as well..

Paschalis I., post: 407114, member: 47272 wrote: If you ever need to go a step further like producing professionally for others and for yourself of course, then learn some "industry standards" like Cubase or Pro Tools. but if you are looking for clients well... they think that you OUGHT TO have Pro Tools or Cubase or you suck... Sad but true..

While PT is obviously a standard, I certainly wouldn't consider Cubase to be. I've owned my own pro facility (1985 - 2007) and never had even one client ever mention Cubase... I have worked in hundreds of studios - in pro studios as a tracking and mixing engineer, and in many, many small studios as a consultant engineer, and have seen PT, Sonar, Logic, even Samplitude.... yet I don't recall seeing Cubase in even one of them.

I'm not knocking the platform, nor am I praising it - because I've never seriously used it, and, I can say that neither have any of my professional engineer friends/colleagues.

So, maybe Cubase is what the OP needs...and in your area, perhaps Cubase is popular. But referring to it as an "industry standard"? That's a stretch... a long stretch.

If asked, and the OP was looking for something entry level and inexpensive, I would suggest Reaper, Reason, or, as Chris mentioned, Audacity.

FWIW

d/

Cubase and Nuendo are as much an industry standard as Logic DP or Sonor... Pro Tools is definitely number one.. After that,.. The market is pretty even between them. Walk into any music store selling software and you'll see Cubase. as well as Sonor and Logic. Does Reason do recording now? I thought it was a VST Hub/Sequencer thing on it's own... Haven't used it since 2.5 though.

I'd suggest cubase in the UK has a much higher incidence in studios run by musicians. Pro tools is more common in pro studios where the studio evolved from audio on tape. Cubase was a sequencer for musicians, that loved into a recording tool, along side the competition on macs on Logic. Cubase is the tool of choice for musicians who record, and protools the tool for recordists. Most pro studios do not generate the music, people bring it to them, so it's handling of MIDI, for example was never advanced to cubase or logic's standard. Steinberg had quite a following with nuendo in Europe, but most users who grew up with cubase stuck with that, and when logic gave up on apple, Steinberg mopped up quite a few. If I walk into a pro studio, the day to day recording places, the protools is sort of expected, but in the programming rooms and in independent pro quality music producer studios you will find cubase, because it makes music, not just records it. Huge quantities of virtual instruments all integrated into the system is what wins the battle for me. I can't consider protools in my studio, because I'd still need cubase for the instruments, the scoring, the MIDI editing etc. the fact I've been using it since it was in black and white on an Atari 530, has nothing to do with it - actually that's a lie, it has EVERYTHING to do with it. Like Adobe, once you earn money from something you are stuck, you know the product too well to swap. Newcomers to music making seem to head to reaper now, especially if they are into loops and samples, while cubase has an upgrade path, like logic used to.

If you only ever record audio and have no need for MIDI or sample based instruments, the protools is very sensible, but if you have piles of music keyboards, samplers, guitars and electronic drums, the protools needs another device to make them work, and why buy two?

I got into Cubase because at the time, Pro Tools was too expensive and did less feature wise.. Cubase worked well on P.C. At the time Sonor didn't exist.. It was Cakewalk and Logic was a clunky piece of crap till Apple bought it. Since then they've made it more user friendly.

Nowdays all the Software can do the same stuff.. I'd say go for something you like the workflow of and has the most support VST wise.. Most companies have VST plug ins before anything else like Rtas, AU or AAX 64. The great thing is that every company has a gazillion youtube tutorials on everything. Like is way easier than it used to be in that sense.

A buddy of mine, producer from the UK had both PT and Cubase . I asked him for advice and he described it all to me just as Paul just put so well.
So, I dropped over $50 grand into it, bought a Power Mac , excel card, farms, DPS, 888's, 10,000 Cheetah's, scsi burners, printers, CDR and software of every kind. I bought the biggest Pro Tools rig I could get in 1998, then started this site thinking I had the world by the tail.
I got into recording much like Paul, came into digital audio way in early 80's. I'm 4 decades into digital audio now.
I made the mistake of investing in Pro Tools. It truly sucked for making music and the sound wasn't much better. I should have stayed with Cubase and continued "making music". Instead I got caught in the trap and it took a lot of years to step away from it and rethink it all.

The idea that all DAW's are the same, is incorrect. ALL DAW's DO NOT produce the same finished product. To my studies, Samplitude is by far the best coded but, its not easy to learn so, if you choose that, study is required. Its a combination of all the best.

The fact that any of this matters though, is moot. If you are a mixer or mastering engineer, Samplitude/ Sequoia is hands down choice to me but, this, and all the other choices are subjective to your ability, finances and goals. None of this matters if you don't have talent and the ability to capture and mix it too. Download as many demos as you can and find the one that works for you. Learn about optimizing your computer and make sure you clean it out so it runs well on each one you try. Plug-ins create conflicts. If you don't have a good system, you will never know which one is truly right for you.

imho, if you are into making music, Cubase would be top on my list. If you are trying to build a reputation as a recordist, buy PT's so you can say you have it, but don't waste your time trying to write and produce great music with it, its sucks compared to the other choices.
Mac or PC, choose and go from there.

use what you have.
i use flstudio for everything, it does it all man, and hardly any menu diving. its all right there.
save your $$ and buy addictive drums. terrific plugin that.

The real question is what do you need to do with the system. That's why equipment choice is now very polarised. Few people want to just record, then play any longer. Protools is great at recording studio tasks. It's the extra studio jobs where the choice comes in. All the current gizmos are firmly pointed towards different jobs. Few do all of them. It's like sheet music. If your musicians need music, and deal with notes on a page, then some sequencers do it pretty well, but none produce the quality of music that you'd publish in a book. There are a couple of packages that produce quality scoring, but they suck at recording! This is the snag.

The cheaper and free products seem to be pretty good quality wise, they just lack the features the more advanced products have. For those that don't use them, it's kind of tricky to explain - but one project last week was a re-recording of a well known song, but would be severely chopped up and re-arranged. Lots of MIDI instruments. Cubase let's you bring in the original audio slap it on a timeline, and then it creates a tempo map, so the bars and beats match up. You then can play to the old track for the basic stuff, and then when you have enough, you dump the original. For me, the tempo mapping really helps me work faster. Doing this manually takes a lot of time.

This, and the sheet music is what I have to have. Others have different needs - that's why there's so many weird bits of software out there. Studios with protools, rarely waste expensive studio time facing around with this kind of stuff - and that's why so many now record in home studios not studios.

pianoman3291, post: 407089, member: 47289 wrote: Reaper is really cheap, very solid in my opinion.

+1 for Reaper too. Surprised that Ableton Lite (or whatever the entry level) wasn't mentioned so far. Another option could be [[url=http://[/URL]="http://www.magix.co…"]Music Maker[/]="http://www.magix.co…"]Music Maker[/] from MAGIX. It has a collection of soundpools (ie Samples) that you can use to create the drum and bass lines, and VST support so you can do this manually with software instruments.