DAWs: a Beginner's Guide

[lightcrystal]

A few people have asked me what a DAW is. Here is a thread in plain English [is that possible? ] where I will answer any questions about DAWs in general. NOTE for all the geeks I am going to simplify things here. I am going to generalise.

1. What is a DAW?

DAW stands for Digital Audio Workstation. Software that records audio, allows it to be edited, and then exports it in a file format e.g mp3.

2. Is Audacity a DAW? Yes, Audacity is a DAW as above.

3. Are all DAWs the same? Are some better than others.

Let's break this down.

Firstly, do DAWs sound the same? Well, I've geeked out on all the studies so you don't have to. I could dig the studies up if you want. The answer is yes, DAWs sound the same. Studies have given people two musical samples that are 100% the same. People are told that Sample A comes from one DAW, e.g Cubase, and Sample B comes from another DAW, e.g Pro Tools. People consistently rate the two samples as being different and say that the sample from a DAW that they use is the higher quality sample! In short confirmation bias occurs.

Don't worry about it. A different DAW won't sound better. [yes, I know the claims about Ableton Live being slightly inferior in its sound. There is no evidence for that.]

Secondly, different DAWs are "better" in various ways. But I think that the best way to answer that is a shortlist of WHY someone might to choose a DAW.

- business model. Paid, free or rented.
- Philosophy. OOTB [out of the box - the user is given fewer choices but directed more easily to what to do versus "freeform DAWs" where the user can do anything how they want to. As reluctant as I am to mention specific DAWs I need to mention a few.

Reaper has the philosophy that the user can do anything that they want. It has a scripting language. It can be made to look like anything. Any workflow is possible. BUT the user has to do it. It's like here's a box of tools make what you want.
FL Studio is the opposite. You are far more limited in choices. But those choices are more obvious and you don't have to work them out. Like a spanner that is designed to make a house.

- Platform choices. Besides the OS there are also some DAWs that work as part of a Midi controller. Some DAWs are also cloud DAWs online though in general they are too limited to be recommended.
- Learning resources/community. For instance forums, tutorials.

I could give many more. But those are the simplest ones.

4. Some examples of DAWs and what they do.

- Audacity. Free. Began as an audio editor but now does things like exporting to most file formats. There are professional narrators who use Audacity.
- Reaper. Swiss army knife. Does a bit of everything but to do anything specific [e.g voice over] you have to tweak it to do it.
- Ableton Live. Main DAW used in live music e.g DJ work. Has a scripting language Max Live that can do insane things at programming music and visuals to combine.
- Renoise. Arguably the strangest DAW design of all time. I can't describe this. Well not without geeking out. This is a beginner's guide to DAWs.

But in short there are 3 DAWs that pretty much dominate voiceover. They are Adobe Audition, Reaper and Audacity. Everything else you COULD use for voice over. But it would be like trying to turn a dune buggy into a race car. Adobe Audition has some brilliant background noise clean up tools. Maybe the best in the industry. But I hate its rental business model. Reaper is what I do use. Audacity is what I used to use. Nothing wrong with Audacity. Can't get better than free

Anyway any questions below. Preferably from people who are beginners at using or choosing a DAW. I mean don't ask me about Pro Tools because I've never used it I did all my electronic music production on FL Studio when I was in Windows.

[Availle]

I think this is the wrong forum, though.
I'll move it over to "Need Help? Got Advice?" where it's a better fit.

[SowasVon]

Thank you for the info!
You moved from Audacity to Reaper, so you may have a good idea of this: If you're already a proficient Audacity user, how much effort is it to learn Reaper? I could imagine it can help to know the basic principles of audio editing and which tools usually come into play (noise removal, compression, etc.). But then, if Reaper does these things differently from a user side, maybe it's not intuitive.
(I've done video editing before, and it was a pain when moving from my usual software to Blender, which does things so differently that you can't intuit your way into many of the common tasks, like applying a fade out/in effect. So I stopped using it.)

[lightcrystal]

Thank you for the info!
You moved from Audacity to Reaper, so you may have a good idea of this: If you're already a proficient Audacity user, how much effort is it to learn Reaper? I could imagine it can help to know the basic principles of audio editing and which tools usually come into play (noise removal, compression, etc.). But then, if Reaper does these things differently from a user side, maybe it's not intuitive.
(I've done video editing before, and it was a pain when moving from my usual software to Blender, which does things so differently that you can't intuit your way into many of the common tasks, like applying a fade out/in effect. So I stopped using it.)

My first DAW was FL Studio when I running Windows 7. When I began narrating at LibriVox I used Audacity for the first time. I never liked Audacity. I tried to. I never warmed to the interface. I navigated through tracks in very inefficient ways. Part of that was that I was not proficient with Audacity.

After 6 months of using Audacity I wanted to change to something else. FL Studio wasn't suitable for narrating; I can run it quite well under WINE. WINE is a clever recursive acronym: wine is not an emulator. Basically it gets things to run in other operating systems; I can run FL Studio in Linux at about 90% performance. There is some jarring with animations. I might do a narration in FL Studio some time just to see if it can do it

Anyway I had bought Reaper a few years ago to do some electronic music. That was a gut punch of a learning curve because at the same time I changed from a USB microphone [Yeti] to XLR microphone with a Focusrite AND I had to work out how to get the Focusrite to work on Linux. Reaper is very different from Audacity. The workflow. The effects tools. The interface. The philosophy; Reaper doesn't "hold someone by the hand". It gives you a tool box and says do what you want. Even though it's a closed source program it has a bit of a FOSS [free open source software] way of thinking. Some people hate that; they need to be directed to set workflows where you do A and B. I love it. I followed some tutorials [reaper for voice over talent and Booth Junkie] and I have it set up for voice over. It took me about a month to make the adjustment.

Aspects of my workflow set up on Reaper for voice over:

- Have Ripple editing set up all the time for just one track at a time. In plain English this means that when anything is deleted in a track, the track moves itself to fill the space. This is a wonderful feature and it was one of the BIG problems for me with Audacity; in Audacity if I deleted something I would spend ages moving the track myself to fill in the gap. Sometimes I would not fill it in right. Ripple editing on solves all that. Absolutely marvellous.

- Have a 2 second delay on. This means that when I press record I have 2 seconds where I can play the tuba if I want. I like to record with JUST the text in front of me. Thus I will use the 2 seconds to minimise Reaper and put the text to fill the whole screen. Some people look at the waves in their DAW; I do not. I just want that text. When I am done or if I make a mistake I just press space bar and it's recorded.

- I have the track times set up in seconds to make it easier to see time points.

- The only effect that I use is a stock Reaper limiter set to -4 dB. I don't use noise reduction or compression. I might in future. But not for now.

- Reaper has a weird OOTB default setting called monitoring that makes every work echo. It's designed for musicians to be able to listen to themselves in headphones. But for voice over it is annoying. It's easy to turn off and I have monitoring turned on. Never to be turned on again!

I never managed to get the above set up in Audacity. One other nice thing about Reaper as well is that you can run it offline and if you've bought it you will remain registered with full features. This happened to me once; my internet cable snapped and I was without my fibre internet for a week. I could still work on my pre-downloaded reads.

I expect to continue using Reaper for narrations. Unless they are bought by Microsoft
If I had to use something else I could go back to Audacity. But I would look at some other DAWs then, maybe Harrison Mixbus. That works on Linux and has a podcast mode.
It's my constant thinking process: what if Microsoft buys my favourite software?

Anyway in a nutshell it is a massive adjustment from Audacity to Reaper. They are very different.

[SowasVon]

Alright, thank you!
Ugh, that's discouraging. I'm not looking to move over anytime soon, but from my very limited knowledge of how professionals do audiobooks (in other words: I heard one professional mention this), Reaper seems to be a pro tool one should maybe use when trying to earn money with narration. So, it's at least interesting to have an idea of what expects the Audacity-savvy Reaper noob.
By the way, the missing feature on Audacity that you mentioned has me wonder whether it was a settings issue. When I cut out part of a track, the part behind the cutout immediately snaps to the part before it, no moving needed. It should require a checkmark under Preferences > Track > Tracks behaviors > Editing a clip can move other clips.

[barleyguy]

I'd like to give my input on Reaper, since I'm an avid user of it. For context, my first DAW (that I liked) was Cool Edit Pro in 1997, which was purchased by Adobe and became Adobe Audition. I used that until version 1.5. With version 2.0 they went to single activation DRM, followed shortly after by a subscription model, so I never upgraded past version 1.5.

I went to recording school in 2010, which was taught completely on ProTools. I used that for a year or two, then switched to Reaper. So, I've been using 99% Reaper since around 2012.

Reaper is a different paradigm in a lot of ways than Audacity. It uses "non destructive editing", which means that no audio you record is ever destroyed by changes. Once I learned Reaper well, I am much faster in Reaper than I was in Audition (and that's after using Audition for over 15 years). The reason I'm so much faster in Reaper is because of how I can split and slide audio around, and because the effects are all in real time.

To jump to how I use Reaper....

- I record on a completely stock, out of the box Reaper. The only things I change are turning off snapping and grid lines, which is two clicks. So I launch the program, click on those two settings, click "add new track", arm record, and I'm ready to go.

- I edit on a different computer, which has a stock Reaper except there are two macros added, one for "Paste by Region", and one for "Normalize". The paste by region is assigned to Alt-V, and the normalize is assigned to Alt-N.
- Paste by Region is used for putting room tone over the top of mouth noises, mouse clicks, etc. When I start editing I'll grab a block of clean room tone, and when I want to clean up a noise, I'll select the region that I want to put room tone in and Press Alt-V for my paste by region macro
- Normalize I use if a section of the audio seems way too quiet or way too loud, and I don't think the compressor will be sufficient to get it back as a nominal level

- My effects chain is a gate, a compressor, and an EQ.
- The gate doesn't go to zero. It's goes to a 7 dB reduction, and is set barely above the level of a normal breath. This reduces the noise floor and breaths a little bit without having the unnatural sound of gating lower
- The compressor is set for light compression with the threshold just above the level of my typical speech. The goal is to reduce the loudness of loud sections of the text, mostly where I'm speaking more loudly because it's a dramatic part of the text or I'm getting into character.
- The EQ removes low frequencies below around 70 hz, and high frequencies above about 16 khz, and I also have a very light EQ that reduces my least favorite frequencies of my particular voice

I want to note that none of these effects are strictly necessary, but are what I like to do.

The first thing I do is normalize my raw recording to -29 dB, which makes all my thresholds in the effects chain roughly correct. The goal is -23 dB, which is about 90 dB on Checker. I very intentionally use my effects chain to make up that last 6 dB.

I generally don't use Ripple editing. When I delete a mistake, I use the "S" key to split before the mistake, the "S" key again to split after the mistake, the "Delete" key to delete the region, then drag with my mouse to slide the audio on the right side over to the left. The only time I would use Ripple editing is if I need to make a change in the middle after I've already done edits farther to the right

I also generally don't use limiting for Librivox. Once I have my compression set up so my rendered file is between 89 and 90 dB, I generally still have about 2 dB of headroom, so there's no reason for limiting in my case. (If I was recording for ACX though, they have a limit in their specs of -3 dB peak, so a limiter would be needed for that.)

I'm not sure how helpful this post is, since it's just a collection of points about how I do things, and not necessarily advice of how anyone else should do things. But I thought it might be interesting, or at least a conversation starter.

Cheers,

Harley.

[barleyguy]

Oh, I do want to note that in the original post, in the part of "DAWs that dominate voiceover", you left out Studio One. It's huge in audiobooks.

The others as you mentioned are Adobe Audition and Reaper, which are also extremely popular. Audacity is most popular here at Librivox, and less popular for paid work.

The reason I mentioned in my post above that I use a completely stock Reaper, is because I don't necessarily agree that any tweaking is needed to use it for narration.

Also, regarding the other post about turning off monitoring... This is all personal preference. Some people like to listen to themselves in headphones while they narrate, other people don't. The "echo" that was mentioned is caused by latency of your particular sound card, and might be fixable in the settings. It's not inherent to Reaper.

Just some notes of things I have a different perspective on ..

Cheers,

Harley.

[sjmarky]

I’m also a Reaper user, but I have heavily customized it for my preferences and work flow. I have a project template set for audiobooks with a larger track window, MM:SS timeline and punch-and-roll pre-roll. The only FX I use during recording is a limiter set at -1db just to prevent clipping. My raw recording volume is about -25db RMS. I’ve reassigned hot keys so all controls are along the front of the keyboard.

My FX chain for renders is a low-cut filter at 80Hz, light compression, hard limiter set at -3db, and normalize at -21db RMS. The output formats are all saved as presets.

I always consolidate the track after completion and discard the unneeded clips. When recording pickups, I do it in a new track so I can easily match volume and timing.

I don’t wear headphones while recording, even though my interface has zero latency. I just don’t like it. I turn direct monitoring off and set my cans on the desk so I can hear my punch cues.

To each his own, eh?

[iBeScotty]

Hey great overview!

Another vote for Reaper from me! That is what I started with and never wanted to change. The only other DAW I have used for recording and editing narration is Auria on an iPad, set up similarly to Reaper it can be quick and organic to edit with a touchscreen, though sometimes glitchy.

Although it does so much more than I know how to use, Reaper can be set up simply and if you want to know how/if it can do something there are numerous resources and videos to find out. For example, I just found that I can use my phone as a remote transport control which is turning out really useful.

I particularly like the nondestructive editing, ripple editing (when making a correction on the fly after spiking waveform with a clap making it easy to find, I split at the start of the correction and at start of mistake and just delete the piece in between: click-s-click-s-delete), auto punch-in, and the effects plug-ins of which I usually only use eq, compressor and expander (where I also amplify accordingly).

I have always found Audacity much more clunky by comparison, though to be fair I have not really used it in 10 years

~scotty