Lookin' For A Good FREE DAW

so you want to make music on your computer and you don't want to pay for software let me rephrase that so you want to make music on your computer and you don't want to pay for software and you don't want to have to disable Windows Defender to run this you my friend are in luck because whether you are a beginner or a novice or an advanced professional producer there are actually quite a few options of free digital audio workstations that are inspiring professional or just different than what you're already used to and rather than trying

to influence you to spend some of your hard-earned money I'm going to attempt to inspire you to save it and maybe make some good in the process now I have to do the part where I validate myself for the viewers who aren't familiar with my content otherwise why would you listen to me and my name is Ben Jordan I've been a professional recording artist for the last blah a lot of years I've released over three dozen albums on over a dozen labels I've Ted the world I've wait a minut you don't have to listen to

me you don't have to listen to anybody body on YouTube all this stuff is more or less free you can literally click one of the links in the pinned comment below close this video and play with the software yourself instead of watching me dick around with it why are we still here oh you want to know which one is best well that depends on what you want buddy making music software easy to use is quite a complicated task so it looks like we are stuck together for a while after all on this video is actually

more challenging to make than I expected because as we all know learning a Daw to the point where you're comfy using it as a place to turn your ideas into sound waves takes months or even years it could take a lifetime I'm personally comfy with FL Studio and a few years ago I spent an entire long week doing nothing but trying to learn Ableton and still making a song felt extremely laborious and I still felt like I barely scratched the surface of the software I initially wanted to make this kind of an anti- influencer Black

Friday 2023 video but I just kept wanting to check out more Daws and spend more time with the ones that I was checking out before I made a short list and in this video I'll be giving you that short list of those options and giving you an idea of what perks and challenges you could expect within it finally I wanted to avoid and steer away from free versions of popular Daws because they primarily exist as a marketing tool to get you to pay to use the full version of the do there's nothing wrong with that

and I generally think it's a good idea I just wanted to see how close we could get to producing professional sounding music without ever spending a dime but the line between free and paid got way more ambiguous than I expected for example over the last couple of months I've read some free doll lists and I kept seeing soundbridge mentioned and it is a free Daw I wasn't thrilled about this this is soundbridge oh oh man that's violence making me sign into every use of the do soundbridge seemed pretty good it installed just fine it works

just fine of course there's nothing really mindblowing or inspiring happening either and fortunately the limitations stacked up rather quickly if you want any instruments or an arpeggiator or even the ability to have more than 10 tracks you'll have to Fork over $9.99 a month if you were to take the Daw with all the features listed on the website and compare that to other free Daws there would definitely be something there but to get rid of the track limitation it's way more expensive than Reaper and oddly enough even if you don't want to pay for Reaper

the 5-second nag screen on an unregistered copy is less annoying than being forced to sign in every single time you open a doll speaking of free dos that are only free under certain conditions our door is a little bit different it's open source but if you want to download a build of it like an executable file or an installer then you'll have to pay for it now you can choose your own price and anything over $45 will get you support up through the next version but if you're a software developer you could just build your

own version of our door from the source code if you're not a developer I would not recommend doing that Ard door does not exactly have a Sleek UI it is not pretty cosmetically it is pretty powerful and I would consider it a very solid alternative to more popular dos the input monitoring is absolutely incredible I would recommend it if you're recording a lot of live instruments come to think of it I literally can't think of a better software solution for somebody recording front of house at a venue and this might be my new go-to when

recording modular sessions with over a dozen tracks I would also recommend our door if you're used to and with the old school qase or Protools HD style Daw interface or workflow that is much heavier on recorded input than it is on a bunch of VST plugins lb2 support is great that works across all the 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 might not be the best first do experience unless you're really willing to commit to it and ride a

good learning curve but if you do ride that learning curve it won't be too difficult to transition or learn other dog should you desire but if you're stocked up on plugins you may never need to now you might be wondering why you can download our door's source code for free and even distribute it under certain conditions obviously if you're using a piece of software and you can afford to support the developers you should but there's also a really good reason why this costs money and it's kind of an important thing to understand this next little

segment is about that problem when it should be about some really promising open source software that is for shitty reasons most unusable in any professional setting in Windows at the moment so lmms is available on Windows Mac OS and Linux I have installed it previously on Linux and on Windows and I'm not actually going to be exploring much of it today because we could do that already in the documentation and there's a reason why I'm not going to be covering it in this it is pretty ambitious it has a lot of different instruments and envelopes

and lfos and effects and stuff like that has a piano roll has a beat SL Baseline editor a lot of the included instruments seem to be chip tune oriented but there are things like mallets which is kind of a simple physical modeler now if this looks good to you and if you want to use Looms in Windows I have some bad news for you it doesn't have AIO support AIO is made by Steinberg and you have to license it this is also a problem with the much more popular audio editing open source software audacity and

the reason for this is because AIO is owned by Steinberg and you have to license it if you want to use it and Licensing it costs money and they don't have any sort of solution for open- Source or free software to license it which is kind of a shitty thing now for those of you who don't know what AIO is if you buy any sort of audio interface or sound card that is designed or marketed to musicians even the really inexpensive ones it almost certainly uses AIO for low latency and performance on some audio interfaces

you actually need AIO to be able to access the individual ins and outs in software and what everybody else uses what comes with your laptop is generally just Microsoft direct sound and the latency is a little bit slower there unfortunately not having low latency performance when working on music is just a nonstarter for me and I feel like most producers would agree with me on that just imagine trying to play the piano or tap in a drum beat and not hearing what you're playing until I don't know 100 to 500 milliseconds later it's incredibly distracting

and hard to work with to be a little bit more specific on what's Happening Here the reason why audacity and lmms can't use something like oio is because oio is protected by a licensing agreement which prevents redistribution since recording this Ben contacted Yamaha and dug a bit deeper into the whole mess turns out that GPL 3 licensing terms weren't standardized until 2007 and AIO isn't compatible when you pry openen the legal ease to be more specific you can't legally redistribute the Ario Source now I can't promise anything but now that the matter has been formally

brought to the attention of big oio it might actually get resolved sometime in the near future that being said if the oio thing doesn't bother you what bothers me is that lmm hasn't really had an official version released in really long time I believe that the most recent Alpha still hasn't been for over 2 years now don't get me wrong there are a lot of recent pole requests it is still very much in development it's just not really in any sort of development where the musician on the other end of it would notice that much

progress one great example is that it doesn't support vst3 instruments it's still using vst2 instruments most new instruments coming out nowadays don't even have vst2 support Ableton doesn't even support vst2 anymore I just feel like the Project's in a bit of a lull right now and I wanted to explain some of these problems and why they exist rather than just showing you an underwhelming or bad user experience on my part and if you're in the future which you certainly are because nobody's watching this before I made it do keep an eye on this project because

there are a lot of really ambitious people working on it and there may be an update coming soon that might blow your socks up off if you're on Linux or if you're using a lot of lv2 plugins or if for some ungodly reason you're still using 32-bit VST plugins exclusively I don't know if there's anybody in the world who's doing that under any of those conditions you should absolutely give lmms a try if you're on Windows or Mac I would give it a few months and see if an update dropped I wouldn't bother spending time

learning something that hasn't been updated formally in 2 years when all of these other options exist ah Cakewalk more like cake walk down memory lane now back in the mid 90s I would run cakewalk on a sound blaster 16 and I could only use the general midi sounds and with those General midi sounds I would try to make dark Industrial Music to reflect my teenage anst that was not a joke that was a true story another true story Cakewalk used to be paid software by a company of the same name Cakewalk Incorporated and then Roland

bought it off them in 2008 and it became Cakewalk by Roland which is just a brilliant play on words then Gibson beat Roland in a bowling match and one Cakewalk off them and then Gibson got sick of working on it and then band lab bought it off Gibson at a garage sale I'm going to be honest with you I didn't have a very high expectation of Cakewalk I was kind of like I don't really want to play with klock but whatever I will and I figured it would be full of outdated pain points and features

that don't really apply to 2024 music making I was wrong it's actually badass seriously like if you already use Ableton or FL Studio or something and are just watching this because you forgot to close the browser tab yo download Cakewalk it is free and it is absolutely worth checking out after installing it and setting it up on the first open anytime that I wanted a particular functionality I was able to just find it and I intentionally didn't use any third party VST plugins other than the free and open source surge I think that that was

the first time that I felt like a musician using 100% free software so far in this journey something I was really happy to see one of my favorite and most welcomed features that's becoming more and more difficult to find input step sequencing akin to the old Dr 660 drum machine or like a JX 305 Rolland workstation shift R we have step recording which is like my favorite thing ever [Music] okay I'm just going to say it Cakewalk is easily my top choice for the best free Daw it's 100% free with no strings attached and I'm

just really glad that a highly customizable professional piece of software with a Sleek user interface exists for musicians who oh God damn it okay so this amazing version of Cakewalk will no longer receive updates it's forking to Cakewalk next and then some new revived version of sonar both of which will cost money or so it appears Cakewalk next is not publicly released yet and I managed to get a semiclosed beta version of it and I don't think it would be fair to pass any sort of judgment this early on on it seems a tiny bit

more customizable than band lab is but honestly too close to band lab to make much sense as a standalone product but for this to use the same name and branding as the last software I played with kind of feels like heresy it's like 20% as powerful and I'm assuming that the powerful Daw will be repackaged and sold as sonar now speaking of bandlab bandlab is a free Daw that runs in your web browser and on mobile devices it's not something I'd make an album on but it's really really powerful for what it is the drawback

is that you cannot use your own plugins and most of the instruments that you can use are uneditable if you want to adjust the attack on a synth pad tough personally that actually weighs down on my inspiration a bit more than I expected for example if I can't adjust a snare then every single time I hear the thing it'll distract me from the other thing that I should be working on slowly robbing me of enjoyment and desire to continue yes I'm aware that that take is very over dramatic but to be fair for something that

runs in aing web browser band lab is insanely impressive it would have even been more impressive if I didn't have to do this key by key to get my MIDI controller working I'm not singling out band lab here because a lot of companies in Pro Audio and elsewhere are jumping into this business model mostly out of necessity so no shade this is just my feelings it's hard for me to look at this objectively because I personally really Loa paid services or models that capitalize on the get your music her thing it's like a carrot on

a that almost always misleads musicians and then even if one of them does get their music heard then they'll be among those of us who are criminally underpaid by an industry that has subsidized the monetary value out of Ip with Venture Capital dollars so even if you make it through that impossible maze you have Spotify on the other side is your reward and when I try and look at it objectively from a business perspective I think that it's quite shortsighted I think that the over business ification of music production creates way too much unnecessary competition

and false expectations somebody gets into making music and immediately needs a 100,000 listeners or a professional hearing their work to feel validated how long do you think that they'll stay in this economy now on the other hand if somebody gets into making music and just simply enjoys themselves the way that they enjoy playing a video game and then gets the chills and dopamine Rush from finishing a song they wrote on top of that good luck getting them to not log in for more than a few days hey there I'm Ben the person editing this video

so since recording that very long monologue and rant I've played around with band lab quite a bit more more on the social media side of things and I've just sort of been listening to recommended songs in my feed and browsing around just listening to other people's music to see what they're making one thing that really jumped out to me is that a lot of the things that I'm recommended and a lot of the things that I'm hearing are literally made by children obviously it doesn't say their age or anything but I would guess that some

are as young as maybe eight or even seven years old on 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 just give children these tools to where they can create almost well I guess it's professional sounding music in a lot of these cases and they can hear it and they can learn from it and that's really awesome on the other hand they're posting it to a social media site on the internet where people

can comment on it and give their feedback and ideas and whatever else and having spent most of my life putting music on the internet that can get kind of nasty and I assume that children are also seeing the same marketing banners all over the site that I'm seeing that encourages them to pay for more promotion or digital distribution or pay for a professional to listen to it and give them feedback and I I don't like that at all but I think with some ethical brainstorming it shouldn't be too difficult to emphasize those positive things and

get rid of those negative things okay end of ranting an unsolicited advice to a company I've never spoken to before with all that being said it's worth EMP emphasizing that band lab is probably the most impressive amount of functionality I've ever seen inside of a web browser I'm not kidding if you've never played with it you really have nothing to lose by checking it [Music] out thepoke synth is not really a Daw unless you are really into hardware and modular SN then I suppose you could wire up some sequencers and make improvised Daw out of

it but it is Standalone music software it supports VST plugins and it's free and it is absolutely amazing the same can be said for Cardinal which is a frequently updated open source plugin in Standalone virtual modular system with hundreds if not thousands of freely available modules and an active Community it gives vcv rack a run for its money and just like band lab you can even run it in your browser in the spirit of getting into music making without spending much money I have to emphasize how good of a deal Reaper is for a first

Daw it's it's professional grade software used all over the industry it has a trial with no strings attached for 60 days and after that you just have to deal with a 5c popup on launch that's janky and probably really distracting and annoying after a while and if you don't feel like dealing with it a non-commercial license for Reaper is only $60 if Reaper is something you want to get into there are tons of really well done intros and one-onone courses for free here on YouTube I'm sure a portion of those watching this video are shouting

at the screen about how you can download any software for free if you're a software pirate and I already made a video about that a long time ago go watch that I'm sure I missed quite a few things and if you feel like I did post a comment with a link to what you think I missed the beauty of free is that you can install nearly all of the things I mentioned in this video without spending a penny while watching this video wild stuff now I also have a pretty solid collection of really useful and

Powerful plugins that I use all the time that are 100% free and I want to make a video about that sometime soon never mind this video has no sponsors and I actually went out of my way to avoid speaking to a lot of these developers to try and be as unbiased as possible I'm going to balance this incense burner that is filled with disgusting ashes on my head while I read this last part to see if it improves retention because people never watch the end of my videos If you enjoyed this video or if you

learned anything or if you found it useful and you want to see more content like this this channel operates as a nonprofit organization and is funded by my patreon where you can access an immense amount of music audio assets field recordings discount codes and monthly songwriting challenges that keep you motivated alongside a really healthy Community thanks for watching keep creating bye