
Waveform Free - T-A
https://www.tracktion.com/products/waveform-free
======
SonOfLilit
Unfortunately, Tracktion's overall nice design is completely ruined for me by
having an unusable piano roll editor. Manual MIDI editing is really important
when your keyboard playing skills aren't up to par (or when you're a kid and
can't afford a MIDI keyboard).

FL Studio's piano roll has been out there for a decade, I just can't
understand how other DAW vendors didn't match features with it yet.

~~~
casion
Can you expand on what you believe is lacking?

~~~
SonOfLilit
FL Studio's piano roll feels like Photoshop: draw some notes, select a couple
with shift+click, make them shorter by dragging the first one's right edge,
actually they're too quantized so do it again while pressing alt to not be
limited to quantization, duplicate them a bunch of times with ctrl+drag (I
think? It'sbeen years), then select the entire thing and duplicate it above
twice to turn it into a series of major chords, select a few of the middle
notes and drag them one row down to make the notes minor, then select all and
right-click-drag the velocities to create a rise towards a crescendo (try that
on a drum roll, sounds great). Or, my favorite flow: record some things, then
select all with Ctrl+A and shrink it to 1/2 the length so it's in the speed I
planned it to be in but can't play well enough to record in.

Tracktion's feels like a grid editor: you can edit specific notes but there's
not really any useful keyboard shortcuts or mouse behaviors to help you draw
music with it.

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rock_artist
The real interesting story behind Tracktion is:

\- they have open-source DAW engine
([https://www.tracktion.com/develop/tracktion-
engine](https://www.tracktion.com/develop/tracktion-engine))

\- as it has strong relationship with JUCE framework, it also supports SOUL
patches which aims to be a modern DSP coding language.

~~~
PaulDavisThe1st
note that AFAICT, Faust remains more widely used as a modern DSP coding
language.

~~~
jcelerier
Also, Faust has the good taste of being 100% open-source, has almost 20 years
of work on optimization, and can easily be translated into SOUL if the need
arises

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brachi
> Once addicted we have a perfect selection of deep dive tools available in
> Waveform Pro to take you to the next level.

I like the honest and careful selection of words in advertisement.

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zengid
I'd be interested to know how they implemented plugin sandboxing. From the
site:

> _3rd party plugins are the weak link for any digital audio workstation.
> Waveform Free addresses this by implementing plugin sandboxing. Once
> activated your work environment is protected by keeping plugin crashes
> contained. Instead of the host closing, the plugin is simply deactivated_

~~~
PaulDavisThe1st
If you want more details of how we see it from an Ardour perspective:

[https://ardour.org/plugins-in-process.html](https://ardour.org/plugins-in-
process.html)

~~~
joan_kode
Interesting and useful post. That being said, I think it ignores some valid
solutions. For example, REAPER and some others offer the option to bridge
_specific_ plugins. This is often sufficient, since users generally just want
to play with some specific cool-sounding but crashy plugins.

Then there's also the more technically difficult option of running the entire
audio engine (including plugins) in one separate resilient process: if it
crashes, it can be relaunched and its state restored by the main process. I
believe Bitwig can do this. Cool but I wouldn't want to be the one
implementing it!

~~~
PaulDavisThe1st
In the Ardour world, the "bridge specific plugins" approach is accomplished by
using JACK. There are several clients that can be used to run a single plugin
(for at least a couple of plugin APIs). The level of integration drops
noticeably, and it does mean that you have to use JACK which for some people
seems to be a burden. But it also leverages the generality of JACK's inter-
application audio/MIDI to avoid complexity in the host itself.

As I said in the article, we are averse to complex engineering solutions to
the problem of plugins that crash.

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luckydata
the free version looks like it's essentially useless.

~~~
jdietrich
Not at all. It's missing some of the more advanced features of the paid
version and has only a very basic plugin bundle, but it's entirely useable.
Unlike the free or cheap version of many other DAWs, it doesn't have any track
count limits or restrictions on importing third-party plugins.

Just add an audio interface, a MIDI controller and a smattering of free
plugins like the Komplete Start bundle and you'd be well equipped to start
making music.

[https://www.native-
instruments.com/en/products/komplete/bund...](https://www.native-
instruments.com/en/products/komplete/bundles/komplete-start/)

~~~
luckydata
You can't even customize the layout of the screen, it's limited in ways that
are not worth fighting against. Nowadays you can get much better for very
little money. on Mac you got Garageband that's leaps better and free, on
Windows you got Cakewalk for free. There's others too. This one isn't worth
even looking at.

~~~
alok-g
I had learned that Cakewalk had become free but had not looked into it. Sounds
like it is a good option.

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worik
This is not free.

~~~
jagged-chisel
Can you provide a _bit_ more detail? I see it’s a “free download”, but since I
can’t download from a mobile device, I can’t see past the download.

~~~
dvtrn
I presume because users must sign up, and verify email before being able to
download and they don’t want to exchange their information as a “currency” for
a free product?

~~~
worik
Bingo, partly.

Also it is free as in beer. Where's the code?

Also, free crippled version and pay for useful version

Not free

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tomcam
What’s crippled about it?

