- Chunks looks really useful for prototyping ideas. I can see how it's powerful for film work as well.
Elfman stated in his master class it was one of the main reasons he uses DP. He can use each chunk to scratch pad out different ideas and bring them back together easily as needed. But also for film work its great you can have all your cues in one project file and switch between them very quickly, etc.
- Pre-gen looks really interesting. Even if I switch over to an M1 soon I still like the idea of having more CPU headroom.
FYI, there are quite a lot of plugins that don't work in Pregen mode, including VePro. But yes its a nice idea.
There are little things that do seem quirky though...
- Two tracks per instrument seems clunky. Definitely in terms of real estate, but I could also see this making large templates tricky to manage. I understand this is just part of DP's DNA, but it seems like they could simplify this.
This comes up a lot and I agree and disagree at the same time. I wish MOTU would add midi regions to instrument tracks, just like other DAW's offer, just to shut everyone up on this topic, and I would use those kinds of tracks for simple projects, but the reality is that having midi tracks seperate from instrument tracks is still very advantageous and probably how you will use it anyway, particularly when using VePro and V-Racks. Cubase has midi tracks and provides seperation. By the way, so does LogicPro, they just call it something different, in logic the tracks are seperate from "channels". Channels are where instruments are hosted in LogicPro...tracks are where you put your midi data in regions. You can have one or more midi tracks in LogicPro that are all connected to a single instrument "channel"...etc.. is it really so different? DP undeniably offers more flexibility.
but it is true that if you are just doing something simple or farting around and want to quickly create an instrument track to start playing on it, in DP you have to create two "tracks", though they do offer a dialog box that will let you create those two things in one operation...its marginally more work then LogicPro. Honestly I'd like to see them add that too, but its simply not a deal breaker, when you really start breaking down your workflow and building up templates; you have a LOT more power and flexibility with DP and you will not mind midi tracks separated. In fact you will prefer it if using VePro and really will have the same workflow as other DAW's
also DP has excellent track management, searching for tracks, nested folders, deciding which tracks to display in which window, etc... LogicPro fails miserably in this department.
- V-Racks look like a way around that, but I've never been a fan of working with multitimbral instances. It's a bit tedious to set up, and I personally have never gelled with scrolling through a list of multis, setting up/deciphering routing if you need to trouble shoot, etc. (Trouble shooting especially so...)
V-Racks are absolutely no different in concept whatsoever then LogicPro's mixer. In LogicPro you have the arranger area with "tracks"...those tracks point to instruments in the mixer. The LogicPro mixer is like using a V-Rack in DP. Except in DP you can use as many V-rack mixers as you want. But you don't have to.
Additionally in DP you can choose to have the instrument hosted directly in the sequence if you want instead of using a V-Rack...on yes...its own instrument track.
Nothing about Vracks implies multi-timbral, but you can do that too of course if you want,.
Better/more streamlined Support for MIDI FX would be nice. Hardly a dealbreaker, but nice to have...
no argument there. LogicPro is the only DAW that does this right now.
I haven't demoed it yet. I'm in the middle of a project ATM so it wouldn't be wise to demo for the next couple weeks, but I plan to shortly...
Awesome
A couple questions:
Any caveats to having pre-gen on by default? Any caveats in general?
Pre-Gen is good. Use it. Some plugins don't support it. Simple as that. There might be some situations where you don't want it on, even for some plugin that supports it, but I'm not aware of any myself.
How are the bundled plugins? Knowing MOTU I'd imagine they're pretty good...
Like all daws they range from adequate to awesome. But I will say their "instrument" plugins are just meh. actually pretty weak compared to logicPro which is simply awesome and Steinberg offers way better instruments too. its just kind of ok in that area, but their audio plugins are quite good and that is MOTU's forte anyway.
And... how extensive are the shortcuts, and can most things be done with shortcuts to minimize clicking?
That will simply depend on you. Some people always find a way that they have to use Keyboard Maestro to get around something the program doesn't provide. But MOTU has been on top of this for a long time with a very good keyboard shortcut manager, etc.. It also has very extensive OSC support in case you want to get crazy with a touchpad.
Like all things, NO MATTER WHO YOU ARE OR WHAT YOU DO...you can try any DAW out there and love some of what it does and be annoyed that they can't seem to get some other things right. That is no different with DP. It has some really compelling features, already mentioned..that's why I'm using it. There is not a single DAW out there that doesn't have glaring annoyances that bother me....but at some point you just choose what is working best for you and live with the annoyances. None of them will be perfect. Period.
LogicPro is still a cool program, but I agree with you about Apple and how they are handling things, plus kind of a lot of serious bugs related to automation, PDC and other things, I just had to move on once MOTU finally added articulation management and bigger fonts.