what was first daw or whatever
sonic foundry acid music. magix music maker. especially 2005 edition but which was incredibly buggy. computer muzys. cmusic. which was sort of a "pre-alpha-beta" of mu-lab or whatever author wanted to call it back then. buzz/buze. openmpt. renoise. reaper. plogue bidule. qtractor.
then imagine a large crash of old boxes, cymbals and other things. which cause high-frequency unpleasant noise. i tried many other things in the interim. until i was absolutely compelled because of a total internal hard disk crash. to use ubuntu studio 12.04 "precise pangolin". there i was able to use my registered copy of renoise 2.8 as well as qtractor. no wine, didn't have internet anymore.
with computer muzys i discovered virtual studio technology by steinberg. before that i couldn't care less about which kind of computer program. as long as i had plenty of wave files to chew into.
i liked berotracker, i deeply wish rosseaux finished it. had two versions. one was typical windows gui but with a lot of bugs and no asio support. the other one was a good mock-up of impulse tracker. with asio support but no file export. it didn't make nice with the majority of vst plug-ins i had. i was just able to work faster in openmpt.
i wanted to check out madtracker. boy that design was confusing. the muso had to buy ogg vorbis export as well as wave export. nope.
my first issue of computer music magazine was #93. which came with propellerhead rebirth rb-338 standalone program. came in an iso which had to be burned to cd which was part of the copy protection. i changed the drum sounds and had fun with that for months. i'm not a big fan of "acid sound" with bassline synth. i still think "pd-303" synthedit example sounded better. but has uglier gui than rebirth.
on computer music magazine i read briefly about a "music-to-go". found out there it was possible to have a linux program which wasn't freeware. they criticized that program. like i would have criticized some other today, almost 20 years later.
renoise was great but ugly. only wave export for a program i paid almost benjamin franklin u.s.a. money for. could have helped exporting song to flac. since it could create 32-bit flac from the sample editor. i never understood their marketing scheme. it was too much for them i guess. to add a note-probability command. or to support real pattern loops. or to have reference to sample for more than one instrument using it. so the muso doesn't have to sit at his computer waiting for the thing to finish saving. on linux i was never able to find nor use a single vst plug-in to use with renoise. i should have gotten the 64-bit version. while i still had time for the registered license. because now i don't have "multilib" on my system. therefore my 32-bit copy is worthless. except for slackel i have lying around somewhere because i dislike "half-desktops" like lxqt and openbox.
i bought license for plogue bidule to be able to use it as vst plug-in. it had been a half-blessing. i salvaged a copy of 0.9743 that works quite well on the old wine for debian "bullseye". but it's ugly and cardinal is leaps and bounds, real progress after 20 years. otherwise i will not talk here about the true reason why i will not use this program ever again.
besides cardinal i did use vcv rack free standalone for windows. this was early in 2022 while i was still using windows10. i wasn't impressed. i downloaded a few modules. but while playing with a few of them the stupid program crashed. it only has five cable colors. maybe i have to buy it to get full "rgba" mode for it. and other unnecessary adjustments.
this past year i checked out other stuff. such as "wren". almost couldn't download it on linux. it requires quad-core cpu and maybe a gpu. interesting program with a few thousand layouts. but who wants to wait 10 minutes for one of them to load? i couldn't find the way to get it to record to wave so i totally gave up on it.
i downloaded bram bos' programs "tunafish" and "tuareg". still have to decide if i would use them. i was put off by other people saying tunafish cannot handle certain vst2 plug-ins. i dislike using buggy programs on linux with wine, period.
sunvox has become more about watching than listening. i tried to get the android version. but google greedily insisted in even more personal infromation from me. i lost ten dollars. they refused to process a gift card i bought. otherwise the authors decided to put a nag. just like ardour for the first time someone renders to wave. anyway i was able to accomplish much more with schism tracker than with sunvox. both programs have bewildering keystroke assignments that cannot be reassigned. sadly milky tracker is not better. and the ugliest of the three. but cannot complain about it anymore. still waiting for my debian "bullseye" with mate desktop to load. so i could use milky tracker.
mus-e for linux was so frustrating that i continued using reaper 2 for windows. because reaper is still slicker. i like the version 1 look too, not the "default" look that it installs. i need "competitive" time-stretching. openmpt has it. audacity has it. mus-e doesn't. my copy of renoise doesn't. qtractor does but it's not intuitive. ardour does but... please spare me. "elastique" hasn't been beat yet imho. that's why i stick to windows 32-bit. if i cut that fingernail. i will wind up adding to hundreds of soulless "xm" and "it" modules being dumped everyday into t.m.a. right now.
i'm sorry i keep writing wall-of-text. almost was thrown out of another forum for it. by a moderator that died a few months later.
Statistics: Posted by clear2ooo — Sat Jan 25, 2025 11:50 pm