Lookin' For A Good FREE DAW

so you want to make music on your computer and you don't want to pay for the software, let me rephrase that, so you want to make music on your computer and you don't want to pay for the software and you don't want to have to disable Windows Defender to run this, my friend, you agree Lucky you, because whether you're a beginner, novice, or an advanced professional producer, there are actually quite a few

free

digital audio workstation options that inspire professionals or are simply different from who you are. We're used to it by now, and instead of trying to influence you to spend some of your hard-earned money, I'll try to inspire you to save it and maybe do something

good

in the process.

Now I have to do the part where I am valid. Myself to viewers who aren't familiar with my content, otherwise why would they listen to me? My name is Ben Jordan. I have been a professional recording artist for the past few years. I have released more than three dozen albums. more than a dozen stamps. He has Ted the world. Wait a minute. You don't have to listen to me. You don't have to listen to anyone on YouTube. All of this is more or less

free

. You can literally click on one. from the links in the pinned comment below, close this video and play with the software yourself instead of watching me play with it, why are we still here?

Oh, you want to know which one is better, that depends on what you want, friend, music creation software. easy to use is a pretty complicated task, so it looks like we're stuck for a while; after all, this video is actually harder to do than I expected because as we all know, learning a Daw to the point where you feel comfortable using it. As a place to convert your ideas into sound waves it takes months or even years it could take a lifetime. I'm personally comfortable with FL Studio and a few years ago I spent a long week doing nothing but trying to learn Ableton and continuing to make a song seemed extremely laborious and I still felt like I'd barely scratched the surface of the software.

I initially wanted to do this kind of Black Friday 2023 anti-influencer video, but I kept wanting to see more Daws and spend more time with the ones I was reviewing before making a short list and in this video I'll give you that short list of those options and I'll give you an idea of ​​the benefits and challenges you might expect. Ultimately I wanted to avoid them and direct them. Far from the free versions of the popular Daws because they mainly exist as a marketing tool to get you to pay to use the full version. There's nothing wrong with that and overall I think it's a

good

idea.

I just wanted to see how close we can get. I was able to produce professional-sounding music without spending a dime, but the line between free and paid became much more ambiguous than I expected, for example, over the last few months I read some lists of free dolls and kept seeing them mentions Soundbridge and it's a free Daw I wasn't excited about this this is soundbridge oh oh man that's violence what made me log in every use of do soundbridge looked pretty good installed very well works fine of course nothing is happening either really mind-blowing or inspiring and Fortunately, the limitations piled up pretty quickly.

If you want some instrument or an arpeggiator or even the ability to have more than 10 tracks, you'll have to pay upwards of $9.99 a month if you buy the Daw with all the features listed on the website. and compare it to other free Daws, there would definitely be something there, but getting rid of the track limitation is much more expensive than Reaper and interestingly, even if you don't want to pay for Reaper, the annoying 5 second screen on an unregistered device copy It's less annoying than being forced to log in every time you open a doll, speaking of two free ones that are only free under certain conditions, our door is a little different, it's open source, but if you want to download a version as an executable or a installer, then you will have to pay for it.

Now you can choose your own price and anything over $45 will support you until the next version, but if you are a software developer you can create your own version of our gate from the source code, if you are not a developer I wouldn't recommend doing that. Ard Door doesn't exactly have a fancy user interface, it's not very cosmetic, it's quite powerful and I would consider it a very solid alternative to the two most popular ones. input monitoring is absolutely incredible. I would recommend it if you are recording a lot of live instruments. Come to think of it, I literally can't think of a better software solution for someone recording in front of the house on location and this might be my new go-to when recording modular sessions with over a dozen tracks.

I would also recommend our gate if you are used to and with the old school qase or Protools HD style Daw interface or workflow which is much heavier on recorded input than a lot of VST plugins. Support for lb2 is great, it works on all platforms and this is easily the best free Daw that runs on Linux systems. If you've never used a digital audio workstation before, it may not be the best first experience unless you're really willing to commit to it and follow a good learning curve, but if you get the hang of it, it won't be too difficult to do the job. transition or learn another dog if you want, but if you have a lot of plugins, you may never If you need it now, you may be wondering why you can download the source code of our door for free and even distribute it under certain conditions, Obviously, if you're using software and can afford to support the developers, you should, but there's also a very good reason why this costs money and it's kind of important to understand that the next little segment is about that issue when it should.

This is some really promising open source software that, for shitty reasons, is mostly unusable in any professional environment on Windows at the moment, so lmms is available on Windows, Mac OS and Linux. I've installed it previously on Linux and on Windows and I'm actually not going to explore much today because we can already do that in the documentation and there's a reason why I'm not going to cover it in this, it's quite ambitious, it has a lot of different instruments, surrounds, lfos , effects and stuff like that, it has a piano roll, it has an SL Baseline rhythm editor, a lot of the included instruments seem to be chip tune. oriented but there are things like decks, which is kind of a simple physical modeler.

If this sounds good to you and if you want to use Looms on Windows, I have bad news for you, it does not have AIO support. AIO is made by Steinberg. and you have to license it, this is also a problem with the much more popular open source audio editing software, audacity, and the reason for this is that AIO is owned by Steinberg and you have to license it if you want to use it and the license costs. money and they don't have any kind of solution for licensing free or open source software, which sucks now for those of you who don't know what AIO is if you buy any kind of audio interface or sound card designed or marketed for musicians , even the really cheap ones, almost certainly use AIO for low latency and performance on some audio interfaces, you actually need AIO to be able to access the individual ins and outs of the software and what everyone else uses. comes with your laptop, it's usually just direct sound from Microsoft and the latency is a little slower.

Unfortunately, not having low latency performance when working on music is a non-starter for me and I feel like most producers would agree with me on that, imagine trying. playing the piano or playing a drum beat and not hearing what you're playing until I don't know 100 to 500 milliseconds later is incredibly distracting and hard to work with to be a little more specific about what's going on. Here's the reason. The reason audacity and lmms can't use something like oio is because oio is protected by a license agreement that prevents redistribution since I recorded this. Ben contacted Yamaha and dug a little deeper into the whole mess and it turned out that the terms of the GPL 3 license were not standardized until 2007 and AIO are not supported when you open the legal facility to be more specific you cannot legally redistribute the Ario font now.

I can't promise anything, but now that the matter has been formally brought to the attention of the big boys. In fact, it could be resolved at some point in the near future. That said, if the oio thing doesn't bother you, what bothers me is that lmm hasn't really released an official version in a long time. I think the most recent Alpha still has. It's been over 2 years, don't get me wrong, there are a lot of recent pole requests, it's still in development, it's just not in any kind of development where the musician on the other end realizes as much. progress, a big example is that it doesn't support vst3 instruments, it still uses vst2 instruments, most of the new instruments coming out today don't even have vst2 support.

Ableton doesn't even support vst2 anymore. I feel like the project is in a bit of a complicated state. moment of calm and I wanted to explain some of these problems and why they exist instead of just showing you a disappointing or bad user experience on my part and if you are in the future, which you certainly will be, because no one was seeing this before me did it. Keep an eye on this project because there are a lot of really ambitious people working on it and there might be an update soon that might blow your mind if you're on Linux or if you're using a lot of level 2 plugins or if for some unholy reason you're still using VST plugins 32-bit only.

I don't know if there is anyone in the world doing that under any of those conditions, you should try lmms if you are on Windows. or Mac, I'd give it a few months and see if an update is released. I wouldn't bother spending time learning something that hasn't been formally updated in 2 years when there are all these other options. Ah, Cakewalk is more of a walk down memory lane. now in the mid 90's I was doing a ride on a Sound Blaster 16 and I could only use the general midi sounds and with those general midi sounds I was trying to make dark industrial music to reflect my teenage anxiety, that was no joke. true story true story Cakewalk used to be paid software from a company of the same name Cakewalk Incorporated and then Roland bought it in 2008 and it became Cakewalk by Roland, which is just a brilliant play on words, then Gibson beat Roland in a bowling game and a Cakewalk and then Gibson got tired of working on it and then Band Lab bought it from Gibson at a garage sale.

I'm going to be honest with you. I didn't have a very high expectation of Cakewalk. kind of like I don't really want to play with klock, but whatever I do and I thought it would be full of weak points and outdated features that don't really apply to music making in 2024. I was wrong, it's actually great, seriously, like I already use Ableton or FL Studio or something and I'm seeing this because you forgot to close the browser tab. Download Cakewalk. It's free and worth checking out after installing and configuring it the first time I open it. particular functionality, I was able to find it and intentionally did not use any third party VST plugins other than the free and open source ones.

I think that was the first time I felt like a musician using 100% free software until now. On this trip, I was very happy to see one of my favorite and most welcome features that is becoming increasingly difficult to find. Input step sequencing similar to the old Dr 660 drum machine or like a Rolland JX 305 Shift R workstation. We have step recording. which is my favorite thing, okay, I'm just going to say it: Cakewalk is easily my top pick for the best free Daw, it's 100% free, no strings attached and I'm very happy that it's highly customizable professional software. with a slick UI exists for musicians who, oh god, damn, okay, so this amazing version of Cakewalk will no longer receive updates, it will branch to Cakewalk next and then to a new revived version of sonar, both of which They will cost money or so it seems to be Cakewalk below.

It hasn't been released publicly yet and I managed to get a semi-closed beta and I don't think it would be fair to pass any kind of judgment so soon, it seems a little more customizable than Band Lab, but honestly too. near band lab makes a lot of sense as a standalone product, but using the same name and brand as the last software I played with feels like heresy, it's like 20% more powerful and I guess the mighty Daw will do it. be repackaged and sold as sonar now talking about bandlab bandlab is a free Daw that runs in your web browser and on mobile devices, it's not something I would make an album out of, but it's actually very powerful, but its drawback is that it doesn't You can use your own plugins and most of the instruments you can use are not editable if you want to adjust the attack on a synth pad, personally that weighs on my inspiration a bitmore than I expected, for example, if I can't adjust a Then every time I hear that, it distracts me from the other thing I should be working on, slowly stealing my enjoyment and desire to continue.

Yes, I'm aware that shot is very dramatic, but to be fair. something that runs in a web browser is incredibly impressive. It would have been even more impressive if I didn't have to do this key by key to get my MIDI controller to work. I'm not highlighting band lab here because there are many Pro Audio companies and elsewhere are jumping into this business model mainly out of necessity so no shade, these are just my feelings, it's hard for me to look at this objectively because Personally, I really find paid services or models that take advantage of the fact that your music is their thing, it's like a carrot in one that almost always fools musicians and So, even if one of them manages to get their music heard, they will be among those of us who are criminally underpaid by an industry that has subsidized the monetary value of Ip with venture capital dollars, so even if you make it through that impossible maze. having Spotify on the other side is your reward and when I try to look at it objectively from a business perspective I think it's quite short-sighted.

I think over-negotiating music production creates too much unnecessary competition and false expectations for someone to have. in making music and you immediately need 100,000 listeners or a professional listening to your work to feel validated, how long do you think they will stay in this economy now? On the other hand, if someone is into making music and just having fun the way they enjoy playing a video game and then getting chills and dopamine from finishing a song they wrote, on top of that, good luck not logging in for more than few days. Hi, I'm Ben, the person editing this video.

Since recording that long monologue and rant, I've played around with Band Lab a bit more on the social media side and have been listening to recommended songs in my feed and browsing just listening to others. people's music to see what they are doing. One thing that really stood out to me is that a lot of the things they recommend to me and a lot of the things I hear about are literally made by children, obviously that's not the case. I say their age or something, but I guess some are as young as eight or even seven, on the one hand, it's like wow, I really wish I had this when I was a kid.

I wish I had this 12 years ago when I was running a music school to give kids these tools so they can create almost well. I guess in a lot of these cases it's professional sounding music and they can listen to it and learn from it and on the other hand, that's really awesome. I'm posting it on a social networking site on the Internet where people can comment on it and give their opinion and ideas and whatever, and having spent most of my life putting music on the Internet it can get a little bit unpleasant and I guess the kids are also seeing the same marketing banners all over the site encouraging them to pay for more promotion or digital distribution or pay to have a professional listen to them and give them feedback, and I don't like that at all, but I think with An ethical brainstorm shouldn't be too difficult to emphasize those positive things and get rid of those negative things.

Ok, end of ranting about unsolicited advice to a company I've never spoken to before. Having said all that, EMP is worth emphasizing. That band lab is probably the most impressive amount of functionality I've ever seen within a web browser. I'm not kidding, if you've never played with it, you really have nothing to lose by checking it out. The Poke synth isn't really a Daw, unless you really like hardware and modular SN, then I suppose you could plug in some sequencers and make a makeshift Daw with it, but it is standalone music software, it supports VST plugins and is free and is absolutely amazing, the same can be said for Cardinal which is a frequently updated open source plugin in a standalone virtual modular system with hundreds if not thousands of freely available modules and an active community, gives you Give vcv rack a run for your money and, like band lab, you can even run it in your browser. the spirit of dedicating yourself to music creation without spending a lot of money.

I must emphasize how good Reaper is for a first Daw. It is a professional level software used throughout the industry. You have a no-strings-attached trial for 60 days and after that. you just have to deal with a 5c popup on launch which is wacky and will probably get really distracting and annoying after a while and if you don't feel like dealing with that, a non-commercial license for Reaper is only $60 if Reaper is anything What do you want? Come in, there are tons of really well done introductions and free individual courses here on YouTube. I'm sure a portion of those watching this video are screaming at the screen how you can download any software for free if you are pirated software and I already made a video about that a long time ago, look I'm sure I missed quite a few stuff and if you think I did, post a comment with a link to what you think I missed about the beauty of free. is that you can install almost all the things I mentioned in this video without spending a dime while watching this video.

I now also have a pretty solid collection of really useful and powerful plugins that I use all the time and that are 100% free. and I want to make a video about it soon, it doesn't matter, this video has no sponsors and in fact I did my best to avoid talking to many of these developers to try to be as unbiased as possible. I'm going to balance this. Incense burner filling with disgusting ashes in my head while I read this last part to see if it improves retention because people never see the end of my videos. If you liked this video or if you learned something or if you found it useful and If you want to see more content like this, this channel operates as a non-profit organization and is funded by my patreon, where you can access an immense amount of resources from musical audio, field recordings, discount codes and monthly songwriting challenges that keep you motivated along with a really healthy community.

Thanks for watching keep creating bye