DJ Equipment Reviews

A friendly overview of today’s digital audio workstations (DAWs)

This post aims at shedding some light on the specific market of the digital audio workstations (DAWs), at everything it provides and possibly make it easier to understand by breaking it down into bite-sized chunks, offering, of course, some examples of what you could best use to get your job done. DAWs today play a much bigger part in the music industry then ever before, and with the constant updates the producers are offering, their digital audio workstations will only get better and better and attract more and more people. While that’s not to say the hardware will eventually dissapear making room for 100% digitally produced music, it does mean that DAWs have set a strong foothold in the music department.

To start off simple, DAWs are "electronic systems designed to record, edit and play back digital audio" (from Wikipedia). Making their first official appearance in the late 70s, they continued to thrive encouraged by technological development, which eventually made modern computers more than able to handle any operation a DAW could throw at it. With the continuous development of almost all DAWs and the never ending customization available with the use of external plugins (VST,RDM, RTAS, etc.), producers might find they actually don’t need to resort to any physical gear for their music. It’s important, in spite of these developments, to make sense of where a specific DAW comes from, so here’s a breakdown of the general categories DAWs usually root from:

• recording a full-band live (now general recording of music)
• remix and mash-ups of different digital music files (where the mixing part of DAWs shines)
• composition of original music with software synthesizers and samplers (music creation from nothing…think Tiesto, David Guetta, etc.)
  

Recording

That’s easy to find help with, as most DAWs today handle functions of recording of multiple channels, if your computer and soundcard handles them. However, if you look at the classics, the guys that made their name in this field, the Pro Tools from DigiDesign comes to mind. We’re talking a software and hardware solution that still closely resembles the analog method of recording on tape. The Pro Tools DAWcomes in 3 flavors nowadays, each of which is capable of much more than just recording:

• M-Powered, which is a stand alone version designed to be used with M-Audio interfaces and costs around $250
• Pro Tools LE which adds support for high-end hardware and more professional quality recordings and control and it runs anywhere from $500 to $2000 depending on the hardware
• Pro Tools HD which is the stricly professional version with strictly professional pricing. It of course contains everything you would ever want a DAW to do

With the flexible selection of tools and price, undeniable quality and compatibility between systems, the Pro Tools shows it certainly deserved its 2001 Technical Grammy award.

Remix and mash-up

This is the part where your own creativity steps in, allowing for original and unique remixes. Again, most DAWs on the market have some type of support for remixes and mash-ups, and to be totally honest, you don’t even need a full fledged DAW to do this. In the $0-$200 you can find some nice digital audio editor like Cool Edit Pro (Adobe Audition nowadays), Sound Forge from Sony Audacity (which is free and available both on PCs and Macs) that have enough features for combining and editing two different audio files together.

If you need additional sounds, MIDI support or some extra features, next in line is Sony’s ACID, which also has a slimmed down "Music Studio" version for around $70. Ideal for the low-on-cash remix masters. Same speed and features as with ACID can be found on Mac in Apple’s GarageBand, and they’re both great DAW options with lots of support for entry-level conscious virtual DJs. Now to the top-level, we find the Pro version of ACID or, most notably Ableton Live, which has everything you’d want it to have and furthermore, it makes it all CPU friendly and fun for you to try, which is not something all DAWs can say for themselves (you name it, Live has it: slicing, remixing, effecting, filtering, compressing, everything). Since this is shaping along to be a whole post by now, we’re going to talk about the last category, music composition in the next one, since creation is where DAWs show off their potential.

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