has anybody got recent experience of daw on macos. used to use garage band quite a lot, and whilst it had accessibility problems, it was still quite workable for a lot of stuff. thinking of investing ina mac mini, but, my macbooks still on big sur, and i cant off the top of my head remember my end of the era intel macbook. so, whats the most accessible daw app on the newer apple scilicon based macs?
thanksfor any advice.
neil
Comments
State of daws
Others who have more experience than I will have to ahime in with other programs, but the state of reaper is great as the latest mac os and reaper latest versions.
ok many thanks
will give it a go, gives me a starting point at the very least. shame gb seems to have disappeared, had its limitations but was handy to have.
Garage Band hasn't gone anywhere.
I literally have it on my system right now, and I got this Mac Mini M2 some time in October, I think. We've actually got quite a lot of accessible stuff on Mac. Reaper, GB, Logic, Ableton Live, and Protools. Windows has, IIRC, Ableton Live, Reaper, and ... Samplitude? It only works with Jaws scripts and I don't use Jaws and haven't for years, so I can never remember what it is.
ok great stuff
even just as a basic multi track recorder gb is pretty handy, and the virtual drummer stuff has its uses too. i guess its more the quality of the samples but ithink there piano is hard to beat.
then the amps/effects etc, do all in all make it a pretty handy app all lin, well imho that is!
thanks for letting me know.
What frustrates me the most…
What frustrates me the most about gb is the total lack of documentation, not even a page about gb and vo, while on ios we have much more than one page.
Logic Pro has an amazing sample library
I doubt I'll ev er need additional sample libraries, except maybe early music instruments, like Renaissance recorders or whatever.
A great website for logic Pro with VO
A great resource for learning both GarageBand or Logic Pro is logic.band. They also have a discord server where you can ask questions regarding logic and GarageBand.
samples and logic audio
would samples of things like recorders work?with a piano or acoustic guitar they fit relatively easily into adsr envelope. anything that is bowed or blowed as it were that goes out the window. how would u use samples of a blown instrument such asa recorder without it sounding like a machine?
thanks for the info levi. u have used logic is it worth the extra dough over gb, i know somebody who uses it but hes fully sighted. ie. is it ok with vo?
Blown/bowed instruments.
Like any instrument that's not a keyboard, you need to learn how to use it. Here's what I mean.
If you take typical keyboard instruments, piano, organ, they're already set up to play via a keyboard. So they work the same way, and aside from differences people usually ignore which are very important, e.g. they use different playing techniques because you need to hold keys to sustain notes on the organ, they're alreayd set up to use that mechanism.
So what do I mean that you need to learn to use it? Say you're playing guitar via keyboard. If you play keyboard, your instinct will be to make close chords, e.g. your D chord will be a D F# A in a single octave. This is not how guitar works. The basic D chord on guitar works like this. D, A in the same octave, D the next octave up,, and finally, F# in the same higher octave as the D.
For flutes, part of this will be determined by your samples, some of them will sound more realistic than others, containing breath samples and all. But generally, what will make it work is that understanding of how various flutes work. You wouldn't, for instance, play a shakuhachi patch the same way you'd play a Western flute. It really has nothing whatsoever to do with an ADSR envelope. As a comparison for what I'm talking about, here's a guy playing the same thing on a reed organ,first in a piano style, then the way you'd play it on an organ, apologies for his rambling, but that's the way he made the video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ba5Oh3apZMI&t=373s
Accessibility state of DAW on MacOS
There's Reaper, Logic and Protools that are grate ways to get what you want to get done. Logic Pro is the full version of Garageband to put it simply, Sampling much more sounds, able to use third-party plugins from folks like Waves, and Izatope and Native Instruments with Komplete Kontroll... Effects, etc. Reaper's fantastic for the recording and editing with the Osara, SWS and Reapacks extentions. And Protools is awesome with the mixing and recording and editing as well. With the help of Flotools its much faster then without for sure as it links the macros into Keyboard Maestro. http://flotools.org http://reaper.fm https://osara.reaperaccessibility.com/snapshots/ and I can say the one thing I'm missing is the app Fision from the creators of Loop Back to get it to be up to par with accessibility like the Gold Wave app is for Windows users and my world would be complete I think. It deserves that accessibility love just like there other products. And as for the boud instruments, it also depends on how extinsive the instrument was sampled, and if your controller has after touch and mod wheeils and possibly some midi pettels, Komplete Kontroll and the Native Instruments libraries, and third party libraries, will give you those realistic sounds, even all the way up to full onsombil orkastrel sounds.
Wind controller
for software instruments that immitate wind instruments, I use a very nice wind controller, which also has a bunch of its own softwqre instruments. The wind controller does an excellent job of articulation, vibrato, breath control, dynamics, note shaping -- it really sounds a great deal like the native instrument. If you inten to use wind software instruments, I highly recommend checking out wind controllers.
On the other hand, if you want to have some fun, try playing drums or the piano or an electric guitar by blowing into and fingering your wind controller. Smile. It looks like and has the key layout of a soprano saxophone, btw.